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Usage of groups

M

martinmaster

Member
Hello fellows Realms Workers,

In the help files (manuals) , RW staff recommends:

• Group Membership: It is generally a bad idea to nest individuals within groups. Individuals often belong to multiple groups, at which point you’ll have to decide which group to assign as a container. If you do that, then you no longer have a consistent model across all your content.
• Group Structure: Chapters of an organization are almost always geographically driven. As such, they are typically a poor match for nesting within the organization. When you think of visiting a guild or a corporate office, you think about where that location is geographically, so that’s how the nesting should usually be modeled.

My question is....
What if you are creating a modern military warfare inclined game ?
Per example, based upon the vietnam war.

Almost all characters i would create are part of definite and almost permanent and very defined military structure. Most of them wont change side, or change group within the army.

I was thinking of using people list in people, just to log all the neutrals...

And for both sides of the war, i was thinking of mimicking the historical military infrastructure of both sides and sort every individuals in the military hierarchy sub categories.

As such , 90 % of my character swould be under GROUPS... as is not recommended by the above advice...

Would you advise against this ? What are the pros.. and cons... of doing so ?

Thanks Realm Workers !
 
In your situation the using groups would probably be fine :-)

As long as you don't have people infiltrating one group from another group. Then where do you put the person. If you have players using the player version of RW, then I guess you'd put the character under the "infiltrated" unit.
 
While you could use groups in this specific configuration, I'd advise not to if you plan to run other game type with RW.

Try to be consistent in the way you manage individual memberships. Find a way that work for all kind of games and use this one.

This way you'll have a very strong, well know indivudual management accros all your realms.
 
The actual problem I'm attempting to resolve, is that I have the feeling of having to do the work twice.

I have a large number of Characters in the military structure of both organization (Side of the war) structured by HQ,Battalions,Squads, etc....

To sort them in PEOPLES I followed the manual advice at first and decided to sort them for each army by: Main Characters, Minors, Extras and tough about using sub categories of regions. This is quickly proving to be an inefficient way for my two military style campaign underconstruction (one is warhammer 40k).
It is not rare that a character would switch categories, or change region. Furthermore, the sheer number of characters to sort trough is slowing down the game considerably. What was working better was to start splitting the main and minors by element of military structure. However doing this , i'm doing the job twice since I then have to also make it a member of the same group i built under GROUPS. So i tought to save me the job of doing all the structure twice and attach directly all individuals to their related groups.

But I'm still new and learning while constructing my world and might need more advices on using people and groups properly before embracing this practice that i might regret in the future.


Thanks
 
Have you concidered either, 1) putting the names into the group topic which will hyper link to the proper entry still oragnized as the people list, or 2) the contained/belongs to relation ship that will establish a link on the right side panel.??

Either of those option would allow the individuals to stay under people but still be readily accessible from the group they are part of and easily be moved if they switch side, assignments, duty stations etc. just a thought
 
Agyess beat me to the punch on this.

Here is a pic of one the groups I have set up to illustrate. I use relationships to place people in groups (the same person can be in multiple groups) and then use the "Relationships" in the Table of Contents to navigate to the person I want. The actual entry for each person lives in the "People" Category.
 

Attachments

  • Groups.JPG
    Groups.JPG
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The way I'd handle it, as a veteran, is to assign each person to their physical duty assignment and then give them a relationship to their unit.

For instance:
Corporal Jones would be contained by Fort Dix and have a relationship to 2nd battalion, C company.

Which more accurately reflects how military units work. This would make it very easy to find specific individuals since you could find them based on either their unit or where they are assigned.
 
I use a method similar to Agyess but I agree with kbs666 if you are running military specific scenarios primarily to use the structure that is already tried and tested -- that's a wheel that works extremely well so no point in reinventing. Bobifle makes a really good point that if you run other types of games like D&D or whatever, it may be best to develop a system that works well across all your games to make your life easier for finding info.

I add a table to each cast group like the one below which gives me flexibility to identify who, where and what. For me, the more important thing is that I can put bit-players like the janitors and farmers and random guys on the street into RW and track where they are normally without creating separate entries for every single NPC.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B38xJJAsUPYUMlJ6T3I5RC1hT00
 
That does bring up something, and maybe the calendar will help with this, most people aren't at the same place all day every day. Having them contained by where the PC's are most likely to interact with them and relationships to the rest of the places they go works but it would be nice if there was a way to set the time of day, and day of week/month, and have RW adjust where everyone is for me.
 
Even with a calendar, it is highly unlikely RW will do that level of automation automatically. You can of course create snippets that identify locations for NPCs based on time which you can track and throw a die to determine where they are at any given time.
 
kbs666 said:
That does bring up something, and maybe the calendar will help with this, most people aren't at the same place all day every day. Having them contained by where the PC's are most likely to interact with them and relationships to the rest of the places they go works but it would be nice if there was a way to set the time of day, and day of week/month, and have RW adjust where everyone is for me.
Click to expand...

Isn't this when the GM should earn his money and just decide where the NPCs are, when the characters need them or might run into them?

Otherwise we run into the problem of the players looking for the contact at the harbour front but the automated process has decided the contact is at the cabin in the mountains - and never shall the twine meet... Essentially stalling the campaign.
 
I contain NPCs in groups, organized upon Houses.

The same with PCs.

Most NPCs are pretty one-dimensional, so there often isn't much need to for much detail. (Gruff is a guard at the temple, he often sells information so he can pay his gambling obsession; that sort of thing.)

So, the members of the great merchant Mathews' family and close household is placed in the group House Mathews.

The NPCs working for the great merchant Mathews are simply grouped under Mathews' Trading House under Groups.

NPCs and PCs without family or group affiliation are placed under People.

Well, it works well for me in a fantasy setting and in Star Wars.
 
Vargr said:
Isn't this when the GM should earn his money and just decide where the NPCs are, when the characters need them or might run into them?

Otherwise we run into the problem of the players looking for the contact at the harbour front but the automated process has decided the contact is at the cabin in the mountains - and never shall the twine meet... Essentially stalling the campaign.
Click to expand...
I aim for a more sandbox build to my campaign so I try to put many different adventure hooks into the setting. Which ones the players run into and what rumors they believe, or are interested in, is something I try not to control.

But if the PC's are looking for a PC in the middle of the night at his work place then no, I don't let them find him no matter what the software says.

However my primary starting town has dozens of NPC's some of whom move around quite a lot. Being able to automate that would be very helpful.
 
Automating the location of an NPC in RW would be a major development. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be cool, but I don't think that many players would put this functionality very high up the list over the long list of other feature requests.

I generally take the "wing it" approach when it comes to this. I make things complicated enough for me. Should I find it important to the story and experience to have an NPC with a schedule or a percent chance at being at a one location over another, I would handle it this way:

1. I would create the place topics for all the locations that the NPC may be.
2. I would create a person topic for the NPC
3. In the NPC's person topic I would create a snippet for "schedule" and I would create a table that would list the places and times the NPC is there. This should auto-link to the pre-created placed. If I really wanted to get fancy, I would create a random-roll tables for different time periods of the day and even the season/month. If I REALLY wanted to go crazy, I would also create various routes that the NPC may take to go from one place to another.

But at some point, I have to say that I'm not trying to program the next Skyrim. I have a much better computer in my head and I can just "become" the NPC and determine where that NPC decided to be at a given time.

I would probably only go through the hassle of creating complicated schedules for a very specific quest where the players have to track down a number of NPCs, perhaps in a limited time period, and I want to make it "fair" to them or make it feel less as if I'm leading them on. Bring some randomness to it. It would basically be a mini game in the overall campaign and not a major mechanic of the campaign itself.

That said...if someone were to create a bunch of NPCs that included schedule tables that I could plug into my world and they made that available in the content market, I would probably use them, if the NPCs otherwise made sense and were fun.
 
Groupe countinues

Thanks for those fast replies and enlightening ideas.

Indeed, I might learn to use relationships more efficiently, and I admit that the numbers of ways you can use either a combination of relationship versus qualifiers tends to confuse me a little.Always thinking about a military type structure... what is better:resident, member, minion (as some organization are above other (like a HQ), and especialy how to best deal with the relationships of leaders towar groups without multiplicating endlessly the number and types of relationships.

Here a typical mil org structure:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/1st_US_Marine_Division.png

Each structure on that chart has its own sub structure divided in companies, squads, and individual members. So each sub category is also a member (contained) of all the above units and might also have a relationship of master-minion or superior subordinate with above units.

So , hearing the above mentionned suggestions , one of the good solution would be if Im Right :

- Create all individual in PEOPLE
- Set them up in a structure that is very general and will become quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of individuals, and jus dont bother too much about it as i would no use PEOPLE to find anybody, but rather GROUPS.
This structure could be like:
- AXIS
- Germany
- Waffen SS
- Werhmacht
- Infantery
- Solider a
- soldier b
- and a list of hundreds of solider following without any more attempt at structure

- PanzerKorp
- Luftwaffe
- Marinekorp

- Militia
- Japan
- Italy

-----------

- ALLIES

---
And in group, it would be structured like



- Army Group A West
- 15th Army
- 26 th division
- 1st Batatalion
- 1st company
- 1 plattoon
- 1 squad
- 2n squad
- 2nd platoon
- 2nd company
- 2nd battalion
- etc...
- 5th div
- 3rd panzer army
- etc..

- Army Group B



- Sub unit would have a reltationship of 1) belongs to or within or 2) would use containement in the GROUP structure or 3 ) BOTH ?

- Also :What would be the qualifier best suited between groups ? Depends on ? Member of ? Resident ? Master , owner etc... this is a little confusing about the pro and cons of different options.

- As for inividuals.... if i understand, all individuals would have a relation ship of belongs to their sub unit, and a qualifier of affiliation-member ? Or resident ? As fol the leader of the group (ie the seargeant) he would have 2 relationships ? a member of the squad... and would have a relationship of Comprise-encompass and a qualifier of master minion ?

Does this make sense, im worried about making a lot of work and in the end having and completely useless and incoherent structure

Thanks guys
 
The point of RW is do what works best for you.

If you're really worried build out a test realm first to see how things work before doing anything in your "real" realm.
 
And if RW doesn't do what you need, use the tools you always have and embed them. I use spreadsheets for tracking large groups of NPCs and then I embed the tables. I can more easily add/delete/sort/manipulate an Excel spreadsheet than I can anything in RW (mainly because RW does not allow exporting - but let's stay on topic because that's a whole different rabbit hole).
 
Relationship and qualifiers

Does anybody have a text clarifying how each relationship and each qualifiers should be used, in relation to one another, and to group versus people.

Like a said the number of different interprations of the proper choice cn become confusion (master,*minion, resident, members...)
 
See the Reference Guide, section 2 (p. 45), available from Manual section, available in the Help tab in RealmWorks. Not sure if this has enough detail for you. It would be helpful to have a lot of examples and illustrations, but the user community is the best resource for examples.
 
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