Has the "Delve" format worked for you?

[Settembrini]

Really?
The parts that were in Delve format?
I aksed my DM, and after we told him which parts we liked, he said he did them himself or they weren´t planned encounters but extrapolated by him.

All those phony trick rooms (lava platform, blade room etc.) with one entrance and one exit, and pre-arranged outcome?

They are terrible!

 

[Raven Crowking]

Here's the conundrum.

1) It's helpful (for many people, if not all) to have all the info for the encounter in one place, on a single page or two-page spread.

2) It's difficult to have the encounter info separate from the actual room description.

Unfortunately, those two objectives are absolutely incompatible. It's not possible to put the encounter with the room description, because of space/layout issues. (After all, if a room description takes two paragraphs, and the encounter takes a page, how do you put those together with other room descriptions?)

Here's the solution: Take the maps off the encounter page, and put them in a seperate booklet. You now have room for all of the encounter information on the same page, including those two paragraphs that were "not possible" to put on the same page(s) previously.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

Imagine the Keep on the Borderlands, Lost City or The Hill Giants in Delve format.

Look at Lich Queen!

Fancy room with two exits!
It´s ridiculously linear, and:

It´s like there were strings going back to Seattle. The DM is basically programmed with this. If the adventure is chunked into overdesigned encounters, ther is no strategy, because there aren´t parties, tribes, plots & schemes. instead there are connected set-pieces.

That sucks big time!

Excellent capsule review!

RC

 

[justinsluder]

I hate it, my first encounter with it was expedition to castle ravenloft and if I'd have known they put it in there I wouldn't have picked it up. At least I got it at a small discount.

I'd still be buying WotC adventures if they hadn't switched to this convoluted format.

They should just have kept with what was working.

My 2 cp.


-Justin

 

[Wombat]

I have not seen or heard of said adventures.

Unless there is far less emphasis on pushing miniatures around a board and far more on social encounters, I sincerely doubt I would be interested.

 

[Jhaelen]

I found it easy to read but haven't played one yet. I like that it's easier to pull them out of the adventure and use them in a different context in a different adventure.

 

[thedungeondelver]

Have I what now?

 

[Caedrus]

I'm not too keen on the new format either. Like others have said, it reduces the adventure to a lot of set piece battles. This can be cool for certain encounters, but not the whole adventure!

The way WotC is talking about their new adventure design (i.e. taking it out of the rooms and into hallways with mobile monsters/npcs) will make it hard to do the delve format. Maybe they realized it wasn't that great.

Here's another option for those that like it. Write the adventure the old way (non-delve), and have the delve-format encounters available as a web enhancement or whatever they will be called on DDI. That way everyone is happy.

 

[Scribble]

I wonder if the new format is in preparation for the upcoming digital releases of the products.

Once you print the adventure out, how the pages sit is no longer relevant. On one side of the table is your description, the other, the tactics...

 

[Mouseferatu]

Really?
The parts that were in Delve format?
I aksed my DM, and after we told him which parts we liked, he said he did them himself or they weren´t planned encounters but extrapolated by him.

All those phony trick rooms (lava platform, blade room etc.) with one entrance and one exit, and pre-arranged outcome?

They are terrible!

A bad encounter is a bad encounter, regardless of format.

The Delve format doesn't dictate to us (that is, writers) what sort of encounters to design. All it dictates is how to present the information.

If you're coming across encounters whose design you dislike, that's due to the encounter itself. The delve format had nothing to do with it, for good or ill.