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This is a side complaint of mine. I think having set stats for monsters is terrible game design. Something like you see in video games, dynamic difficulty, would be so much better from a game design perspective. But then I also love me some OSR-style universal monster stat blocks. Yeah. There...

Make them softcover, staple or coil bound, sans art, black & white, printed on low-quality paper, and dirt cheap. Then people might treat them like workbooks. Though I’d much rather have a nice hardbound book with free downloads of printable worksheets.

Along those lines, clearly mark what’s obvious and what’s obscure. Like clues in a mystery scenario. Something like a TN or a time requirement listed on finding things. I’m not a fan of listed TNs either, but a lot of people do use them.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” “Yes, it’s true. This man has no d—.” “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all outta bubblegum.” “Game over, man. Game over!” “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s...

I’ve worked in layout and design for book publishing. You really don’t need to do that. Pick one good font that works for both.

Likely because it’s easier for most people who aren’t graphic designers or information professionals to visualize bolded text and bullet lists. Great list by the way. Nice use of nested bullet points.

Did you forget some of the “promoted” article(s) on here about just that? The one I remember is someone tried to argue you could cast something like six eight spells in a round. I’m not sure what the right phrase is for posts that are “promoted” to articles on the site, but that post was made...

Agreed. The more I’m thinking about this the more I seem to want any descriptions in exactly that kind of barebones, stripped down, “Just the facts, ma’am” style. The module should provide the facts. I’ll provide the flourishes.

To me that screams out for something like fronts from PbtA games. The villain has a plan, which is what will happen if the PCs don’t intervene. But the PCs inevitably will, so giving specific ways the villain could react to having their plan interrupted seems like an obvious must. “If...

We have the actual sales data that disproves this claim. Over here. https://www.enworld.org/threads/all-basic-b-x-and-becmi-and-rules-cyclopedia-set-sales-from-ben-riggs.690259/

Yeah. I do the same. It seems to come in waves. Fiction for a time then non-fiction. Forcing things almost never works out well for me. I just end up hating the things I normally love.

Exactly. Supernatural Thriller, not horror. The protagonist is a badass monster hunter, not a scream queen who happens to barely survive.

Not really. Neither is a Western in any real genre sense. They each have one character from the Old West in Victorian England in a Gothic Horror story, but in no real way does the presence of that single character change the genre of the whole. Especially in Dracula where the cowboy is a...

Though, thinking about it more there are some that just wouldn’t work because they are mutually exclusive. How I define horror (huge power imbalance between protagonists and antagonists) makes it mutually exclusive with action-adventure and pulp. You can have horror-themed monsters in a pulp...

Exactly. But basically no one would say the genre of Dracula is Western.

To me it’s not about tough fits, you can make most combos work. It’s more about easier vs harder to explain what you mean by a given combination. Like a Mystery-Romance. They’re both plot-based genres, so you have to figure out which dominates and how they interact with each other. Is the...

Sure. To each their own. I'd rather err on the side of unnatural but well-written dialog. The snappy patter of film noir and hard-boiled detective stories, for example. Maybe not everything like that all the time, but definitely on that end of the spectrum rather than the realistic end.

Sigh. Because of course. Here's a [+] thread for people who want to actually talk about good information design in modules. https://www.enworld.org/threads/best-practices-for-easy-to-run-modules.716252/

The [+] is to keep things positive and prevent the already tired arguments about preferences and this style of module. This thread is for people who like this style of information design and want to talk about it. There are plenty of other threads to hate on things you don’t like. Branching...

Yeah. And people really, really don't want dialog in movies or TV shows to match how real people in the real world actually speak. If you don't believe me, record a conversation. Wait a day or two, then play it back. Now transcribe the thing exactly as spoken, be sure to include all the UMs...