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What do you want in a published adventure? / Adventure design best practices?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 7157322" data-attributes="member: 32659"><p>One of my biggest complaints about running <em>Hoard of the Dragon Queen</em> is that it has loads of fantastical locations, meant presumably to evoke atmosphere, but it cannot be bothered giving me a description of those locations. A lack of boxed text is a lack of descriptions for me to read to the players, maybe adapting as I go; without one, the room is often tough to describe in a novel and fun way. </p><p></p><p>For example, underneath Naerytar Castle is a frog shrine. Room 11, page 61. I was able to adapt the first paragraph into boxed text on the fly. But then room 12, the inner sanctum of Pharblex, the Bullywug Priest? I came to this impossibly dense and long description, none of it boxed, and froze for ten seconds while I tried to parse it. Then I said, "uh, this is another big, rectangular room... it contains a mud-covered chair and reading table, a box of candles, and a wooden chest." You'll notice that this is from the end of the first paragraph. (The rest of the paragraph is devoted to a useless account of where Pharblex goes, as if this is Oblivion and the players are going to find him asleep if they hit the Rest button outside the room.) Then I paused again, trying to scan for any other information, which I couldn't find, so I just trailed off. The adventure devotes nearly a third of this entire page to describing how the trap on the chest works, and no space whatsoever to giving a description that would entice the players, let them work out that there is something on the ceiling to be aware of, or in general save me any effort when running it. This whole chapter is a great example, to be honest; apart from one picture, the players and DM get given basically no interesting or useful descriptive text to make the castle memorable beyond a bunch of combat encounters. It could be a white box filled with cultists and Rezmir's furniture, and it'd have the same effect.</p><p></p><p>If I look at an adventure now and see that it doesn't have boxed text, I'm likely to not bother buying or running it. It's a huge help when running, and indeed one of the things that I'd specifically want an adventure to help me with. One thing that I found difficult with running my own dungeons was the lack of it; I now had to extempore describe what was in a given room and why the players should care about it.</p><p></p><p>You asked about the changeable stuff; the best boxed text that I've seen has usually had a line above it saying, "Adapt the below if the players arrive at night" which, having been warned, is easy to do. They also tend to not describe the inhabitants of the room, instead letting you add that on in your own words after completing the boxed text I often also finish a boxed text by saying, "Remember that you guys enter by the north doorway, and the room is 40x30", the more mechanistic stuff that you don't want clogging up the description.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charles Rampant, post: 7157322, member: 32659"] One of my biggest complaints about running [i]Hoard of the Dragon Queen[/i] is that it has loads of fantastical locations, meant presumably to evoke atmosphere, but it cannot be bothered giving me a description of those locations. A lack of boxed text is a lack of descriptions for me to read to the players, maybe adapting as I go; without one, the room is often tough to describe in a novel and fun way. For example, underneath Naerytar Castle is a frog shrine. Room 11, page 61. I was able to adapt the first paragraph into boxed text on the fly. But then room 12, the inner sanctum of Pharblex, the Bullywug Priest? I came to this impossibly dense and long description, none of it boxed, and froze for ten seconds while I tried to parse it. Then I said, "uh, this is another big, rectangular room... it contains a mud-covered chair and reading table, a box of candles, and a wooden chest." You'll notice that this is from the end of the first paragraph. (The rest of the paragraph is devoted to a useless account of where Pharblex goes, as if this is Oblivion and the players are going to find him asleep if they hit the Rest button outside the room.) Then I paused again, trying to scan for any other information, which I couldn't find, so I just trailed off. The adventure devotes nearly a third of this entire page to describing how the trap on the chest works, and no space whatsoever to giving a description that would entice the players, let them work out that there is something on the ceiling to be aware of, or in general save me any effort when running it. This whole chapter is a great example, to be honest; apart from one picture, the players and DM get given basically no interesting or useful descriptive text to make the castle memorable beyond a bunch of combat encounters. It could be a white box filled with cultists and Rezmir's furniture, and it'd have the same effect. If I look at an adventure now and see that it doesn't have boxed text, I'm likely to not bother buying or running it. It's a huge help when running, and indeed one of the things that I'd specifically want an adventure to help me with. One thing that I found difficult with running my own dungeons was the lack of it; I now had to extempore describe what was in a given room and why the players should care about it. You asked about the changeable stuff; the best boxed text that I've seen has usually had a line above it saying, "Adapt the below if the players arrive at night" which, having been warned, is easy to do. They also tend to not describe the inhabitants of the room, instead letting you add that on in your own words after completing the boxed text I often also finish a boxed text by saying, "Remember that you guys enter by the north doorway, and the room is 40x30", the more mechanistic stuff that you don't want clogging up the description. [/QUOTE]
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