Modules: Made to Read vs Made to Run?

[Bill Zebub]

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."

So...that is reading to me like a criticism of those GMs, and not of the general idea of zero-prep dungeons. No?

 

[Bill Zebub]

A bullet-point encounter takes 2 minutes to read while a full-written longform encounter takes 8 minutes to read? Yeah? So what? Who cares how long it took?

Must be nice to have a trust fund! I'm envious.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Our priorities are dramatically different in this regard.

I agree with you there. Although I also think @Lanefan has a point: information density means less page jumping, and/or better value per page that you are paying for.

 

[aramis erak]

Page count is irrelevant in digital forms.

Wrong about that. Many are using tablets or eReaders for content consumption, and those have limited storage and limited RAM.
My 10.5" likebook's page turn rate is severely limited by document size and complexity. Sentinel Comics was pretty much unusable. Alien PF was pretty quick, Similar sizes, but very different complexities, and very different UX. Both are much slower than the SC preview printer friendly, which is 22 pp... it can move the majority into RAM and then generate faster page turns.

Which reminds me: the Sentinel Comics adventures are pretty well tuned to be ready to run with a read through or two.

 

[zakael19]

Wrong about that. Many are using tablets or eReaders for content consumption, and those have limited storage and limited RAM.
My 10.5" likebook's page turn rate is severely limited by document size and complexity. Sentinel Comics was pretty much unusable. Alien PF was pretty quick, Similar sizes, but very different complexities, and very different UX. Both are much slower than the SC preview printer friendly, which is 22 pp... it can move the majority into RAM and then generate faster page turns.

Which reminds me: the Sentinel Comics adventures are pretty well tuned to be ready to run with a read through or two.

That’s more likely going to be caused by images than page count.

FWIW, the 302 page PDF spread of Stonetop’s Book 2 is 26mb inclusive of plenty of simple black and white images. I’ve run ~170 hours of gaming directly from fractions of the total content in there with occasional jotted notes; and another 30 or so hours with some prepped sites using it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Must be nice to have a trust fund! I'm envious.

What does time spent reading something (presumably) enjoyable have to do with having a trust fund?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wrong about that. Many are using tablets or eReaders for content consumption, and those have limited storage and limited RAM.
My 10.5" likebook's page turn rate is severely limited by document size and complexity. Sentinel Comics was pretty much unusable. Alien PF was pretty quick, Similar sizes, but very different complexities, and very different UX. Both are much slower than the SC preview printer friendly, which is 22 pp... it can move the majority into RAM and then generate faster page turns.

Which reminds me: the Sentinel Comics adventures are pretty well tuned to be ready to run with a read through or two.

I use a Kindle. Never had any problem storing or reading anything in pdf format.

 

[aramis erak]

That’s more likely going to be caused by images than page count.

FWIW, the 302 page PDF spread of Stonetop’s Book 2 is 26mb inclusive of plenty of simple black and white images. I’ve run ~170 hours of gaming directly from fractions of the total content in there with occasional jotted notes; and another 30 or so hours with some prepped sites using it.

It's the combination of non-adobe-standard fonts, number of fonts on a page, number of graphics per page, proper flattening, total document length, and the availability of RAM.

Back in 2002 or so, I bought a PDF, and it was all straight postscript art... and Acrobat Reader crashed on page load... on my mac DVSE. So, I open it in a 3pp PDF reader, and I can read it... go to print it, and it literally crashed the post-script engine on my laser printer. (HP LJ III)... so, to print it for use, I had to copy and paste the text...

As you say, a graphics issue... the graphic was one subroutine in PostScript, but was called every page...

But I've seen pure font docs using bound in fonts to be capable of major slowdowns... and some mobile PDF readers ignore custom fonts.

 

[aramis erak]

I use a Kindle. Never had any problem storing or reading anything in pdf format.

I had a Kindle Oasis; screen was too small for anything but novels and manga for me.

And there are a few I've got from people who clearly didn't know the way PDF as a format actually works, do things like have the same image on a given page 7 times in the same spot. or having an EPS or SVG graphic with 100k points.

 

[Celebrim]

So...that is reading to me like a criticism of those GMs, and not of the general idea of zero-prep dungeons. No?

Well, yes. I don't have a problem with the idea of a zero-prep dungeon. I just think that a lot of the zero-prep dungeons don't feel particularly more zero prep than classic two column formats with condensed stat blocks, small, boxed text and so forth. I don't feel like bullet points necessarily are a solution to the problem. Just within this thread, I've seen two ideas of how to condense information presented and one of them works a lot better for me than the other. And the thing about bullet points or other outlining techniques is that ultimately they are mapping to sentences, and if they are just rearranged sentences in non-natural order then that's far from helpful. Likewise, there is a tradeoff between presenting the information clearly once and presenting it multiple times in different fashions, and well so much of these bullet point presentations don't add much.

In general, if i was advising a novice GM a module to buy that they would need minimal prep to turn into a lot of good play, I'm not sure that I'd wouldn't advise "Beyond the Witchlight" over some of these "Zero prep" modules like "The Waking of Willowby Hall". I mean, I'd never advise being "zero prep" at all, and starting to run something without reading it, but not sure either module is just easier to run. (Though I will admit the first part of Beyond the Witchlight with the carnival is the hardest part to run and the part I'd probably most change if I was doing it.)