Great news for those that think Word is a good RPG tool

[Luke]

Just thought I'd tell you about the latest advanced wordprocessing available in RolePlayingMaster.

At last, you can use an RPG-dedicted program, AND have all the control you need to produce the highest quality output.

Its an awful lot like Word, with an incredible degree of control on stuff like paragraph formatting, auto-numbering, images, standard font/bold/italics, and especially tables.

Tables, in particular, have a great degree of control. Tables can contain other tables, hyperlinks, fully formatted paragraphs, different back-ground colours, images etc.

Your note fields in RPM (like PC/NPC notes, encounter groups, map/location descriptions, adventure details or encyclopaedia entries), can access very advanced features now with a simply right-click of the mouse.

In fact, any one of those fields is effectively like its own word document.

There are then 2 basic ways to continue and make great use of this.

1) You can prepare for your game (no computer at the table), by producing reports to take with you. All of your "mini Word documents" are organized into a nice report (including graphics, tables etc) for things such as an adventure, character sheets, or statblock lists.
The Encyclopaedia works very nicely, letting you produce a full report (including an autogenerated hyperlinked table of contents), after searching/selecting any node in your encyclopaedia tree.

2) You can simply use your computer at the table.
Apart from all the standard RPM benefits to this, you can also make use of the new hyperlink facilities from the new wordprocessing.
This gives you the ability to jump quickly between things such as adventure notes and encyclopedia notes (for rules, campaign setting info, etc).
There is a real bonus here, where the hyperlinks can also point to new multimedia features for background music, sounds, and general audio clips.
Scripted commands are also possible for the really keen ones...
The hyperlinks are displayed nicely (as in a browser), and not like the old ugly RTF ones that used to be in RPM.

I'm pretty confident that this is probably the best wordprocessing capabilities you'll find in any program that isn't a dedicted wordprocessor.


The download is available at: http://www.roleplayingmaster.com

Enjoy!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Is it just me, or did the program just get a wee bit faster as well?

The Auld Grump, ah, being able to do a finished looking project seems much more likely...

 

[Luke]

Is it just me, or did the program just get a wee bit faster as well?

The Auld Grump, ah, being able to do a finished looking project seems much more likely...

It got faster too.

 

[Felon]

So, does the enhanced layout give better control of placing tables with absolute positioning? I've created a bunch Savage Species-style monster classes and now need to merge the tables and the columnized text into one printworthy document. I find that Word stinks because tables screw up the flow of columnized text, and even more annoying is that if I leave text-wrapping on the table moves with text but if I turn text-wrapping off I have no ability to create bufffer space between the table and the rest of the document text. Pretty lame layout control there. I don't want to have to start screwing around with nested tables just to create buffer space.

Been trying my hand with Adobe Pagemaker, and have found that to be a very, unintuitive program. I define columns, and then when I import (excuse me, "place" ) the text into the document, it ignores the column definitions completely. Beaucoup annoying.

 

[Luke]

So, does the enhanced layout give better control of placing tables with absolute positioning? ...

You should be fine.

In complete honesty, I don't have an exact mental picture of what you described, but you can certainly control whether a grid will rezise itself, or allow automatic resizing.
In additional of have full paragraph control (and of your grid is placed in a paragraph, as well as containing "paragraphs in cells"). This includes pixel-level control of indentations etc.
Cells can have minimum heights and preferres widths (other-wise auto size formatting applies).

I suggest that you simply download it and try it out.

A quick [Alt+Y] hotkey will bring you straight to the Campaign Encyclopaedia, where you see an entry that is a decent example of images, colours, general formatting (paragraphs), bullets (with different styles), and tables.

From there a right mouse click and choosing the editor option will bring up a specialist editing window with a toolbar set reasonably similar to Word.

I'm pretty configdent that you'll never have seen this level of options and control in anything other than a good, dedicated wordprocessor.

Regards,
Luke