Boxed Text - A Railrod Sign, or Great tool for Immersion? Both?

[weem]

I've never (in 20+ years) run a published adventure - I make up my own stuff. Some of it of course comes from inspiration from sources such as published adventures, but I have never run them and as such I have never used published boxed text before - I create write it myself.

With that said, I had never thought about the value of it as a tool for gaining insight in how to play an NPC, etc (by that point in my planning, I know my NPC) but that makes sense.

 

[Oryan77]

With that said, I had never thought about the value of it as a tool for gaining insight in how to play an NPC, etc (by that point in my planning, I know my NPC) but that makes sense.

Yeah I'm not all that good at writing an adventure from scratch. I probably could, but it would take me forever. I pretty much use a published adventure as a basis and then create my own stuff around that.

I still have an excel file that I write all my made up material and boxed text in. So I'm referring to both my excel sheet and the published adventure as I DM. At times, I'm even using up to 3 or 4 published adventures at the same time...using bits that I liked from each and creating a single adventure out of it all.

A lot of people dislike published adventures because they can create their own...but I think they are a great tool to use for inspiration and mining ideas from. I never shy away from something that might help me improve my game.

 

[Jhaelen]

I actually wish published adventures made in 3e had more boxed text (I don't know if 4e has them a lot...never read a 4e adventure).

WotC's 4E modules basically use the same two-page encounter spreads as the late 3E modules. They generally have several blocks of read-aloud text:

The first gives descriptions for anything that is immediately obvious.

The other blocks give additional information that is linked to a specified (passive) skill check DCs (e.g. Perception DC 15, Nature DC 20, Arcana DC 10, etc.).

Typically, there's one final text block to read aloud as soon as the (combat) encounter starts.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Or at least, that tends to be the result of "letting things happen". Another time we spent nearly 2 sessions in a bar hitting on barmaids because one player REALLY wanted to get one to come up to his room and she didn't want to. But the DM didn't want to railroad us into leaving the bar...so we stayed there. Any action the DM took to change our minds would have been railroading(she already offered us 2 or 3 reasons to leave the bar, we rejected them all). It was great fun for the two players who wanted to be there. Not so much for the rest of us.

Ehm... What?

The DM has given your character 2-3 reasons to leave the bar, you (and presumably your character) was bored out of his life and your character just stayed? And you are blaming the DM for "letting things happen"?

To me this sounds you are not even trying to have a good game. Blaming it on the DM instead of taking it in on yourself that your characters have to DO something for the game to get interesting isn't something I have much sympathy for.

I know I have "letting things happen" in my game, like dropping a difficult problem on the players that they didn't manage to solve and ended up just arguing. This is where a DM should get his act together and help the players out. I didn't and the game was boring because I didn't act. The DM's fault, not the players.

In retrospect I should have helped or pushed the characters through the problem instead of just sitting back and listening to them not being able to agree on any plan. After this incident I have tried to gauge the mood of the players a little better and give them more clues earlier on if they are stuck.