Yes, the perennial question - do you like "boxed text" (or "read-aloud text" or "color text") in your RPG adventures?
Yes.
When I'm doing my own prep for a series of encounters, I consider boxed text to be the single most important piece of prep I can do. Since you usually don't have visual illustrations, boxed text is the sole source of evocative painting you can do. It's scene framing. It's immersion. It's the clues.
For those who do, what defines "good" boxed text? Do you like just the bare bones, or do you prefer something with a bit of flair?
- It should be fairly short so that the players don't tune out. If it runs long, it's better to break it into smaller pieces that are read as the players investigate different areas more closely.
- It should nonetheless try cover everything that is obvious to the player's senses at the moment, and clues to what might be worth exploring.
- It should not describe how the players feel or act (unless something magical is compelling them).
- It should be well written, literate, even slightly florid. The language should be evocative of Tolkien, Wolfe, Howard and those 'Appendix N' authors. It should read like and the players should feel like they are in a good fantasy novel.
- As much as possible, it should not make assumptions about the player's behavior to that point, so that the DM doesn't have to mentally rewrite it to reflect broken assumptions. This is one of the hardest parts of doing a good job.
- Dialogue of importance also makes good boxed text, particular responses to queries on important subjects. One nice thing about extensive dialogue samples is that it really helps you play a character. However, long blocks of text are to be avoided unless they represent 'stories within stories'. Even then, try to keep the story fairly short.
As a final question, can anyone nominate an adventure that they think does the whole boxed text thing really well?
Different adventures do different parts of boxed text really well.
I first fell in love with boxed text reading the works of Tracy Hickman. But Hickman could be excessively spare in my opinion, particularly if he thought the room wasn't that important. Although he's never guilty of overwriting or stringing paragraph after paragraph together (which is the far more common problem), he's a bit too barebones IMO. You could also really tell when there was a 'move on, nothing to see here' vibe to some of his writing, and in my opinion that's both bad design and bad writing. But in terms of how he places his text consistently and introduces it, I have emulated that ever since. And you could do worse than following his guide for being terse and to the point.
Better written though is the boxed text in C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. While the module has many problems, it's some of the best boxed text ever done.
I also have a fondness for CM3: Sabre River.
Gygax writes well - witness WG4: The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun - but his organization skills are terrible, and figuring out how to turn his text into a description is always a challenge. But in terms of crafting a sentence describing something in a room, he does it as well as anyone has ever done. In an ideal world, you'd also get good illustrations of the S1: Tomb of Horrors sort (still some of the best ever), to go with boxed text, but obviously this isn't going to happen in a typical homebrew.
A more modern example that I think incorporates 'lessons learned' is Kevin Kulp's 'Of Sound Mind'. It's not perfect - I rewrote some passages to suit my ear when I ran it - but it's overall really well done, both in language and the amount of detail he imparts, and one of the best I have ever read. If you can be half that good, you'll be doing really well.
Another modern dungeon I admire a lot is Erik Mona's 'Whispering Cairn', but it's useful to compare with Kulp's better and more consistent boxed text. If anything, Mona's best room design and best text is better than Kulp's, but Kulp is a lot more consistent from room to room IMO. The formatting though sucks, as it just doesn't leap out of the page nearly as well as it should. The module is definitely worth your time though.
