AoW and DM Genie

[trellian]

Anyone tried to run AoW using DM Genie? I mean, adding all the statblocks, adventure locales and stuff?

[Narg]

I'm working on it now. Have been adding about half of Diamond Lake and working on the Whispering Cairn now. First time I'm trying to use DM Genie so we'll see how it turns out. Starting the campaign tomorrow

[Wayland Smith]

I'm also going to try using it (starting with 3FoE).

I'm a little concerned with the combat side of DMGenie, especially since the combat scenes in 3FoE are VERY non-traditional in nature. (That and I still haven't figured out how to use DMGenie in actual combat).

If nothing else, I'm keeping it handy to look up descriptions (although I have the SRD for that as well now)

[trellian]

I'll probably not use the combat section, only the campaign manager where I type in the room descriptions and links to the maps. This seems like a wonderful way of organizing adventures and play in Diamond Lake without flipping pages and looking up various mags. It's a bit of work, but since I'm translating almost everything to Norwegian anyway, it's not too much more than I'm used too.

[Wayland Smith]

I finished typing in the creatures for 3FoE, and I will say that Dungeon's editors might want to try typing in their creatures to catch their errors.

For example, the Kenkus in the maze are under medium load with all of their equipment as listed - I had to cut their number of sunrods down to three.

Also, for some reason the attributed skills for a number of the NPCs don't mesh right...

We'll have to see how things will go... I'm still wanting a paper copy of the stats (I'm also not going to run the encounters with DMGenie - I don't feel like trying to script the Ebon Aspect's special abilities...)

[Craig Clark]

trellian wrote:

I'll probably not use the combat section, only the campaign manager where I type in the room descriptions and links to the maps. This seems like a wonderful way of organizing adventures and play in Diamond Lake without flipping pages and looking up various mags. It's a bit of work, but since I'm translating almost everything to Norwegian anyway, it's not too much more than I'm used too.

Ouch! OCR and a scanner are your friends...usually. Maybe OCR and Babelfish?

[trellian]

OCR? Having maps availbale as downloads from Paizo is a lifesaver in these matters.. else I would have to buy a scanner.

Babelfish isn't working too well with Norwegian. Besides, I'm studying to become a translator, so translating modules is good practice for me.

[evilash]

I'm currently running Shackled City in DM Genie, and I'm trying to use as much of the software as possible, including for combat and campaign management. There is a learning threshold, but once you pass that DM Genie is a great help, also in combat. Also the campaign manager is very helpful, since I have all the information available at the tip of my fingers. The only downside, and it's a big one, is that I have to enter all the information to make full use of the campaign manager.

[Bonemash]

I ran The Whispering Cairn using DMGenie and boy where they impressed when I showed them the various pictures etc that paizo had included. This converted my group into DMGenie fans, before they thought that I was playing on my own...but now with me showing them scenes as they develop they love it.
I am so enamoured that at present I am inputing data like a coffee crazed monkey so that I can use it better in our Living Greyhawk campaign.
I take my hat off to Piazo and DMGenie for making my life as a DM feel more rewarding, the look on their faces as I swiveled the screen and they could see pictures of rooms, creatures or items as they encountered them.....and all at the same time. I used to pass round pictures, printouts etc, but now the effect is far more dramatic because they all view at the same time. They see as one and panic.....
I must also say that I found AOW a perfect vehicle to try out this integration because of the well thought out internet extras provided.
I also found a few errors in the modules, but these minor irritants where fixed in seconds. I discovered most whilst inputing and rectified them there and then.

[Craig Clark]

trellian wrote:

OCR? Having maps availbale as downloads from Paizo is a lifesaver in these matters.. else I would have to buy a scanner.

Babelfish isn't working too well with Norwegian. Besides, I'm studying to become a translator, so translating modules is good practice for me.

OCR: Optical character recognition, the more recent software is great at pulling in the written page and then running the words through spell-checker type of software. Cuts retyping time down to almost nil, if you are on a budget there are free versions online that work but require a little more finesse in getting the magazine into DM Genie.

[trellian]

Hmm.. I don't really understand how to use this OCR thing.. all it did to me was create a smaller version of the same .pdf file.. (I'm using something called PDFCompressor from CVision).

[Craig Clark]

The way OCR should work is it scans in the page then pulls the words out as text, sometimes it will ask you what areas of the page are text and what areas are pictures and formatting. Sometimes it will do that automatically. Then when it parses the text it will ask for corrections if it finds something that doesn't exist in its dictionary. It really depends on how sophisticated the software is you are using.

I like to use it because then I can quickly put the scanned text into the individual room descriptions (encounter areas) for DM Genie. I also use the .pdf's from Paizo and extract the images into DM Genie.

[trellian]

So you should get text that is "edit-able", right? Not the picture-like text you get when you simply take a snapshot of the text in Adobe?

May I ask what software you are using?