NovelWriter has it right - some of the alternatives go over the top

[cjbrooking-kr]

This is just an opinion piece, don't bother reading it if you are after any technical insights!

I recently tried out Writality and Bibisco. at first it looks like these can do everything that novelWriter can do and a bit more. It didn't take me long to realise that a lot of things that they can do are not only unnecessary but a distraction. For example, you can define a relationship between characters, for example parent-child, then you can relate them. looking at their discussions a lot of people were actually setting up fine grained relationships (mother-son, mother-daughter, father-son, father-daughter). You can then add a picture of the character too.

But what does this give you? If these are main characters and it's relevant, you will remember. If you need to know it for minor characters just add 'Mother of Lee' in the text of one character and 'Son of Yulang and Chen' in the other. It's quite clear that a lot of people spend literally months adding characters, objects, places, maps, and defining and setting relationships and get nothing written. Then a lot of other things are not as streamlined either - to change margins or indent you need new sections, to add a section break you need to add the separator text manually.

Maybe some people find value in all this upfront work, but for straightforward novel writing, novelWriter has the balance right.

[vkbo]

Heh, there has been requests for these kind of features here too, but yes, I do consider it too much for this app. If you want to go full George R. R. Martin on your characters, then you probably want some dedicated software for that.

I do map family relationship between my characters, but only by listing it at the top of the character file and adding references to the family characters so I can easily jump between them in the viewer by clicking through. That's more than enough.