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Realm Works and Hero Labs - GM Tour

Dhrakken said:
You know, after watching your videos; what really struck me is how much time it must have taken you to enter all that data. I'm not going to lie, as a new user that is barely scratching the surface, the task ahead of me feels truly daunting.

Hurry up content market and take my money already!
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While I share your desire for the content market, it's mainly so I can get a damned good look at how others have organised their content.

Like daplunk I have a huge amount of information in my various realms. All I can say is that it's much easier if you have PDFs to cut and paste from. You quickly learn keyboard shortcuts to ease the process, and the very act of going through information, cutting and pasting it, doing little bits of reorganisation in Realm Works, actually serves as prep time - you remember a lot of it.

Some of the pain is in working out how you're actually going to organise the content. That you really learn by doing - I scarcely touch the plot and relationships windows, for instance, preferring a slightly more traditional structure of storylines combined with containers for places, people and things - the hyperlinks tie everything together.

Since I'm more interested in setting and background, and since my players know the rules system pretty well, I've concentrated more on getting setting details into RW than game mechanics.

It *can* be a pain. It is, after all, a form of data entry. There are times I don't want to do it, and times I enjoy it. So long as I keep a couple of steps ahead of the players, I can happily go off and play a computer game instead of prepping.

Initially, getting in the background information took a few weeks of solitary effort. Since then, I've just kept adding to the plot information as necessary. I try to keep a few sessions ahead of the players.

For example, my players have just reached the Graul Farm in Rise of the Runelords - I've got that and Fort Rannick already in Realm Works, and once I stop typing here I'll add some more plot entries from the rest of the Hook Mountain Massacre. I doubt I'll get that chapter finished this evening, but you never know. You get quicker the more you do it.
 
Barwickian said:
While I share your desire for the content market, it's mainly so I can get a damned good look at how others have organised their content.

Like daplunk I have a huge amount of information in my various realms. All I can say is that it's much easier if you have PDFs to cut and paste from. You quickly learn keyboard shortcuts to ease the process, and the very act of going through information, cutting and pasting it, doing little bits of reorganisation in Realm Works, actually serves as prep time - you remember a lot of it.

Some of the pain is in working out how you're actually going to organise the content. That you really learn by doing - I scarcely touch the plot and relationships windows, for instance, preferring a slightly more traditional structure of storylines combined with containers for places, people and things - the hyperlinks tie everything together.

Since I'm more interested in setting and background, and since my players know the rules system pretty well, I've concentrated more on getting setting details into RW than game mechanics.

It *can* be a pain. It is, after all, a form of data entry. There are times I don't want to do it, and times I enjoy it. So long as I keep a couple of steps ahead of the players, I can happily go off and play a computer game instead of prepping.

Initially, getting in the background information took a few weeks of solitary effort. Since then, I've just kept adding to the plot information as necessary. I try to keep a few sessions ahead of the players.

For example, my players have just reached the Graul Farm in Rise of the Runelords - I've got that and Fort Rannick already in Realm Works, and once I stop typing here I'll add some more plot entries from the rest of the Hook Mountain Massacre. I doubt I'll get that chapter finished this evening, but you never know. You get quicker the more you do it.
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Totally get where you're coming from and I too have noticed with just a few days of data entry, I have gotten a lot better and through watching many videos, have learnt a lot of tricks. I mainly want the content market for the mechanics and potentially the setting; I fully intend to enter the plot/adventure myself as I do agree; it's a good form of prep. Plus I'm running 6 PC's who are mythic through Reign of Winter which was intended for 4 PC's and no mythic so I have to do a lot of rewriting/restructuring anyway.
 
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That was one great video. I am in awe of the data and organization you have put in place. My data files are getting large but I can't imagine the size of yours.
 
Very nice mate!

Finally back in town and can watch a video, internet at the lake is very spotty and it can be a chore to read email.

One thing these videos do, is show those who are new, or even little wary about using RW, a little booster to get going.

One thing that can not be stressed enough, is how forgiving RW is, you can always re manipulate the data entered, and nothing is a waste of time.

Very good stuff, keep it coming!
 
It's probably the most boring one so far to be honest. I tried to show how i enter a PDF in using a very small adventure but its still going to be long winded. Need to do some actual video editing perhaps to show snippets of the process instead of the start to finish.
 
daplunk said:
It's probably the most boring one so far to be honest. I tried to show how i enter a PDF in using a very small adventure but its still going to be long winded. Need to do some actual video editing perhaps to show snippets of the process instead of the start to finish.
Click to expand...

Actually I got quite a lot out of it.
 
daplunk,

I must commend you, your videos are amazing. I was wondering if you could provide some advice, perhaps you can do it in another video. So I am starting to enter in Rifts world information to use with Savage Rifts. The information for the world is spread through out 40+ books. I like how you set up the prefixes based on the information in the modules. How would your recommend doing prefixes for world building based information. Like in your Faerun second, how to you prefix the different cities and nations in the Forgotten Realms?

Salcor
 
Thanks :)

I've not actually tried to build my own world yet but I can see what you're asking. I'm in the process of fleshing out the map of Faerun actually. Let me have a look at that and see if I can create a useful video.
 
Actually... i might have a crack at setting up a whole universe and showing how I would set it up. People might find that useful.
 
Ok spent yesterday putting more of an actual world together. Video can be found HERE.

I found i didn't use alot of Prefix's. My preference would be to use the folder structure instead and use prefix's when you want to sort something in a specific way.
 
I purchased Realm Works about 3'ish months ago after I finally dove into the DM chair. Unfortunately, I had a hard time getting started with it though I am a huge fan of all that can be done with it. It was just difficult for me to decide how to get started, I know there were tons of posts saying 'just start inputting' but that just doesn't work for me :(

Seeing your videos and getting a glimpse of how someone has set theirs up though has helped tremendously! I actually spent some time yesterday evening inputting data from the campaign I'm running and though I'm sure I'll be tweaking how I've organized stuff at least I have taken that critical step forward.

I look forward to watching the rest of the videos you've shared and any new ones you post!!
 
I was so overwhelmed when i first started. I put it down and left it for a year. It wasn't until Hero Lab support came out that I went back to it. So glad i did! Nothing else i tried came even remotely close.
 
It's never done. And that's ok. I'm going through a few thousand entries now as I standardize and ensure I have sources identified. Dive in and spend as much or as little time as makes your games enjoyable.
 
Looks like I'm in the same boat as a few of you. Just felt overwhelmed by it all.

So, I decided to take the plunge (thanks to daplunk), and just started taking baby steps.

First by entering NPC's names, and I'm going to build from there.


Dave
 
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