Am i missing something?

[A Social Yeti]

Trying to wrap my brain around the FG content creation work flow for generating my own adventure content for a loaded paid for rule set(use 5e for example).

I have been over this https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...Best-Practices to some extent and done some experimenting.

What is puzzling me is, if i am creating the adventure content, in chronological order using a story flow chart. Is it just required that i name each story entry so that it is alphabetically ordered to be the correct story event flow order in the list?

Is it actually such if i want a correct story list order that follows event chronology order in the adventure, there is no function in the FGU tool for that? We just have to plan it out in advance manually outside of FGU, keeping track of story order of events outside of FGU, and then give each in FGU entry a name that will place it alphabetically in the same exact order that the story events would happen in?

I'm just head scratching here as the FGU tool design obviously knows we're telling a story here. And the events of a story are most commonly set to a specific ordering from start to conclusion. And yet as best as i figure out the FGU tool seems to have no mechanical understanding of story chronological ordering in its content creation tools.
A rather puzzling design gap by my POV, for a tool explicitly intended to create and tell story content in.


Thanks in advance for any data on this you can provide.
Sorry if i am just dense and missing the obvious way to do that right in front of me.

[LordEntrails]

It depends. Using the default method then yes, you need to order your stories alphanumerically. This is why most adventures use a prefix numbering scheme (i.e. chapters) such as ; 01.01, 01.02, ... 01.15, 02.01... 11.01... etc.

Doing that then the story list will sort in the intended order and the automatic next/previous buttons will work as desired. Or, you can make a story entry and place links in it in any order you want.

Don't forget, many RPG stories are not told until the adventure is played, and the adventures may very well not be linear.

[A Social Yeti]

I can't forget it, i been GMing a long time now.

It is that open world sandboxy games, are challenging to track all the things that may be going on in them, and how they may relate in aggregate or branching outcomes to each other.

That seemingly common RPG table situation, made me imagine a tool designed for that. I assumed it would include some kind of flowchart/high lvl POV info tool, for event and people relationship understanding. Something that goes a little deeper than what amounts to, all the logic and workflow control is just my brain as logic circuit, for naming in a way that will alphabetically be the closest thing to that flow i can get in the FGU tool to do.


i do find the design of FGU a bit puzzling at times for what it did think to help with on the GM side and what it seemingly had no awareness of about what is common for the "GM's heavy lifting" at an RPG table that would be very useful to help out with.

Imagine the "story" section not as a linear alphabetical list of stuff, but a flow chart of branching if/then outcomes instead, that can aggregate into each other as they go off.
Or in list form, as a outline appearance. Where the event is the top level but the sub-options a-x are the potential state it is in when the players arrive based on thee if/then aggregate of previous events outcomes.


I see obvious column data being presented as columned data, and am entirely flustered at the lack of end user ability to control the column sort order.
Nor any data column or two, dedicated to some if/then relationship data points for making direct connections of meaning, rather than just links to other stuff that GM is still the calorie power logic circuit tracking all the if/then state changes they have to manually implement.


I'm a long term sondboxy GM generating the vast majority of the world content. That's why the content creation tool questions are more important to me than the automation mechanics of ruining the content are.

[GavinRuneblade]

The Fantasy Grounds story works ok for this. You can put all kinds of direct links to other story entries.

The trick is to keep each entry minimal, don't explain everything about all the factions on a single story page, like you would a chapter in a book. Instead make an intro page, and give each faction multiple story entries of their own. drop links to these all through them wherever an if/then applies. Add links to the NPCs to the Images you're using, etc.

Instead of a flow chart, I've found Alexandrian's node system works for me. He likes to keep it simple in his examples, but there is a point where he shows one of his games and how complex the relationships actually are. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress...otted-approach

[Zacchaeus]

If you look at Storm Kings Thunder or Waterdeep Dragon Heist you'll see examples of branching story lines. In both those modules there is a flowchart which has pins to the relevant story entries. the flowchart itself is graphical and you could draw up any kind of image or find one on the web (or even export something out from Excel or similar) and use that as your master index using pins to direct you to the area or adventure hook or whatever. These pins should go to an index page from which any story or information can be linked.

[LordEntrails]

Yep, use an image and put story pins on it, or create a nested table and then put links to the story pages in it.

[Ckorik]

I had a hard time with this also until I got a module made by Danny Stratton. He had the answer and I've used it for my own stuff to great success.

Each entry gets a number - each chapter is a number :

1.00.00 - Chapter 1
1.00.01 - Chapter 1 Plot 1
1.00.02 - Chapter 1 Plot 2
1.01.00 - Chapter 1 Sub Area 1

etc.

Now your entries will line up - and you can adjust as needed.

[Trenloe]

If you have more than 9 of something remember to use 01, 02, etc. for the first nine entries so that they order correctly, even the first (chapter) number.

[A Social Yeti]

If you look at Storm Kings Thunder or Waterdeep Dragon Heist you'll see examples of branching story lines. In both those modules there is a flowchart which has pins to the relevant story entries. the flowchart itself is graphical and you could draw up any kind of image or find one on the web (or even export something out from Excel or similar) and use that as your master index using pins to direct you to the area or adventure hook or whatever. These pins should go to an index page from which any story or information can be linked.

This is kind of what i was originally attempting to look for and ask about. I'd be real sure that "flow chart" was not made entirely from scratch manually in the FG app. It was probably made using a flow chart app that facilitates creation of complicated flow charts for such branching aggregate story lines. Like i already use for the previous "era" of content creation GM work i been doing. And i had imagined that anyone mkaing a tool for GMing whit would not have skimped out the content creation side of the tool needs and overly focused just on GM run the game side of things.

I had imagined a GM's unified tool kit would be a great evolutionary advancement to get in on. But this design seems far more just about GM's running the game(yeah i'm still gonna buy it for that). With content creators still being a separate group of people using a separate set of tools (no unified kit) to do the content creation work, and then transferring all that into the FG system as a content "post production" step to actually creating the content.

An incorporated flow chart tool that fascinates this was what i was looking for originally as that made a whole lot of design sense to me anyway. From the POV of a GM buying a GM tool far more than a player buying a player tool.
So 20+ years of GMing, and these are my expectations for anything that seems to want to sell itself on the basis of being a better GM tool, than the collection of apps i already have. When it comes to the creation of content side of GMing.

particularly as FGU is just optional to anyone that already has that collection of tools and knows how to use any free online program for communications/screen share and RNG checks.

I had imagined the design direction of FGU to be way more aimed at GMs on the whole, than at GMs running premade modules and not generally doing much of their own content creation.

But the more i dig into it, the more i find the deign left a whole lot of room for custom made content, but it does little to nothing to facilitate that content creation for anyone not up on their manual coding work or puzzling out workarounds for getting X functionality out of the FGU system somehow.
Like how to recreate a flow chart in a system that does not mechanically know what a flow cart is, or how to facilitate the creation of one.

This is not to be a rag on for FGU, but product descriptions do lead to expectations. I wonder how it was i imaged FGU was going to be a tool kit for content creator GMs as much as it was a tool to run Hasbro made modules?

It is one of the red flags of today's product market we consumers do have to be weary of. The claim of a bit too much indavdually customization, often just really means: whatever xhtml can do that you know how to program, you can do.
That is equivalent to selling a ream of blank paper, and calling it the, Crete the next best seller kit.

If the product itself can, but in on way facilitates the process of...exactly what kind of feature is that?

here buy this hammer i am selling. It* never misses a nail head.

*: note if hammer missed nail head that has nothign to do with the hammer, it is your own fault.

[SilentRuin]

This is kind of what i was originally attempting to look for and ask about. I'd be real sure that "flow chart" was not made entirely from scratch manually in the FG app. It was probably made using a flow chart app that facilitates creation of complicated flow charts for such branching aggregate story lines. Like i already use for the previous "era" of content creation GM work i been doing. And i had imagined that anyone mkaing a tool for GMing whit would not have skimped out the content creation side of the tool needs and overly focused just on GM run the game side of things.

I had imagined a GM's unified tool kit would be a great evolutionary advancement to get in on. But this design seems far more just about GM's running the game(yeah i'm still gonna buy it for that). With content creators still being a separate group of people using a separate set of tools (no unified kit) to do the content creation work, and then transferring all that into the FG system as a content "post production" step to actually creating the content.

An incorporated flow chart tool that fascinates this was what i was looking for originally as that made a whole lot of design sense to me anyway. From the POV of a GM buying a GM tool far more than a player buying a player tool.
So 20+ years of GMing, and these are my expectations for anything that seems to want to sell itself on the basis of being a better GM tool, than the collection of apps i already have. When it comes to the creation of content side of GMing.

particularly as FGU is just optional to anyone that already has that collection of tools and knows how to use any free online program for communicators/screen share and RNG checks.

I had imagined the design direction of FGU to be way more aimed at GMs on the whole, than at GMs running premade modules and not generally doing much of their own content creation.

But the more i dig into it, the more i find the deign left a whole lot of room for custom made content, but it does little to nothing to facilitate that content creation for anyone not up on their manual coding work or puzzling out workarounds for getting X functionality out of the FGU system somehow.
Like how to recreate a flow chart in a system that is does not mechanically know what a flow cart is or how to facilitate the creation of one.

This is not to be a rag on for FGU, but product descriptions do lead to expectations. I wonder how it was i imaged FGU was going to be a tool kit for content creator GMs as much as it was a tool to run Hasbro made modules?

It is one of the red flags of today's product market we consumers do have to be weary of. The claim of a bit too much indavdually customization, often just really means: whatever xhtml can do that you know how to program, you can do.
That is equivalent to selling a ream of blank paper, and calling it the, Crete the next best seller kit.

If the product itself can, but in on way facilitates the process of...exactly what kind of feature is that?

here buy this hammer i am selling. It* never misses a nail head.

*: note if hammer missed nail head that has nothign to do with the hammer, it is your own fault.

I think you read more into it than I did when I looked into FGU. Not sure how you came up with that interpretation - but it's not some seamless unified product for creators and GM. GM's can be creators - for sure I add in images (token/maps-LOS), storyline, etc. on the fly in my campaign every week as part of prep work for my canned bought Curse of Strahd module. It can be a lot of work but adds flavor into FGU interpretation of it. And if I want to make an extension - it has very little to do with FGU the product and everything to do with unity dev document, notepad++, unpacking and searching through existing lua and xml code, and using the FG forums here to ask questions. For absolute sure its not some unified product in the actual FGU product to do that sort of thing. Nor did I come into this with some misconception on that point that it was.

Can I build my own maps, tokens, storyline content, and tie them all together in FGU? Sure.

Albert Einstein never manage to come up with a unified field theory in physics, and FGU (and other products I'm aware of) have not found a unified codeset for creators, GM's and players. Just tools.

If you thought otherwise, you were mistaken.

And if you found some other product that managed to do it? Go for it! Because that will be impressive.