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="Waylander the Slayer" data-source="post: 6878113" data-attributes="member: 1830">Sure...here are two descriptions I have taken from two different adventures that describe locations:The Windmill. On at low mound by the submerged bank there stands a wooden windmill with black-striped tar-sealed planks. The four sails of the mill are shocked and patched, ruinedby the flood. One remains whole. In the water at its base swarm one hundred metre-wide white crabs. The sails of the mill creak slowly round. Each one dips a foot beneath the water as it turns. A handful of child sized crabs grab on and ride the sail. They climb it as it turns, trying to get inside the mill. Just below the sail crank, visible as it spins, is a window with a whiteface. A desperate woman, Tana Che Urla, wields a pole and tries to knock the crabs before they reach the gap. Inside the mill are fifteen defenceless children, one old woman, and no food.The above, to me, is great adventure design, clear, concise, focused on what is happening, and what the PCs see, feel and interact with.And attached is a single room description/encounter. Note that there is a second page to that single room encounter as well. The latter, to me, is the wall of text syndrome that has tons of passive text, the call out text being a static description of the room (though there is a lot of activity going on that is hard to glean at all) with codification of all sorts of useless information including how much weight a table can hold, lots and lots of verbiage about what an NPC might say (though there is little description of what she looks like/acts like/and will stand out to the PCs...i.e., the "use test"), ancestry of bad guys (same "use test" other than what the generic monster name is) that the PCs will likely kill in 5 minutes etc.  and an average GM would have to spend about an hour of prep time to run this one single room, along with taking notes and also having to wade through useless information that will never come into play.  Such information adds nothing to most games and in fact detracts from game play (try running this and having to look for information in that text).</blockquote>

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