Recent content by BruceWright

After reading the adventure, most of my prep is taken condensing the session into a table-ready cheat sheet where i can see the whole session at a glance. Maps labeled with room names, short descriptions, any checks involved. Lists of NPCs, etc. Making it table-ready. I never want to be...

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...

I think it’s clear by now that we all like what we like and don’t like what we don’t. 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 can...

For the players, it doesn’t need to simplify it. As a DM, I’m glad that a flat map simplifies it. I’m just saying, as a person who has run i6 from the orthographic map in the 1980s, and with a flat map recently, the flat map was much easier. I dunno. Maybe my brain works different from...

Oh, yep, I did miss that, from the explanation being tucked in the unkeyed entry that I would need to cross-reference from its reference in the information about the shaft. That’s what I mean about needing to prep in advance. Definitely not something easy to understand on first glance. Yep...

Agreed. That map is super clear.

Then let me retract that phrasing and replace it with the objective statement that many companies including Wizards will pay writers based on word count, and leave others to draw their own conclusions on how that impacts the final product.

I think we’re looking at a bit of a pendulum here. Back in the days of early D&D, descriptions were brief and mostly mechanical. Size of the room. Monsters and traps within. Maybe a short description of cobwebs or a bad smell. Then Ravenloft put the flavor into box text. Icy water drops...

a reminder that many game designers wish they were Tolkien. And the lesson they learned from reading Tolkien is that his books used a lot of words.

Nostalgia glasses off, I disagree. I printed it with flat maps when I ran it recently, and the layout turns out to be much simpler to run. It’s not quite the maze it presents itself as. I’m happy that the map disorients players. I don’t want to be disorientated as the DM. But yes, the...

Sorry, what was this Berlin Wall you keep talking about? Never heard of it.

If the players can see the monster, I tell them they can see the monster without going on about the silverware and the cooking herbs used in the recipe for the food first. I want to emulate what the players senses tell them, not deny them. I'm emulating their senses, not a dracula movie nor...

I6 Ravenloft also contains one of my favorite examples of a buried lede in a room description box-text. You enter a room in the vampire's castle with a FRIGGING VAMPIRE banging away madly on a pipe organ. But the box text first describes the shape of the room. Then the chandeliers...

I just ran this last year and I really disagree. Maybe great for that era, but just really not very usable by modern standards. If the players take a staircase you aren't expecting, you're paging through numbered entries to figure out which room they're in. Good luck with the...

actual layout. Directly conflicting with the text of the adventure as written. Borderlands Quest: Goblin Trouble, an official adventure published and given for free for the "Day of Play" /Free RPG Day by WotC, uses a Dyson map from the DMG that directly contradicts the adventure descriptions...