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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9802658" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I've never written a module and most that I've run have not been good from an "running accessibility" standpoint. That said I've thought about this a lot and the main thing holding me back from publishing (other than laziness) is not feeling like I knew what good should look like (I'm really digging this whole line of threads, because it's something I've puzzled over a lot). But here are my thoughts:-I tend to veer sandboxy and simulationist when I run a game. When an enemy in the first room of the castle gets away or sounds an alarm there's a whole castle of enemies that's going to crash down, the captive might get killed, the evil wizard might get his fireball scroll out of storage, everything will be out of intended place, etc. I woudl like a module to think through and offer suggestions for the consequences of major ways things can not go according to intention, both because it helps me run games but also to discourge gamemasters from panicking and having the PCs improbably kill the escaping enemy or whatever simply because they're afraid they'll mess something vital up if they have to adjudicate consequences on the fly. If this is not feasible, I would like to at least see rooms of locations not presented as though they are scenes that must begin the same way under all circumstances.-Monsters/enemy/npc statblocks should not need to be cross-referenced to another book. Ideally for me they should be on separate cards, but in the back is acceptable if it is a shorter document. Some sort of shortform stat reminder in text when the enemy comes up is great, but should not be something I have to go looking for later if that being ends up in a different context through emergent gameplay.-Longer adventures need indices.-Adventures should start with an overview.-I feel like most written adventures, even ones well written to run (for most people), are too afraid to just come out and tell me narratively why elements are in them and what their narrative purpose actually is. Since I'm going to remake everything to my tastes I'd appreciate a note here or there when something is a keystone element and tampering will have widespread reprecussions. And, while I don't need commentary on everything, when the inclusion of something as presented is the result of some sort of complicated calculus weighing multiple goals a note explaining would help me appreciate it's significance and tamper responisbly. This is not something to derail the main text for, but give me sidebars, footnotes, etc. galore (on which subject, see below).-I'm not opposed to read-aloud boxed text, when used sparingly. It's okay to occasionally set a scene, give a villain a grand entrance, or make sure something like a puzzle is presented by the GM in a very specific way. But it should be rare enough that when the GM starts reading blocks of prose out word for word the players know it's time to listen. And there should be notes for how to present it without reading aloud word for word, because some tables will have people that sort of thing just doesn't work for (making sense of a long, intricately composed piece of prose recited requires a skill many people simply don't train these days).-A lot of people in this thread seem to be advocating for a radically terse, bullet point oriented approach to things, and I mostly agree. Having a backgroud in both law and history I think I'm easily in the top percentiles of people (if not necessarily of gamemasters) for digesting and teasing out the relevant elements in giant blocks of text, and still when I'm pressed on time to prep or trying to find something at the game table it's just a nighmare, particularly to find that lost detail I remember having read but not where I read it or the details of it well enough to know what to do with. The terse bullet point advocates are basically just advocating for the text of the adventure itself to be reduced to the notes (both mental and written) that I would create reading it in order to render it runnable and that sounds great. But I worry about taking it to extremes where I feel like its just leaving a lot of "blanks" I feel I have to fill in, and while I like filling in things to my tastes I also want there to default things. Generally I think a somewhat minimalist, bullet point oriented text is a good basis for the main text of an adventure, but that adventures should have more than just their main texts.-I think adventure presentation is overly rooted in the limitations of writing and printing before modern wordprocessing and layout software was available. It's just not that hard anymore to have footnotes, infoboxes, and other marginalia and annotations, and these sorts of things are great for allowing a main text to be brief and navigable while also permitting there to be options for a reader to delve deeper when they need to. They also are a natural place to speak with editorial voice to elucidate certain elements.</blockquote>

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