Reference manual for an adventure module ?

[Dyark]

I am building new adventures and I was thinking of building through a reference manual instead, would it be good practice ?
How simple could it be ? I can do it in XML but that could be long

[Myrdin Potter]

The easiest in game method right now is the Savage Worlds extension which not has a way to be used for 5e. Look at the thread in this sub-form.

Reference manual can contain links to the standard encounters and such, but in and of itself it cannot give you everything you need in a standard reference manual.

[Bidmaron]

Myrdin, respectfully that was very confusing.

Dyark, you can do what you want using the new savage worlds 5e extension you can find on recent posts. If you find there is something you want to do that it doesn't support let us know and we will fix it if FG is technically capable of it

[Myrdin Potter]

Bidmaron - reference manuals do not have all the functionality that a typical adventure needs without building some content outside the reference manual and then linking into the reference manual. Reference manuals mainly help reading by giving a much better layout.

As an example, if you want to use pins on a map to run your adventure, the pin will not go to a specific reference manual paragraph, you will need a story entry.

[Bidmaron]

Myrdin you can get around that now with the savage worlds tool I am talking about. You can make the story entries just fine. In fact, you can do that part right in 5e. You just can't do the fancy stuff without iskael's special tool

[Talyn]

I do reference manuals for all the adventures I've done on the store, but I'm the only one so far who has duplicated the Story content there. The most recent one I did, I only put reference material there, no Story content.

You can indeed pin a reference page to a map, a hotbar, anywhere just like you can a Story page, Encounter, anything else. The trick is you don't want to have the playable story content in the reference manual but skip having it in Story because a lot of GMs modify adventures to suit the campaign they're running, and reference manuals are read-only.

[Bidmaron]

Talyn, I thought you could drag the link of anything in a read only manual to the corresponding window list and then click the lock icon and edit it.

Isn't that true? I don't currently own encrypted content and cannot check but I believe I have seen this stated many times recently

[Talyn]

Absolutely untrue, reference manuals (and therefore reference pages) are hard-coded as read-only and there is no lock/unlock icon on them.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17921&stc=1&d=1487185421

[Bidmaron]

ok, we are speaking past each other. I am assuming that you have two modules. The fancy one with the rules material and the story one that is a conventional module. Sorry for being totally unclear.

[Bidmaron]

That said, why was it implemented this way? Why not let someone drag an entry to their campaign list and edit it? If it is encrypted no one can wholesale steal the content. As I believe one of the SW principles pointed out, you cannot stop someone from screen shotting it and editing so why enforce anything more than that?

[Moon Wizard]

If you are referring to why the reference manuals are not editable, it's because FG doesn't have a mechanism to do these sort of layouts directly. So, the reference manuals are actually a dynamically generated set of objects from a data list provided by the module. It's not in a format that is easy to make an interface for, especially within current FG UI tools.

Regards,
JPG

[Talyn]

ok, we are speaking past each other. I am assuming that you have two modules. The fancy one with the rules material and the story one that is a conventional module. Sorry for being totally unclear.

Nah that would be a waste, in my opinion. Even if I'm only including reference material for the GM and not duplicating the story content, that's important info the GM may need to run the adventure so I wouldn't bother making a separate .mod just for that.

The why is as Moon Wizard stated: there's simply no easy way of editing these things within the UI. Reference pages are a custom window frame where we define blocks in XML then a Lua script runs through and handles the rendering of those blocks on the page. Normal "story" and "library" pages don't do that, they are formatted text and links only.

[Myrdin Potter]

And I do not think that reference pages can have chat boxes as well which are standard tools when running an adventure.

[Talyn]

You mean the clickable dialogue bits? Sure they can. They have everything you can do in a Story page, plus all the refpage-only bits.

[LordEntrails]

I am building new adventures and I was thinking of building through a reference manual instead, would it be good practice ?
How simple could it be ? I can do it in XML but that could be long
Did you get your answer?

IMO, Build your adventure in the traditional non-Ref Manual way at a minimum. Then, if you want to duplicate it, create it as a Ref Manual as well. I think most of the users are going to expect that behavior and might be confused if you do it Ref Manual only.

[Talyn]

Yep, and like I said, a lot of GMs like to customize things so you'll get a lot of pushback if you were to do refmanual-only which they can't customize. Plus, the refmanual is a bigger window and that might be a factor on smaller screens like my laptop where screen real estate is at a premium. You can drag pages to a hotbar but no one wants to drag every single page. So it's a balancing act. The few out there before me (Zacc's Legendary Beginnings adventures for 5E) did only reference material for the GM in the manual and the story was in Story. The one I submitted a few days ago (Gauntlet of Spiragos for Pathfinder) I did the same thing. The one I'm working on right now, I still haven't decided if I will duplicate the story bits in the manual or not.

[Dyark]

Thanks everyone, good points and guidance, it helps choose what I want to do

[Talyn]

If it helps at all, I decided this morning that the next four I'm doing, the refmanual will only contain GM reference material, no playable Story content.

[damned]

If it helps at all, I decided this morning that the next four I'm doing, the refmanual will only contain GM reference material, no playable Story content.

That is I think the best option all round.

As an aside and I dont know of its something appropriate to add to FG modules but to me a brief overview of the whole story and how it is likely to play out would be an incredible boon to a busy (and possibly under prepped) GM. So often an important piece of information about an NPC is revealed later and the game and that NPCs role has already moved in a different direction.

[Myrdin Potter]

In the one module I converted that is for sale, I did not add anything to the text of the module in terms of DM notes. What I did add was a short section of how to do certain things in Fantasy Grounds. I do not think if you are just converting a 3PP module you should change the words of the original developers. You are more of a layout artist than a module creator.

Now, there is a lot of room to make the module better in layout. SKT is much, much easier to run using FG because of all the pins and links that were added. The words were not changed but the developer really made an excellent effort to make the module better when using FG.

That is where the reference many and regular story entries work well together. The part where the DM just reads is perfect for Reference Manual formatting as you can make it much easier to read on the screen. The part where you are meant to be playing (room descriptions and encounters) seem to me to work better using the traditional approach.

[Talyn]

I did the Pathfinder version of that same module, Myrdin and I did do a reference manual. I don't recall altering text on that one.

We do, however, have limited "artistic license" (for lack of a better term) when converting to FG because we're converting from one medium to another. Things like when books or PDFs say "see page NN" FG doesn't have pages, so we can change the text to something appropriate.

In terms of Troll Lord's material specifically, as Damned is very well aware, they are notorious for publishing with poor copy-editing and my OCD English Major self is unable to allow that to slip by on my watch so I do my own copy-editing of their material—which mostly consists of correcting typos, etc.

But I do place GM notes in cases where it's appropriate, such as the one I'm submitting next there are a couple instances where the adventure uses printed hp for monsters on encounters, where the rest of them use random die rolls for hp, so I made a note with the original hp if the GM wants to use those. Stuff like that. Plus if you have any 5E content they usually have a "Conversion Notes" page, and that's purely written by the conversion author specifically for use in FG.
I'm working on a boilerplate template to use for that on the ones I make, so I only have to possibly make very minor tweaks for the specific adventure I'm working on, otherwise the generic template is ready to rock.

Aside from that, however, I totally agree—people are paying to read and play the author's content not ours so ideally we should be invisible.

As for Damned's suggestion, yeah, for the U1 remaster I just finished a few minutes ago (lol compared to when I told you back in October it was finished!) I came very close to writing something like you suggest. I ended up rearranging things more organically (it helps that I have a couple C&C modules out now so I have a better grip on how they build their stuff) so that hopefully it wasn't necessary. But yeah, I'm not opposed to doing that if I finish something up and I still feel the GM could use some guidance that wasn't in the published version. Although if I can locate commentary to that effect written by the author somewhere (or just ask the author to write one for you!) that's probably better than a community developer writing his or her own guidance. Maybe.