NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 4751843" data-attributes="member: 60075">I'm not going to replicate everything that's been discussed in a thread I started on that topic on another forum, but I'd recommend you to have a casual read if you're interested. I linked a pretty interesting R&D article by WotC on the delve format later on in discussion, and there's other stuff. <a href="http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=13909" target="_blank">http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=13909</a>My main point there is that the delve format has led to a deterioration of story-arc-heavy and (non-player)character-intricate content in modules. With the possible exception of Demon Queen's Enclave, the evidence on that is dishearteningly incontestible, if hardly surprising.Ok, so what about the layout? I've got nothing else to say about the format except this. In terms of layout, of visual presentation, it's grand. You don't just have all the information you need at your fingertips - you FIND it in a heart beat. But what about the selection of information, of the actual content being selected? Here things turn detrimental. The delve format (as a type of visual presentation) has led to an immense reduction of visual illustrations in the module. This has been compensated by the illlustration booklet (or section) in H2 onwards, primarily because of uniformly negative customer feedback on that point (have a look at H1 - no illustration of a major NPC (Sir Keegan), how ridiculous is that? - or any of the earlier 3.5 stuff in the  "Expedition to..." product line).So where has all the page space gone which was previously (in 3E) dedicated to wonderful, helpful illustrations? The answer to that question brings us to the next great sucker of the delve format .... cartography. When I ran Scourge of the Howling Horde (late in 3.5), I blew up the dungeon overview to A3, and then .... made the SINGLE visual contribution that is added by the individual room maps within the module: capital letters with circles around it, these indicating the monsters' starting position.Yep gentlemen, that's the visual contribution of the delve format. Encircled capital letters. I suggest we treat it as the second coming of our lord, sliced bread. Because indicating a monster's starting position in a room of 3x3 squares is a matter of character life and death, and makes all the difference in the world as to how an encounter plays out at the table.Is there a rationale for repeating the enlarged cartography of dungeon sections in the main body of the product? Sure, it gets you a parcelled out understanding of the entire dungeon. Is there another way to accomplish that? Sure, just look at 30 years of (A)D&D modules and you'll see aplenty. Revert to that, and use the new space on the page for information (visual or otherwise) which COMPLEMENTS the product in a useful way, as opposed to wasting it on material that painfully reminds me, page by page, of pointless filler. Pointless filler? Oh, there's more to be had - the stat blocks. There's a great line by Rich Baker and James Jacobs in Red Hand of Doom as to why they organized the stat blocks the way they did (print them in a separate appendix): every repeated stat block sucks up product space that could be used to, you know, ENHANCE the product. This point blends over into my final one. On top of everything else, the delve format has led to something else: each encounter is treated as a self-contained unit with next to no impact on the encounters surrounding it. (In H1, a monster stat block - that of the Kobold Dragonshield - was repeated on two non-facing successive pages, because, you know, A DM FLIPPING A SINGLE PAGE IS THE PITALL OF A PROPERLY RUN DUNGEON.) That's something else that you have, when the dungeon - both visually and in content- is no longer conceptualized as an integral, dynamic whole.Gone are the good times when Mike Mearls would write articles in Dragon magazine on how to make things in one dungeon room interact with things happening next door.Gone are the good times when Dan Noonan wrote a module in which these things were a HUGE part of the challenge in exploring a dungeon.Actually, gone are the good times when Dan Noonan WROTE stuff for WotC.Is the delve format good? It's visually pleasing - I mimic it in my own dungeon write-ups. But does it carry conceptual persuasiveness? No, sir.</blockquote>

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