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Realm Works Users' Vent in the HLO Forum

I have been away for a while. I had hoped to come back to more well rounded tool only to come back to nothing. Disappointing to say the least
 
Dervish said:
I have been away for a while. I had hoped to come back to more well rounded tool only to come back to nothing. Disappointing to say the least
Click to expand...

Well we did have our Bi-Yearly visit from Rob, but we have been put back on the bottom shelf again. So yeah, nothing new.
 
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Xmas soon. Let's hope for so news at the end of the year.

In case no new post shows up in the meantime: Everyone stay in good health - and let's hope all of your wishes become true.
 
Something that occurred to me recently. The importance of online organization has definitely increased for the current year. It likely won't stay quite as big in the future, but this is something to stay. Increasingly RPG companies that are not doing great support for the digital side of the company feel dated. Realm Works unfortunately could have had a really good year if it was still a supported program being developed.

I bought into Foundry during their Black Friday sale and so far I am loving it. Realm Works would be a perfect accompaniment to Foundry (or other VTTs) if an export/import tool was made for the programs. I would love to import certain journal entries from RW into Foundry. I would love to export text blocks of my Foundry elements directly into RW. Also, if the RW subscription actually came with the capability to host Foundry sessions in addition to hosting RW material that might push me over. Of course, what I still really want to make a subscription worthwhile is for players to be able to setup a free account that has web access to RW worlds.

More and more I'm finding myself using Realm Works less. As online games becomes more common I'm already doing a lot of text entry into a VTT. I need to get into the habit of cut and pasting between the programs since RW organizes much more nicely than the VTT programs and keeps me better prepared. Competitors like World Anvil haven't pulled me away, but seeing capability of other campaign organizers working with VTTs is tempting. It is just a natural fit to have these various programs able to communicate and transfer information.

I still hold out hope Lone Wolf changes their mind and decides to restart work on Realm Works. I think more companies would be interested in selling on the content market these days.
 
What's most disappointing for me is that there's a ton of great content ideas and supportive forum members for developers to draw from. How long have we waited for a calendar feature that works? How long do we have to wait for LW to answer questions or post a development?
I let my online subscription lapse last year in the spring and I had my laptop die this past summer.
Now onto my new laptop, I'm hoping to port the data with no issues, but the EA-level CRM that LW uses has me very worried.

In any case, what are people using for alternatives? I'm looking at World Anvil as a possible solution. That's not to say I couldn't start using Realm Works if they ever bothered to support their product for their customers, but I'm very unhappy that I spent $80 Canadian plus the online fees to get little more than what I get from One Note or Google Docs for relatively free.

In all seriousness though, what have people converted to? I'm more than open to hearing ideas.
 
SenahBirdR said:
Something that occurred to me recently. The importance of online organization has definitely increased for the current year. It likely won't stay quite as big in the future, but this is something to stay. Increasingly RPG companies that are not doing great support for the digital side of the company feel dated. Realm Works unfortunately could have had a really good year if it was still a supported program being developed.

I bought into Foundry during their Black Friday sale and so far I am loving it. Realm Works would be a perfect accompaniment to Foundry (or other VTTs) if an export/import tool was made for the programs. I would love to import certain journal entries from RW into Foundry. I would love to export text blocks of my Foundry elements directly into RW. Also, if the RW subscription actually came with the capability to host Foundry sessions in addition to hosting RW material that might push me over. Of course, what I still really want to make a subscription worthwhile is for players to be able to setup a free account that has web access to RW worlds.

More and more I'm finding myself using Realm Works less. As online games becomes more common I'm already doing a lot of text entry into a VTT. I need to get into the habit of cut and pasting between the programs since RW organizes much more nicely than the VTT programs and keeps me better prepared. Competitors like World Anvil haven't pulled me away, but seeing capability of other campaign organizers working with VTTs is tempting. It is just a natural fit to have these various programs able to communicate and transfer information.

I still hold out hope Lone Wolf changes their mind and decides to restart work on Realm Works. I think more companies would be interested in selling on the content market these days.
Click to expand...

I wholeheartedly agree. I AM considering World Anvil, simply because it looks like I can more easily exchange data. It's not a perfect tool, but I see customer updates. That's more than LW has done since shortly after I spent my $80 in early 2018. I keep hearing excuses of "it'll take a developer dedicating their time to ..." Well do that! Pay someone to do it. Take time from whatever else your doing and do that. Get an investor if you need to. Customers paid money and the model as it is is very monthly fee dependent thanks to CRM that is wholly unncessary.
 
I am using Foundry and World Anvil. The two integrate so that I can easily port WA content in Foundry. For my 5e game, I'm currently running Rappan Athuk, a massive mega-dungeon, and rather than copying and recreating everything I entered into RW into WA, I'm just using the PDF and focusing on prepping the maps in Foundry.

With my Mage the Ascension 20th Anniversary game, I am starting a homebrew world from scratch and so am finally making an effort to get the most out of World Anvil. It is taking some time to get used to. I miss the auto-linking of Realmworks, but the at-type-ahead (type @ and start typing to link other content) works well enough.

My work requires me to spend long stints out of country, I can't install gaming software on my work computer, and I really don't want to have to lug around two laptops, so having everything online is really nice. Even if RealmWorks development restarted, I'm not sure I would go back to it.

I don't play Pathfinder or Starfinder, so I've not had a use for HeroLab. For my 5e games, we use D&D Beyond with a third-party plug-in to Foundry that imports character sheets, monsters, spells, and equipment from DDB to Foundry.
 
I use Roll 20 to run my virtual games and just don't use a RW type tool anymore. If I was to go back to it, I would probably ho with WA, but my players just don't use the tool enough to merit the fee, so I either organize directly in Roll 20 or use Google Suite. Google makes sharing easy, and is web based. For my in-person game, which is 5e, I use DDB for characters and rules references, Roll 20 to display maps and pictures, and Google. DDB implemented the buy-as-you-go method very well.
 
I decided to take the plunge and went with World Anvil. Got a year with the thirty percent off sale. I think having that much of an investment means I will use it and spend the time to learn it. I currently use a (free) wiki and am also wondering if this will replace that at some point. I like to post session notes and plots, often in a form of prose, and to help remind myself. I don't know if I saw RW doing that or not originally but I was hoping the player versions would be more real time than what we got.

I'm maybe five hours into it and it's okay. I can make my own calendar. Heck, I can make several. I can put historical events on several timelines. This is not my full review of WA by any means.

  • I go to put in an event and when I finish, instead of going back to the screen to enter a new event, I'm editing that event. It's not bad, just me getting used to how it works and not what I would prefer. While I use event here, that happens with everything. I want to enter a bunch of placeholders for various organizations but there are extra clicks to get out of editing the new one and back to adding one.
  • Entering a new event and assigning it to a timeline doesn't mean it will show up nicely in the timeline. I can't figure out why but it creates orphan events.
  • As the owner/GM, I can't easily see or figure out how to see a subscriber/player point of view. That's been annoying.
  • I can't seem to enter PC information but have to invite them to do it? At least for me, my players might not so I want to be able to do that and maybe assign them

Having said that, this is a very shallow review. There looks to be potential for my wants, which is one timeline but holding multiple campaigns. It does appear that it can find some links or show me where things could link up. I will keep going and reporting. Further, there is a lot here, and maybe I shouldn't have reported, but hoping this will also nudge me to do more with WA and see how it works.

Here it is for any who want to see it or ask questions. Definitely a WIP. I'm trying to put events into this timeline for this version of FR. That means two previous campaigns, and the two current (lockdown) campaigns I have going. It does allow me to have one campaign use PF1 rules and another use 5E rules. They have character sheets for that but I haven't found a way to do anything with that yet.

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/forgotten-realms-evildmguy

Thanks!

edg
 
The big question is: is there an importer for RW in World Anvil?

Because if I can't automate that to at least some extent, I'm not using the tool. Right now I'm toying with the idea of just shoving everything into Foundry VTT. I'd lose some functionality like plots, relationships and my hirarchical order, but it might be worth a try.
Foundry has an open API and is written in Javascript while Realm Works allows a XML output. It should be possible to write an RWImport module for Foundry without 'too' much effort - take content from certain tags and put it into certain js object properties - but I've been using Foundry for a week now, so me writing a module for it is nothing that will happen short term. Mid-term I might think about it if no one else is doing it.
 
There is a planned API for WA but it is in dev and GET only right now. So, no importer. Maybe? It is json at the moment, so a converter to that would have to be written from RW's XML.

In the end, I didn't use RW for much. I did a lot at the beginning but since I didn't feel like RW allowed me to do improve and create an entire inn with staff easily on the fly, I didn't use it during the game. Once that happened, I found myself using RW less and less. I didn't like that because I would at least enter NPCs and put in their connections and then would see a lot really cool options I might not have.

I don't know that WA is the answer either. I just thought I would try it and see.

At the moment, I'm using a college ruled composition notebook. As the campaigns I'm running are happening about the same time and indirectly connected, one campaign is the front of the notebook and one started from the back.

Thanks!

edg
 
Iam still actively using it.

Iam stioll hoping for the impossible - that they lit the torch again and provide some updates.

It's so great that this tool works offline - I don't want to have all my date in some webspace :)
 
WA looks nice and pretty but as much as I hate to say it, RW just suits my style. It is some slick easy to design, build and revamp when you realize you went way off target.

For me, the ability to create my own categories and tags is the shiznat, almost all major canned categories have been replaced with my own.

Rob's vision was great, just wish he didn't lose the RW glasses, and we are not floating out into the ether alone.
 
I presume they were all focused on launching PF 1...
Let's hope this is success so they have bucks to maintain whatever they need to maintain to keep RW and servers online.
 
Exmortis said:
WA looks nice and pretty but as much as I hate to say it, RW just suits my style. It is some slick easy to design, build and revamp when you realize you went way off target.

For me, the ability to create my own categories and tags is the shiznat, almost all major canned categories have been replaced with my own.

Rob's vision was great, just wish he didn't lose the RW glasses, and we are not floating out into the ether alone.
Click to expand...

Looks like I may have to 180 on this statement, since the last update it has been a nightmare for me.

I have a PF rules realm I have been working on that is intended to be an import for any PF campaign world. Having all the rules in the mechanics reference. Since the last server update I can no longer sync this realm, and with nearly the entire CRB having been done, its a lot of work possibly lost. As usual the error is cryptic and may as well be the RW version of the check engine light.

Now I have a new issue, I have been working with my first realm getting it ready and it has been a dismal experience. It has been working fine for years, until now... I make any changes to a topic, it then will not sync and reports there is too much data in a snippet. Worse, I deleted a large topic, rebuild it from scratch typing it in all over again and expanding the work to 6 new topics, and I get a new too much data error on syncing again. Other than the all new snippets I moved a few snippets into new topics, which seems to be the catalyst for this, if I move a snippet from one topic to another I get this snippet size error...Which renders RW rather worthless to me, as I have a lot of topics I used as snippet and information repositories, which I then could build a topic structure from the snippets by moving them around. I worked on this realm that way since it was created. It is one RWs best features, I create a base topic, enter literally dozens of snippets pictures, maps etc. then build the topic structure top down moving snippets into these new topics and filling out the story and any required info.

I am at wits end, and it took years for my last support cases to generate a response, no idea how long these will take. A notebook with reams of paper, seems like the future again, with a loss of untold hours.
 
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Exmortis said:
I am at wits end, and it took years for my last support cases to generate a response, no idea how long these will take. A notebook with reams of paper, seems like the future again, with a loss of untold hours.
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What a disaster! I'm so sorry to hear this.

At the moment I'm using Roll 20 and keeping notes on one of their little journals. It's not ideal and it's not the same as RW, which was superb, but so far it's just about working.
 
Exmortis said:
Now I have a new issue, I have been working with my first realm getting it ready and it has been a dismal experience. It has been working fine for years, until now... I make any changes to a topic, it then will not sync and reports there is too much data in a snippet. Worse, I deleted a large topic, rebuild it from scratch typing it in all over again and expanding the work to 6 new topics, and I get a new too much data error on syncing again. Other than the all new snippets I moved a few snippets into new topics, which seems to be the catalyst for this, if I move a snippet from one topic to another I get this snippet size error...Which renders RW rather worthless to me, as I have a lot of topics I used as snippet and information repositories, which I then could build a topic structure from the snippets by moving them around. I worked on this realm that way since it was created. It is one RWs best features, I create a base topic, enter literally dozens of snippets pictures, maps etc. then build the topic structure top down moving snippets into these new topics and filling out the story and any required info.
Click to expand...

Did they ever implement a data limit for the cloud service?

I wonder if somehow all of your syncs are being rejected because some sort of account quota has been exceeded on the cloud system.
 
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