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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Treebore" data-source="post: 3287561" data-attributes="member: 10177">Here is something you may find of interest:"Originally posted by James Jacobs on the Paizo MessageboardNow that "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk" has been anounced, I can talk a little bit about my experience writing in the Delve Format. It sucks. Building encounters using this format takes MUCH longer than building them in the current format. I think that the payoff (having everything you need to run an encounter on one or two pages) is worth it though. Delve format adventures are CERTAINLY easier to run in game.But the problem with the delve format really starts to show in higher level encounters. In "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk," I was the one who got to design the highest level encounters. And there were many times that the delve format simply didn't work. For example, one of the most classic encounters (the evil adventuring party) doesn't work in this format, since there's simply not enough room for four compelx stat blocks. Often, there's not enoguh room for one complex stat block, and a final encounter with only one BBEG is generally an anticlimax since the PCs outnumber him and can take him down easy.In addition, the delve format takes up a hideous amount of pages. In a product like a a 224 page adventure, that's not as much of a deal. But in a magazine, it's impossible. Let's take issue #140 as an example. In the three adventures we have in that issue, we've got about 54 combat encounters. Using the Delve Format, we'd be able to strip out the stat blocks and tactics sections from the adventures themselves, which would probably save us about 19 pages. But then, each of those encounters would have to have at LEAST a one page encounter, and most of them would have to have two. A few of them wouldn't work at all, and we'd have to cut creatures from encounters. My experience writing the Greyhawk adventure was that, if you plan well, you can do about 1/3 of your encounters as a 1 page encounter. Using that math, we'd need 90 pages of content to do those combat encounters; subtract the 19 pages we save and you're still at a magazine that's 71 pages over. Nevermind the fact that since each delve encounter requires a map, that'd skyrocket our budget and leave us with a magazine that was illustrated only with maps; I doubt we could afford any art at all.We might be able to do one adventrue per issue if we used the delve format, and that's not an option, so therefore we won't be using the delve format."</blockquote>

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