Thoughts on doing away with Story entries on new products?

I was having a chat in discord the other day and the discussion came up with Ref-manual and story entries and it got me thinking how to eliminate Story entries in converted products.

Now that we have a fairly easy method of building ref-manuals all that needs done is to change the way pop-out linked ref-manual pages display (so you can resize freely) and I can't see a reason why we'd need to link Story entries on maps any longer.

The fix for the ref-manual page popout took me about 2 minutes to apply.

Doesn't break any previous work and seems to give a migration path to no longer needing Story records in new products?

For older content you can create a ref-manual using Author to import the Story data into Builder if you want to update?

I'm mostly wondering with Doug/JPG's thoughts are and if I could possibly use this method on new conversions (and re-works for older content being brought up to FGU features).

There is a very good case for not doing story entries for adventures. I'd hesitate to go back and redo older products that I've done (I couldn't anyway since there's no way to link a refmanual page to an image easily in par5e) but going forward it would certainly save a lot of work having to duplicate everything.

The refmanual pages would however need to shrink down a bit since they take up a lot more room that a story page does. I think that unless they did users with limited screen space would be most unhappy.

As a user I would be highly skeptical... Other than screen space, I expect a "Story" entry that I can use. Maybe cause I'm old, I don't run using the Ref Man, I use it to pre-read an adventure, but them always use stories. Also, how would the ability to (copy)/edit modules entries be impacted?

But, it almost seems like the entries could be one in the same? Formatted in the Ref Man and listed in the Story list? I'm not opposed to learning new things, but I would like to see an example before passing judgement.

Please don't make any changes to the way adventures are created at this time. We have some thoughts along these lines; but as @LordEntrails alluded to, there are other considerations about use cases and workflows that need to be ironed out.

Regards,
JPG

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Originally Posted by LordEntrails

As a user I would be highly skeptical... Other than screen space, I expect a "Story" entry that I can use. Maybe cause I'm old, I don't run using the Ref Man, I use it to pre-read an adventure, but them always use stories. Also, how would the ability to (copy)/edit modules entries be impacted?

But, it almost seems like the entries could be one in the same? Formatted in the Ref Man and listed in the Story list? I'm not opposed to learning new things, but I would like to see an example before passing judgement.

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It wouldn't change how you play your games really. You'd still click on the pins and bring up a page, it would just load the page from ref-records and not a Story but look the same.

The only difference otherwise would be instead of opening Story records to read a page manually is you'd open the ref-manual.

I do not know what the future plans are in this regard I just would love to get rid of one or the other as it's not necessary. The downsides to ref-manual use is... almost nil?

I think SmiteWorks are probably exploring that option... :pirate:

Whatever the future approach is, it should eliminate the double work of maintaining a RefMan and Story pages with duplicate content. RefMan and its formatting are much better and the only issue is the fixed size of the refman page.

The only usage of Story entries I have is during map crawling and opening the individual pins. Otherwise I keep the RefMan as it provides an outline.

I don't develop modules for FG, but I do referee (5th, Traveller, PF2 & Starfinder). I hardly ever use the reference manual, mainly because it's just not as usable as Story entries. My biggest issue is that I frequently copy text from story entries to paste in chat (descriptions, names, and suchlike), which is not something you can't do from the reference manual (afaik). The reference manual window is also clunker than the story windows - it has a minimum width, which story windows do not, and you can only have one instance open.

I can see the benefits of combining both, but don't cut the story windows loose until the reference manual is fully able to replace their current functionality.

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Originally Posted by rtrm

I don't develop modules for FG, but I do referee (5th, Traveller, PF2 & Starfinder). I hardly ever use the reference manual, mainly because it's just not as usable as Story entries. My biggest issue is that I frequently copy text from story entries to paste in chat (descriptions, names, and suchlike), which is not something you can't do from the reference manual (afaik). The reference manual window is also clunker than the story windows - it has a minimum width, which story windows do not, and you can only have one instance open.

I can see the benefits of combining both, but don't cut the story windows loose until the reference manual is fully able to replace their current functionality.

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The new reference builder does everything that story entries do; you can have more than one page open (which you can do now actually by clicking the link on the top left of a page to pop it out), you can edit them or copy text from them - unless they are locked - which they wouldn't be if it were an adventure. You can also link them (which you can do now as well). But I agree the main problem is page size.

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Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

which you can do now actually by clicking the link on the top left of a page to pop it out

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Live and learn, thanks :)