"Delve" Format and Page Flipping: Convenient or a Pain?

[Marius Delphus]

I thought I'd plug in to the groupthink for a second here and ask this question, because it's on my mind of late.

What do we think of the split, in 4E products (which was birthed in some late-3.5 products) between story text and encounter pages? Would we prefer to go "back" to a format that runs the encounters in with the story text? If so, would we be okay with losing the "2-page spread" encounter format?

As a disclaimer, I should say there's no telling whether the results of this poll will influence the format of future products from any particular publishing company, of course. I'm just curious.

Thanks in advance for your helpful contributions.

 

[RangerWickett]

When I run games, I print out monster stats, and have a page of notes for the encounter. I don't want the map on the same page as the stats or encounter notes, because, well, the map will be on the table for all to see. I need a version I can use to guide my drawing of it, but that version should not clutter the same pages I have the stats and stuff on.

When I read a published adventure, I'm fine with the bulk of the stats being in the back -- especially if the adventure is digital, and I can just click a link to hop to the appropriate encounter. But I want to at least get a sense of what the encounter is. It's been a while since I've looked at a Dungeon adventure, but my recollection is that there was a lot of:

Encounter 17. Drunken Ettins. See page 139.

Encounter 18. Hung-Over Ettins. See page 141.

At least put in a descriptive tagline, like:

Encounter 17. Drunken Ettins.
XP: xx (Level 12)
Timeline: Normal/tactical

Two Ettins vying for the affection of a hill giantess don't like the PCs stumbling into their drinking contest.

See page 139 for details.

That format, particularly the Timeline entry, is something I'm thinking might be showing up in future products of a particular publishing company. Timeline tells you whether the scene is:

* Tactical (measured in rounds)
* Normal (events occur roughly in real-time, as people talk and describe their actions)
* Extended (events of several hours or days are synopsized, usually for skill challenges)
* Bridging (descriptions of events that lead from one encounter to another)

So the first Lord of the Rings movie (assuming Frodo's a PC) would be something like:

Gandalf's Arrival (normal).
Birthday Party (bridging).
Bilbo's Vanishing and Gandalf's Explanation (normal).
Leaving the Shire (extended).
Black Rider (tactical).
Buckleberry Ferry (extended).
... fast forwarding a bit to the action ...
What About Second Breakfast (bridging)
Weathertop Camp (extended)
Nazgul Attack (tactical)
Arwen's Aid (normal)
etc.

As for how to lay that out? Have a page at the beginning of each Act of the adventure that just has the abstract version above, but then make the main body include full encounters. If it's a physical book people are going to reference at the table, you get better reability when the DM's preparing, though you sacrifice a bit because monster stats might be spread across a few adjacent pages.

If it's a pdf, I say do the same as above, but also have the maps and stats for each encounter in a separate file, so folks who want to print them out and have the most efficient use of paper during combat can do so.

Ultimately this will be moot, as soon we'll all be releasing apps with each adventure. The apps will have all the monster stats, accessible and updatable via your touchscreen phone.

 

[malraux]

I really like the ability to open the book and just run an encounter with no additional notes. The extra work of having to haul around extra books for monster stat blocks doesn't work for me. To that end, I find the delve format to be great.

That said, I don't think WotC has gotten it perfect. I wish information finding were more standardized. Does the list of treasure or plot items go in the delve location or in the larger story location earlier? Where should I look for NPC attitude info? I often find this sort of info is much harder to locate with the current format.

 

[Truename]

Would we prefer to go "back" to a format that runs the encounters in with the story text? If so, would we be okay with losing the "2-page spread" encounter format?

What I love about the delve format is having everything at my fingertips when I run an encounter--combat or otherwise--and no page flipping. I don't care if it has the whole spread to itself; I just don't want to have to flip (or even turn) pages.

My ideal would be a layout that mixes encounters in with the rest of the adventure, with careful attention to where page breaks occurred.

Also, although unrelated, I'd like to see multiple redundant presentations of the information in the adventure for various purposes: A plot-centric backgrounder. A DM-centric overview. A flowchart showing the likely paths through the adventure. A "during play" treatment including encounters and boxed text. A backstory reference describing all the trivia I need to design my own encounters when the PCs go off the rails. An NPC index with descriptions, motivation, and how they fit into the adventure. Etc.

This might make the adventure less fun to read, but for adventures with the complexity of WotBS, they'd be way easier to DM.

 

[FireLance]

IMO, a good published adventure needs to be able to do two things:

1. Give the DM enough "big picture" information to have the "flow" of the adventure (for a more scripted module) or the "current situation" (for a more sandbox scenario) in mind.

2. Give the DM enough detail to run specific encounters and challenges smoothly when they are triggered by the PCs.

The current Delve format is great for the latter. However, it doesn't have to be poor at the former, or only be able to achieve the former through a lot of page flipping. All that is needed is for a brief summary of each encounter to be provided in the main text of the module so that the DM can read through it and understand it without needing to flip to the more detailed two-page encounter descriptions (which can thus be ignored until the DM needs the more detailed information).

I don't think that running the encounter details in the main text will help, as overloading the DM with details could make it harder for him to see the big picture.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I like the Delve format because it saves a lot of page flipping. Back in the 3.5 days one had to flip back and fourth several pages because of the exploding stat blocks; finding details like room or component description or treasure information in a sea of combat data was no fun.

In the H-P-E series of adventures, WotC lost all cohesiveness, though. Your knew there was some information about a NPC, monster, room, story, whatever, but this information could hide in any of several places and books.

The text- and information flow of the whole adventure is something in sore need of improvement.

What's even worse, though, is the format employed by several 3rd party puiblishers, where they organize the material in the same way as WotC does, but stuff everything into a single PDF and use no links. While page flipping in one or two books is bad, page flipping in one PDF is way worse!

 

[MrMyth]

I like the delve approach, generally under two conditions:

1) Present the two different components (overall story vs specific combat stats) in two seperate booklets, so I can reference both as needed.

2) As RangerWickett suggests, include at least some basic info in the story section. I don't need the entire encounter, but the basics of who it involves, what the scene is like, etc - those can help a lot.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I like to be able to run the encounter with not further lookups for the given encounter.

That said, there is a place for a good overview of the adventure and separarate map of the entire adventure for location based stuff should be included in the dungeon adventures in a particular.