Thoughts on doing away with Story entries on new products?

Hey all,

I am playing around with Builder to learn what it can do. It is very easy to use. Thank you for creating such an amazing tool. I noticed one other difference between RefMan content and Story content---image sharing. In a RefMan entry, an image is embedded and cannot be easily shared with players. You need to find that image in the Images folder inside Campaign and then share that record. In the case of Story content, a link to the record in the Image folder is provided, allowing the host to quickly share the image. Hopefully this will also be ironed out, or content developers remember to also add a link to the Image folder record when they embed an image in a RefMan entry.

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Originally Posted by spoofer

Hey all,

I am playing around with Builder to learn what it can do. It is very easy to use. Thank you for creating such an amazing tool. I noticed one other difference between RefMan content and Story content---image sharing. In a RefMan entry, an image is embedded and cannot be easily shared with players. You need to find that image in the Images folder inside Campaign and then share that record. In the case of Story content, a link to the record in the Image folder is provided, allowing the host to quickly share the image. Hopefully this will also be ironed out, or content developers remember to also add a link to the Image folder record when they embed an image in a RefMan entry.

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This is incorrect. If the images have been correctly added to the refmanual then you can click on the image to pop it out and then share it as normal. See video Twenty-Eight here https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...112#post492112

As I mentioned on the Discord...

As a GM I usually like changing stuff (art, descriptions, sound links, additional material...) to the stories during prep. I make copies of the story sections I modify IOT be able to export my additions to different campaigns while at the same time be "safe" from reverting my changes. Being able to edit the ref. manual is nice, but I can't export my "customization" to use it in several campaigns yet (and copying the content from a ref. manual "page" even if it's unlocked is not as simple as "dragging and dropping" like with current story entries).

Of course, I'm talking too early about a "problem" that probably won't exist �� . But I just wanted know if the possibility of copying ref. manual pages via drag&drop to the ref. builder would be a sensible request in the idea informer (wishlist), or if some other idea was actually in the works to not make prepping clunkier and longer for GMs that like customizing content to their own taste...

I think in many ways we should be looking at this from the other way around. Instead of removing story pages, remove the reference manual and make story pages act like reference pages with embedded graphics, sidebars, frames etc. Whichever way it goes what I think we would like is the functionality of story pages with the elegance of reference pages.

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Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

I think in many ways we should be looking at this from the other way around. Instead of removing story pages, remove the reference manual and make story pages act like reference pages with embedded graphics, sidebars, frames etc. Whichever way it goes what I think we would like is the functionality of story pages with the elegance of reference pages.

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I think the reason ref-manuals are useful for me is they can contain chapter/sub-chapter (i.e. nested layout) instead of just 1 simple "category". If they could make Story records able to function in that way and make it "look" good it would be a viable alternative.

The platform needs good component to represent the book, structured and formatted as close as possible to the original product. This is what the reference manual is. It will be ridiculous to deal with single pages and closing opening them while reading rules or something. And the indexing …

Make refmanual export to story marked for export content to suit the current needs and this will be enough. No need to maintain twice a content.

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Originally Posted by Valyar

The platform needs good component to represent the book, structured and formatted as close as possible to the original product. This is what the reference manual is. It will be ridiculous to deal with single pages and closing opening them while reading rules or something. And the indexing …

Make refmanual export to story marked for export content to suit the current needs and this will be enough. No need to maintain twice a content.

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Yeah I don't think anyone wants to have to maintain or even have both.

If they can come up with a way to display story entries in a way that works/looks like ref-manual "book" style (and they should be able too) as well as make story entries content the same as a ref-manual (inline images) it would solve it. Basically it would be a dynamic view of Story entries that has a more complex version of category/grouping. This has a example of what im talking about.

https://storybook.js.org/

"Bookmark" Tree on the left with "content" on the right. The bookmark tree has containers of for books so you could easily navigate/find a module (phb, dmg/etc).

That's what I'd envision, whether it happens... /shrug

Cheers!

Thank you for the correction. In my mind, reference manuals are now perfect for building story content.

Edit... I tried again and I was not able to get images to work, but then I stumbled on the answer. The problem was that after 11 years of using FG, I never imagined that you double click to share the image instead of right click.

Double click the image. :o

You guys would use these for actual play? The window seems too big and clunky... I never even considered it.

I'd also put in a bid to maintain the functionality to allow editing module entries (whether those end up being stories or ref manual pages).

I rarely run modules entirely out-of-the-box and I prefer to make my notes and changes to the pinned story entries attached to the maps so as to have everything in one place.

Read-only ref manuals would make that a huge pain. Ideally I like to just unlock the story entry pinned to the map in the module and edit that rather than having to make a copy and re-pin everything, but the latter would be an OK half-way house.

Cheers, Hywel