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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5608965" data-attributes="member: 54877">First, and this is a must for even getting to "decent" in my book, I want meaningful information, well organized. "Meaningful" is naturally going to be one of those eye of the beholder type things, and I'll grant that my tastes probably make me hard to please here. But generally, I want something that I can use to make the adventure better--more lifelike, more fantastical, more interesting, more challenging, etc. A lot of times, I get the impression that the text is trying to give me that, from some idea the author had, and probably used well in his home game, but it got lost some where in the flavor text. Example: You have an orc tribe faction, the "bezerk beaters." I want to know their motives, their means, their methods, their mistakes, etc. If you've got a little bit about their odd cooking habits, sure, throw it in. And I want those useful bits to be at least somewhat easily applicable to the adventure at hand. OTOH, I don't want a long dissertation on their place in society, which is not likely to come up. And I sure don't want little off-beat flavor text items (hair color, voice tone, etc. ) to take up a lot of key mind space. I find that a little bit of flavor goes a long way, and that one really good piece of flavor is a lot better than lots of half-hearted flavor sprinkled throughout.  I especially find this when the author has apparently gone out of his way to be "edgy" or push some cause or any number of other such bad habits that adventure writers seem to learn readily from bad novelists. Or maybe their editors learn not to clean this stuff up properly from their counterparts in novels. It might be unfair to blame the writers here. <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" /> I want information that helps me run the game, not that shows me how cool the writer thinks his story or characters are. If the author gets too caught up in the flavor text, he can obscure the meaningful adventure running bits, make them harder to find, and in some cases, manage to leave them out altogether. I could write forever on organization. Suffice it to say for now that I think column and a half stat blocks for a single wizard automatically fail on organization. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I thought Monte Cook's work in Ptolus was as good as a 3E-ish product could be organized, given the limits of the mechanics. It was very good, but Monte cheated a bit, and a product that big has its own advantages and disadvantages. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Then beyond that base requirement, which is so seldom met to my satisfaction, I want source material that meets my preferences (naturally). Since I don't like horror, anything smacking of trenchcoats, tieflings, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, DragonLance, Planescape, and a bunch of other stuff, I'm probably forgetting--the universe of adventure writers that sometimes cater to my tastes is somewhat limited. When such a writer manages to satisfy the base requirement, I can appreciate his good work, but I'm not likely to run it, and thus don't benefit from it. I think there are some critical, err, "literary" objections to much of the work referenced in that preceding paragraph, that goes beyond mere preference. But I'm sure that is a huge discussion that should be done separately, if at all. Suffice here to say that I find much of the hard work put into making everything "gray" rather banal and shallow, with a strong dash of faux sophistication which I find amusing, if not useful. I find that the Pazio products generally favor sophistication over depth. When they are praised for depth, it is usually, IMHO, because the reader has mistaken the former for the latter. A not unusual thing, nowadays. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> If that sounds a lot like, "flavor I don't like is bad," I'm not being that silly.  I'm saying flavor I don't like is flavor I don't like, and sometimes I have strong reasons for it.  And I'm mostly convinced that most of the praise for the flavor in the above products for being "good" by people is really, "flavor that I do like," and not nearly so convinced that the reasons are much considered beyond that.</blockquote>

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