Modules: Made to Read vs Made to Run?

[Celebrim]

Most of my prep time is spent reading something like what your wrote there and transcribing that to my prep notes that read like:[

Steps 20 feet down, Dusty. Quiet.
DC 10 Investigation—-> Scratches.

I admit to liking that as a short note better than I like the stuff written with multiple fonts and parenthetical asides and out of natural language order. However, I also don't feel the advantage of your note is enough to make it worth the effort. My effort would probably be in adding more detail to that bare bones encounter because I hate bare rooms. You'll note even my short rewrite changed the encounter area a bit. The immediate note I see a need of is what is the source of the odor, since that is in a separate encounter area. (And if mildew is not in an adjacent encounter area, that's an oversight by the designer.)

But again, as you say, we have different things we like.

 

[BruceWright]

I definitely get the resistance to a bare-bones, even anodyne adventure. I find such things bloodless and cold and I often have to work hard to create an adventure worth running. So I certainly get that.

But also I read adventures where I have no real idea what’s going on, because the story is just kind of seeded in keyed areas and encounters and I have to imagine some adventurers going through it and looking at everything before it clicks… “oh, this adventure is a metaphor for the grief of losing a child. Got it.”

Summaries would help. Notes from the author and suggestions of how to run this. Themes. Metaphors. Guiding principles. Inspirations. Tone.

And maybe all the flavorful writing that you like, but then also a map with cues for quick reference.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Definitely. Nowhere am I saying that I am "right" about liking terse, information-dense formats. It's just what I happen to like.

That said, I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction between "Easy to Read" and "Easy to Run". I personally find the Easy to Run modules also Easy to Read, or at least easier than wall-of-text modules.

"Wall of text" itself is hardly a neutral term. Someone might as well call the style you prefer "bullet-point hell".

 

[Micah Sweet]

One thing reading this thread presses home for me is just how vastly different people's tastes, preferences and needs are as GMs.

I have looked at a lot of the examples that are raised as being made well and presenting information well, and I loathe them with all of my being. I feel insulted by the texts, that they are unfinished outlines where I'm left to do all the hard parts of making the idea come to life after the content creator has done the easy part of coming up with ideas. I feel the style is goofy and the adventure railroad-y and often inferior to the 1e AD&D module that inspired it. The staccato blips of micro-information with its bold fonts and frequent formatting changes just is oppressive to read. I like none of it.

But if it works at someone's table, OK, that's fine. It's just, please don't tell me that the stuff I like is hard to run and this stuff easy and well organized.

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of loaded terms used to describe whatever style the poster doesn't care for. People clearly have strong feelings on this issue.

 

[Bill Zebub]

"Wall of text" itself is hardly a neutral term. Someone might as well call the style you prefer "bullet-point hell".

Love it. Or how about "PowerPoint Dungeons"?

 

[Gus L]

Jumping in a bit late here but what if rather then thinking of this as two distinct categories of adventure "To be run" and "to be read" we note that they are all meant "to be run" ... but some writers/brands/systems aren't actually good at knowing what that means, or have an idea of it that demands large read aloud sections, excessive unusable backstory and all the other sins associated with "meant to be read modules".

When you look to the advice on running games and designing adventures from the 1990's and 2000's (something like "X-DM" or "Play Dirty" - refereeing manuals from the 90's/00's) the advice largely focuses on bending the players to the referee's pre-written story through bullying, trickery, deception, props, and smoke machine usage. The goal of course is to create a game with novelistic or cinematic highs, lows, and reveals - to teach the referee how to perform for the players and guide them through a narrative experience. It's not what I want in my games these days and seems very high prep...

The corresponding adventure design would seem to be the sort of "to read" adventure that covers the backstory (to place the adventure in narrative context) and every detail of its scenes. Personally I don't think this works, but as much as the 90's directed adventure experience stye game relies of rigid referee control and virtuosity to keep players unknowingly or happily moving along an (ideally hidden) track through the rising action to the climax, this sort of module relies of designer control - to describe everything and help lock in a specific feel and experience.

Personally I don't find this kind of adventure useful, but I don't think it's made for reading so much as it's made for to "read to" one's players. It's for a certain style of game, and when we aren't playing that style of game it becomes incomprehensible.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For me it is simple... I will always read a module or adventure many time before ever running it, because I need to make sure it fits into the world and area the characters are in, and makes sense as a stop on the narrative the characters are creating and journeying on. So there will never be a point where something gets "sprung" on me and I suddenly need to go scramble for a "mid-level haunted druids grove" adventure (for example) and pull it out and immediately run it without ever having looked at it. I think that leads to rather uninspiring DMing as they are too busy trying to wrap their heads around what they are reading, rather than acting and reacting in the moment to what the PCs are doing. And believe me... I've been to cons and played in D&D events where it is blatantly obvious the DM hadn't read the module previously and were just trying to do it on the fly. And to a person they always rather sucked. Almost as though a 'DM who doesn't prep' and a 'DM who isn't very compelling' go hand-in-hand.

Only my experience obviously... but I've experienced it enough to know that I do not enjoy playing at tables under the DMs who believe in the "little to no prep" mantra.

 

[Bill Zebub]

For me it is simple... I will always read a module or adventure many time before ever running it, because I need to make sure it fits into the world and area the characters are in, and makes sense as a stop on the narrative the characters are creating and journeying on. So there will never be a point where something gets "sprung" on me and I suddenly need to go scramble for a "mid-level haunted druids grove" adventure (for example) and pull it out and immediately run it without ever having looked at it. I think that leads to rather uninspiring DMing as they are too busy trying to wrap their heads around what they are reading, rather than acting and reacting in the moment to what the PCs are doing. And believe me... I've been to cons and played in D&D events where it is blatantly obvious the DM hadn't read the module previously and were just trying to do it on the fly. And to a person they always rather sucked. Almost as though a 'DM who doesn't prep' and a 'DM who isn't very compelling' go hand-in-hand.

Only my experience obviously... but I've experienced it enough to know that I do not enjoy playing at tables under the DMs who believe in the "little to no prep" mantra.

Is it possible that in those terrible experiences the GMs chose modules that do require a lot of prior reading and prep? That they aren't choosing modules that can be run off the cuff? Statistically likely, I think, given that (in my experience) the vast majority of modules belong to the former category.

I'll also suggest that the "no prep" objective may be a subset of the "easy to run" crowd, but they are not synonymous. I also "read" a module several times before running it, but when it's laid out in "bullet point hell" style (thanks, @Micah Sweet!) I can do that reading, and grasp the big picture, in a fraction of the time.

 

[Celebrim]

Is it possible that in those terrible experiences the GMs chose modules that do require a lot of prior reading and prep? That they aren't choosing modules that can be run off the cuff? Statistically likely, I think, given that (in my experience) the vast majority of modules belong to the former category.

Speaking of my experience, absolutely not. If they'd only been far enough along the Dunning-Kruger curve to recognize that if they wanted to run with little to "no prep" to buy any sort of prepared adventure or campaign to run, they wouldn't have been terrible. Rather, they invariably think that they can get away with no prep because they think they are really super creative people who can improvise great adventures on the fly. They are on the peak of Mt. Confidence. No one here is giving me that vibe particularly because everyone here is talking about running something that is the equivalent of buying hours of preparation and is usually designed to run with relatively little preparation. That in itself guarantees at least a 'C+' sort of gaming experience.

To get down to 'F' you need a lot more confidence than that and either "no prep" or "All my prep is in the form of a short story and I don't follow the system rules."

 

[Reynard]

For me it is simple... I will always read a module or adventure many time before ever running it, because I need to make sure it fits into the world and area the characters are in, and makes sense as a stop on the narrative the characters are creating and journeying on. So there will never be a point where something gets "sprung" on me and I suddenly need to go scramble for a "mid-level haunted druids grove" adventure (for example) and pull it out and immediately run it without ever having looked at it. I think that leads to rather uninspiring DMing as they are too busy trying to wrap their heads around what they are reading, rather than acting and reacting in the moment to what the PCs are doing. And believe me... I've been to cons and played in D&D events where it is blatantly obvious the DM hadn't read the module previously and were just trying to do it on the fly. And to a person they always rather sucked. Almost as though a 'DM who doesn't prep' and a 'DM who isn't very compelling' go hand-in-hand.

Only my experience obviously... but I've experienced it enough to know that I do not enjoy playing at tables under the DMs who believe in the "little to no prep" mantra.

"No prep" and "running a module that I have not read" are nothing like the same thing.