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Is there a better way?

G

Grey Mage

Well-known member
Is there a better way to organize spells (or any other category of information) under the Rules Mechanics?

I created a series of categories: Classes, Feats, Skills, Spells, etc. However, after inputting a couple of hundred spells I suddenly find it sort of kludgy to pick the proper spell to form to the link when I do hyperlinking.

Can anyone think of a better way to organize 'crunch' material than what I have explained? I considered alphabetical subcategories but that will make the pane excessively long (IMO) when you do that for each of the Categories since subcategories are not collapsible (at least I have not figured out how yet)
 
There are two main methods of categorization from a visual perspective. There is the Categories (and you can make Sub-Categories as well, as you've noticed, but they are not as visibly sub-categorized as I personally would like those to be) and the other way you can use concurrently with that is the Containing Topic method and show things as Nested Hierarchies. So it's two ways you can use to show data. That's just for visual representation, though.

Are you running into the issue of finding something from a list or are we talking about finding something from auto-linking? If the latter then the only way I can think of is to make sure you distinguish your categories with meaningful icons. Maybe use the "Magi Items" magic wand icon for spells, for example, and a Flag for Feats or what have you. Then you just have to remember your icon structures to quickly determine if the name you looking at is the Spell version of something or the Feat or Skill or whatever it is among things that have the same name.
 
Mostly from the autolinking perspective... I have done all of that, but when it goes to autolink a spell (for example) and there are several hundred there to choose from, it can take a bit to scroll down the list.

Was curious if anyone else has a better way of doing it.
 
Ok, I must not understand something then. If you created a category called "Spells" then created each new spell into that category then the autolink scan should only present things that have the name you are looking for. Or is it something else that's presenting the list to you?
 
Lenny,

When I go to create the link by highlighting, then right click, then 'Create New Custom Link for Selection', it opens Select Content Link, I then click on Articles (which is were I am putting all my 'crunchy' data) and when Articles opens, it shows me several Categories under a new Select Content pane. One of these categories is spells. That Category is getting really long.

I had considered putting alphabetical subcategories A, B, C, etc but it will still leave me with 26 entries under Spells (unless there is a way to collapse/fold subcategories which I have yet to discover). The same 26 entries under Feats, Classes, Races, etc means the pane would be a couple of hundred entries long (again unless we could collapse/fold subcategories like we can individual entries under a Category.

Does this make it any clearer?
 
OH! So not autolinking, then. Gotcha. I don't normally work with things that way so I'm not sure I can help there. Maybe subcategories would help, but I think what is needed is to have the Filter ability available on the link selection list. That would probably help a lot in finding what you need. But, and sorry if this is a dumb question, why not just use the autolink? Are you linking to something that doesn't have the same name you're using?
 
As I enter spells into RW, I link back to Spell List pages ie., Level: Artificer 3, Assassin 3, Sorcerer 3, Wizard 3.

Each one of those class/level combinations goes to a page that lists all of the spells for that individual class and level. However, they are not called Assassin 3 rather that would '3rd Level Assassin Spells' (this is a holdover from my own MediaWiki on a stick I was using before RW came to be.

Mostly what I have been doing for the past couple of days is just cut and pasting a few hundred pages a day and recreating links. Autolinking is somewhat helpful, but a lot of the time I merely create the link myself.
 
Well, you could just create Aliases where appropriate which might help some for letting autolinking do its magic. I haven't worked closely enough with Tags either, though, so maybe somebody else with more experience working with them could have some ideas on that front.
 
For spells specifically, I created parent topics for school and subschool.

This helps keep the number of visible spells down and speed up the search for specific spells.
 
Is there a reason that you've opted to avoid the auto-linking mechanism? It's always been our objective that auto-linking would be used 99.5% of the time, so I'm worried there's a case we didn't cover that's forcing you not to use it. What did we miss?
 
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