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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6970637" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know that you know that well.  This is what I actually wrote:"In 32 years of gaming, as a player I've never once failed to enjoy an experience when the GM was well prepared, and invariably every bad experience I've ever had came down to (I soon discovered) a lack of preparation (or sometimes too much of the wrong preparation, that became immediately useless when the players went off script). The single most telling mark of a good GM is how hard they are willing to work and how much time they put into their games."It very much sounds to me that you are putting a lot of work into your games, and your discussion of how to use published material in a session could have in its substance been written by me.   If you are putting that sort of effort into your games, I imagine that they come off very well indeed.  I made quite clear that "not my cup of tea" were DMs that put no effort into their games and showed up and just tried to wing it, and in particular the ones that believe that they are so good at DMing that they don't think they need to put in a lot of effort.  You've made clear that's not your approach, so there is no reason to expect you fall out of my cup of tea.We ultimately had a minor disagreement over the organization of text in an encounter.  I advocated having a short well written evocative introduction to the scene, in the style of a screenplay or story hook.  You disagreed, but then instead advocated having a list of bullet points that you would turn into natural speech in the style of an oral presentation.And, I basically feel that's only a very small difference.  Both approaches clearly call out to the DM where to begin a scene, and both approaches clearly organize the important information that needs to be conveyed to the players so that they can start their investigation.   In practice, if either is very well done, the results are going to be pretty similar.  There are things I like about both approaches, and things I dislike about both approaches.   Thinking what the bullet point version gets you, I like the following:a) Improved possibility of eye contact, if DM has skill to pull it off.b) Point by point presentation allows you to make sure everyone is clear over each detail before moving on. c) Would work well if combined with visual illustrations, such a 3D model of the dungeon.Thinking about what I don't like:a) Natural language harder to pull off well, particularly when under stress.  Most DMs likely to end up just reading large portions of the bullet points anyway.  b) Module will likely read less well to the DM (before play), and be read less well to the players (during play).  DM has to compose in real time, postponing work that could be done in prep, resulting in inferior transcription.c) Bullet points ultimately just added white space, conveying same amount of information in more page space.Overall though, I think the approaches are far more congruent than orthogonal.  Turning one into the other involves only a short amount of time and not a lot of effort with a word processor.   Ultimately, which works best probably is a matter of practice - how good is your dramatic reading versus how good is your oral presentation skills.</blockquote>

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