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Realm Works and Hero Labs - GM Tour

Now that I've had some time to use Realm Works, thanks to the wonderful videos provided by various community members, I'm getting to the point where I'm trying to figure out the best way to organize everything. I know it's a personal preference and what works best for one may not work best for another, but I'm just trying to get a feel for the different ways of going about it as that may open my eyes to something I hadn't tried or knew was available.

Right now I have it laid out as per the adventure book, but that doesn't seem to flow very well for me, it just seems too all over the place. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

The other thing I'm wondering about is have any of you changed the default topic templates to work better with the system you use or do you adapt the system to the topic layout? Again, I'm sure this is personal preference, but it's always a learning experience to hear how someone else goes about things and why :)
 
Everyone does things differently. The goal should always be to find a way that works for the way you run your game.

Don't worry to much about where the data is or how you arrange your topics at first. One of the great advantages of RW is the ease with which things can be re-arranged and even refactored if you change your mind about something.

As to customizing topic templates, I'd stick to the default ones till you've got the hang of the program and put some data in. Some people get really hung up over having lots of empty snippets in a topic but really that's no big deal. Players will never see them unless you reveal them and there is a way to remove all the empty ones from a topic if you want.

If you want more detailed advice post a screenshot of what you're doing and describe what you don't like. People will surely give you some pointers.
 
After watching Daplunk's "Managing Merchants" video for at least the fourth time in a couple of months, I finally got the time to think about the organization a little bit more and how I might want to do it for my campaign.

I love the table that J Rob Haring created and your idea for implementation. I did notice that while you would list the cost levels at the shop, the links would go to the same master list that included everything available anywhere and did not show the limits by locale.

Rather than having an article as "For Sale: Blacksmith", I was thinking of breaking it down also by locale. For example, there would be an article for "For Sale: Premium: Blacksmith" that would most likely include everything on the list (except perhaps the bark armour you created and added). There could also be articles for the other locales like urban and rural or perhaps even area specific ones for things like underdark, druid village, etc.

The advantage is that you won't see all the unavailable items and can have more granularity, the disadvantage is that you have to create multiple entries. This might not be a big problem if you do the Premium one first, then copy it and remove what you don't want for the areas where availability is tighter. Another disadvantage is that if you changed a detail on one list it would need to be modified on the rest.

Other options would be to just have a snippet for each of the locales in the same article or to add the locales to the table.

We could even tag the equipment with the locales it is available in, but this seems a tad obsessive.
 
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@daplunk, perhaps you've covered it in another video, but have you thought about using the audio snippet? I'm not a big fan of audio when running my games--another thing I have to manage--but when I was looking into it, I liked the idea of having a snippet in the section of the scene or other topic that I could click on to play the audio. I could see having to scroll up or down for the table could be distracting.
 
I have yes. It all comes down to really wanting to have control of the audio from the content I am reading at the time. As you said, it's just one more thing you need to manage, but having a link on the adventure page means its just a click.

my concern there is I will be inflating the size of my realm quickly. Adding in the audio snippet requires me to add a new copy of the audio file so to do this one every article where I want music will quickly create a bigger size problem than i already have.
 
That's a good point. Linking to an audio file is better than copying the file into the realm and having to sync that. I could see published content, however, embedding the audio into the topic. Otherwise, you've convinced me. Hyperlink to the file, don't embed it.
 
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