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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5587286" data-attributes="member: 54877">There can be better balances, for a given audience, but no one will ever resolve this fully in a print medium. There is always a tension between evocative elements and good reference material. Even something as innocuous as a few footnotes can turn a non-fiction, historical narrative from fairly interesting to rather more bland. And on the other side, what could you possibly do to make a dictionary really interesting to browse through without compromising its main function? (I recall a Charlie Brown dictionary I had as a very young child, with many illustrations, and relatively few words for its size.) And the real stinker for RPG source material is that "evocative" is so varied for different members of the audience. One person wants a half column of background material on an NPC, to get that spark. Another one wants no more than a handful of descriptive words.  Now if you had adventures with expandable fields, that would be another matter. Almost footnotes in reverse. You get the reference material in the main part of the document, and then you click on something to get short descriptors and something else to get the long version. But then that would be annoying as all get out for the people that want to read straight through for enjoyment. They would insist that the background be the main texts, and all the stats be what you click to expand. This would almost make high level Pazio 3.5 adventures readable, with their NPC stats that take up a full column or more. Congratulations, we just compromised the usefulness of the material when running an adventure, to make it more fun to read! Only real way out of this that satisfies everyone is electronic document with hideable pieces, customized by the reader. Also, once you get into satisfaction levels for what are essentially meant to be evocative fiction, we all have different standards.  Quite frankly, much of the longer background text that is lauded as particularly conducive to storytelling reminds me rather more of the puerile offerings of sophomores in a creative writing class--the kind that thinks that having your hero commit suicide at the end of your short story automatically makes it more edgy and dramatic.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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