New to RW - Not getting how to use storyboard

[Ceodryn]

Hi all,

I just bought the software to plan a WFRP4 campaign. While I get how to enter NPCs, locations... I dont get how to use storyline, events, scenes vs. storyboard.

My questions are:
1) What is the difference between World Almanac vs. Story Almanac? How come the NPCs I create in one don't exist in the other?

2) I do not understand the relationship between the Events Family (Scene, storyline, quest etc...) to the Storyboard

For example, I want to build the very simple FFG adventure "A Day Late, A Shilling Short" in RW.

The adventure plot is:
- Setup: In an inn, the PCs receive the job to find/rescue a lost coach, and particularly find the MacGuffin within the coach.
- Episode 1: A Missing Coach
- Act 1: PCs come across a beastmen war party currently attacking the missing coach
- Act 2: The beastmen receive reinforcements, including the arrival of their leader
- Act 3: A storm breaks out and the cowardly beastmen break and flee, leaving the PCs to continue their investigation – for the time being

- Episode 2: Dirty Dealings - There are no acts, the PCs can explore the coach and find a scared merchant. There can be an optional social encounter where they need to convince the merchant to tell them where is the MacGuffin and to let it go


Taking the example above, I am not understand whether to use the Events Family or whether to use the Storyboard / Plots, or whether I have to use both.

I would appreciate someone helping me figure out with the example above.

Thanks
Ceodryn

 

[kbs666]

The story almanac is a view of the global almanac. In short it is a subset of all the topics in your realm that you can populate as you see fit. right click on any topic and choose assign to views and choose story almanac, you can create your views as well. This is handy for when you have a large realm and want to only have the topics relevant to a particular adventure visible for a session.

Events are simply topics useful for describing things that happen at particular times, these happen to be useful in describing stories. You can use this to describe a linear story. The storyboard allows for a graphical representation of a story.

I would setup the story you describe this way:
setup: The Inn would be a location (you might want or need to reuse it at some time in the future). I'd then create a scene detailing the social encounter at the Inn where the PC's get the job just make sure to make sure that you clearly link the scene to the Inn in the scene somewhere.
Episode 1: I'd create a location for the missing coach since the rest of the adventure occurs there and there is likely a map.
ep 1, Act1: I create a scene for the initial encounter describing the finding of the coach and the fight with the beastmen.
ep 1, Act 2: You could just continue this in the scene from above or create a new scene making sure to make clear what triggers the transition between the two in the first scene.
ep 1, Act 3: This should pretty definitely be a new scene. The beastmen flee, a storm has hit and the PC's are trying to investigate the coach in the wind and rain.
Episode 2: Another scene. They find the merchant and can have the social encounter to find the MacGuffin of Great Doom.

Since this is pretty linear there really is no need for the storyboard. I'd just use prefixes on the topics under a storyline topic named after the adventure.

 

[daplunk]

Give this a watch.

 

[MNBlockHead]

Don't discount story boards. I find them an excellent tool when running the adventure.

I have the story board graph in the left navigation panel and I can click through it with the scenes appearing the right as the party progresses and makes their choices.

In my created adventures I am, generally, either running them generally from a map or a storyboard. For a dungeon crawl, I just need a map in the nav panel and I can click on the pins on the map to bring up the scene (or just view the pin text--often no need to create a scene topic for each location) in the right. For more story-plot driven adventures, I use the storyboard. Usually, I'm using a mixture of both.

 

[kbs666]

Don't discount story boards. I find them an excellent tool when running the adventure.

I have the story board graph in the left navigation panel and I can click through it with the scenes appearing the right as the party progresses and makes their choices.

In my created adventures I am, generally, either running them generally from a map or a storyboard. For a dungeon crawl, I just need a map in the nav panel and I can click on the pins on the map to bring up the scene (or just view the pin text--often no need to create a scene topic for each location) in the right. For more story-plot driven adventures, I use the storyboard. Usually, I'm using a mixture of both.

I mostly do multi branching plots and always use the storyboard to navigate them. But in a purely linear story I was just thinking there wasn't much to be gained from the storyboard but maybe the nav panel might make it worth it.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Personally , I find the story board woefully underpowered and archaic. Even 1997 visio was better than it is....If it were not for the autolink feature it would be DOA.

 

[Valyar]

If it were not for the autolink feature it would be DOA.

Isn’t this valid for the whole product?

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Ouch Val...

Seriously.. I guess if someone has never used other software like a Visio, etc.... something beats nothing... but that features inabilities out way its capabilities IMO...
Sad part is this is a place that could have easily been addressed during the "waiting for Content Market" event to occur.

 

[Farling]

Personally , I find the story board woefully underpowered and archaic. Even 1997 visio was better than it is....If it were not for the autolink feature it would be DOA.

Nice to diss a feature without saying why you don't like it.

Visio is a drawing package. RW provides the storyboard to have blocks in an ordered sequence. The only thing missing is to be able to set the block placement to "manual" mode so that they can be re-arranged better. (Does Visio have automatic block placement based on flow?)

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Nice to diss a feature without saying why you don't like it.

Farling my dear friend from across the pond
Well, I wasn't trying to revisit the many lacking features mentioned in other threads concerning the storyboard...... so in brief.....
lack of:
Line weight, color type or ends nor ability to change it from anything other than straight..No other customizable or otherwise shape choices, no ability to arrange as you the user would like (other than horizontal or vertical)... I can go on, but whats the point... The comparison isn't exactly fair....
Its like comparing RW to Word for it abilities, or most other VTT software compared to RW mapping capabilities.
There are simply better tools. but that also has an inherent cost. This would be one side of the debate.. the other (which I was really making reference to) is LWD tries to emulate some of those features of those other softwares, but the lines are grey where they choose to stop... We have some Word features within RW... We have some mapping features.. but by comparison.. the storyboard (which for all purposes is simply a flow chart) is the least developed of these.

Visio is a drawing package.........

Ah... no... it's a flowchart software that has some drawing features. And can create a myriad of various chart types such as logic paths, organizational charts, storyboards, time lines, etc

Best Regards
DLG

 

[Ceodryn]

Thank you all, that has been extremely useful as well as the videos from Josh Plunkett.

I have setup my scenes as described above, and while I have not set up a storyboard to help me navigate, I just I got the idea from one of the video.

What I am now puzzled about is statbocks/running encounters: I don’t have herolab since I am using real works to run wfrp4 d100, therefore my statblocks are in RW as their integrated word processing. Currently, I have setup my entire encounter participants in there, which works but it means I can’t reuse easily those monsters for later.

I’d like to setup monsters in realmwork, and say have one entry for a gobelin. However, then, when I run an encounter and say I have 5 Gobelins, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly duplicate statblocks or open them 5 times... basically what I am trying to get at is how do I use RW for efficiently planning encounters with re-usable monster blocks versus specific to that encounter? How do I somehow recreate in a dirty way the ease of use of HeroLab encounter planning?

 

[kbs666]

This is pretty easy but does require some copying and pasting.

Create an article on the mechanics side for each monster, under Dangers->Creatures with the statblocks. Then when you build your encounters simply copy the statblocks you need into the encounters.

 

[MNBlockHead]

Thank you all, that has been extremely useful as well as the videos from Josh Plunkett.

I have setup my scenes as described above, and while I have not set up a storyboard to help me navigate, I just I got the idea from one of the video.

What I am now puzzled about is statbocks/running encounters: I don’t have herolab since I am using real works to run wfrp4 d100, therefore my statblocks are in RW as their integrated word processing. Currently, I have setup my entire encounter participants in there, which works but it means I can’t reuse easily those monsters for later.

I’d like to setup monsters in realmwork, and say have one entry for a gobelin. However, then, when I run an encounter and say I have 5 Gobelins, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly duplicate statblocks or open them 5 times... basically what I am trying to get at is how do I use RW for efficiently planning encounters with re-usable monster blocks versus specific to that encounter? How do I somehow recreate in a dirty way the ease of use of HeroLab encounter planning?

Before HL had the community content for 5e, I used a text-expander/universal-macro program called Phrase Express to create a formatted stat block.

So, in RW, I would just type "statblock" in the snippet where I wanted the statblock and it would creat a nicely formatted statblock table. I would just edit the numbers and type the ability descriptions. It saved A LOT of time and looked nice. I played around with having it prompt me to enter info before creating it so that I wouldn't have to edit, but found that to be less convenient.

There are other programs that do this, ActiveWords comes to mind.

I have some old threads where I go into a LOT more detail on this. Search for "PhraseExpress"

Once HL had 5e content, I stopped putting statblocks into RW. Much easier to include a HL snippet instead.

 

[MNBlockHead]

Personally, I find the storyboard woefully underpowered and archaic. Even 1997 visio was better than it is....If it were not for the autolink feature it would be DOA.

I'm all for giving people more features, but there are so many things that should take development priority.

The story map is very basic, but it is functional, and I find it to be very useful.

If they ever do add to the functionality of the story map, I hope the formatting options are easy to ignore and they that they first focus on making it easier to navigate when editing.

I do a lot of business-process modeling for my work and I hate Visio. Switching to IBM Blueworks was one of the best things I've done to improve my productivity.

Visio is very fiddly and cumbersome. It feels like a graphic-design program. Blueworks is smooth as butter. It makes it simple to create standard-compliant BPM documentation. But it doesn't give you a lot of options.

I realize that Visio is used for far more use cases than BPM. That's my point. Visio is a kitchen sink program. It isn't really the best for any of its use cases but it provides an adequate solution for a great many use cases.

I would rather the RW storyboard be more like Blueworks than Visio.

 

[kbs666]

There are many things that would be nice to have in the storyboard but the only major annoyance, for me, is the lack of bidirectional arrows, That single things causes a great deal of graphical clutter is so many of my adventures.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Visio is very fiddly and cumbersome............

I would rather the RW storyboard be more like Blueworks than Visio.

Oh I agree on both assessments.. just most of the general public doesn't know about Blueworks and are more familiar with the attached microsoft products such as Visio...

For years Wordperfect, Harvard Graphics, and Lotus123 were far superior even after the "coming out party" of Microsoft office in the day.. but the "total package concept" put all of those basicly in the ground.

Again was making reference to what most of the community is probably familiar with.