Modules: Made to Read vs Made to Run?

[BruceWright]

After reading the adventure, most of my prep is taken condensing the session into a table-ready cheat sheet where i can see the whole session at a glance. Maps labeled with room names, short descriptions, any checks involved. Lists of NPCs, etc. Making it table-ready. I never want to be flipping pages, or worse, scrolling a computer, at the table.

 

[Celebrim]

After reading the adventure, most of my prep is taken condensing the session into a table-ready cheat sheet where i can see the whole session at a glance. Maps labeled with room names, short descriptions, any checks involved. Lists of NPCs, etc. Making it table-ready. I never want to be flipping pages, or worse, scrolling a computer, at the table.

I would love to get to that but my sessions are often really unpredictable, and invariably I have PCs or NPCs at places I don't expect them to be. Then I have to go look up the encounter location or the front/faction where that NPC is documented, or scroll to the encounter key for somewhere I wasn't expecting, or just make something up. If I was running anything as simple as a dungeon, this wouldn't be a problem. In fact, I got so frustrated by the complexity of the last two adventures I ran, I'm running a dungeon for the next adventure as a change of pace just to have something nice and simple.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Is it possible that in those terrible experiences the GMs chose modules that do require a lot of prior reading and prep? That they aren't choosing modules that can be run off the cuff? Statistically likely, I think, given that (in my experience) the vast majority of modules belong to the former category.

I'll also suggest that the "no prep" objective may be a subset of the "easy to run" crowd, but they are not synonymous. I also "read" a module several times before running it, but when it's laid out in "bullet point hell" style (thanks, @Micah Sweet!) I can do that reading, and grasp the big picture, in a fraction of the time.

I would say that is true... in that they usually are Adventurer's League modules and thus are your prototypical D&D-styled written adventures. But even though that might be true... I still have little to no faith than a person who tries to run an adventure "off-the-page" is actually going to be good, because it is always obvious when a person is actually having to spend time reading. And not only reading, but also trying to process what they have read. And time spent reading is time spent silently looking down at their papers trying to grasp just what it is they are looking at and making sense of it in a way they can then look up and try to then jump back into Narrator mode.

At least a person who is completely improvising an adventure is one who has their head up, listening intently to the players, and reacting in the moment to what is being said... while the invisible dials of new ideas of action and dialogue are flashing across their field of view in their mind's eye before they select what they want and then jump into it. That kind of person makes for a much more interesting and compelling performance to watch than the one who has to keep looking down to remind themselves of what the paperwork says because they don't have it memorized or at least in their head because they have never read it... while at the same time feeling as though they have to follow what is being written.

And look... from my perspective if I'm going to be reading a module with the intention of incorporating it into my game... I for one couldn't care less how long I have to spend reading it. A bullet-point encounter takes 2 minutes to read while a full-written longform encounter takes 8 minutes to read? Yeah? So what? Who cares how long it took? Why am I so concerned about saving those 6 minutes for my prep? If I'm going to DM... it's because I WANT to DM, and thus I don't care at all how long my prep is going to be. If I spent like 4 hours over the course of the entire week trying to get the next series of potential encounters set up in case my players make all kinds of various choices... why is that a bad thing? That's what DMing is! Being creative! Coming up with new ideas! It's D&D! And I want to play D&D, don't I? So why try and get it over with so quickly? Quite frankly, It's the same question I always have with the people who get all bent out of shape what character creation takes more than like 5 minutes. Why does that matter? You're creating a character for a game you want to play, aren't you? Don't you like roleplaying games? Why are you trying to end it so fast? Why is it such a burden that the game is telling you that you have a selection of like thirty different spells you could possibly select from at 1st level and you decide to read what those 30 different spells are? Especially when you don't actually have to do that and could just select the spells the Class section suggested to you if you really had so little time on your hands and couldn't bear to spend any of it reading the Spells section of the PHB. I just don't get it. You either want to play the game or you don't.

 

[DEFCON 1]

"No prep" and "running a module that I have not read" are nothing like the same thing.

I would suggest they are not "nothing" like the same thing, but are more "somewhat" like the same thing. Because in both cases neither DM is spending any time right before the game going over the adventure they have in front of them to actually be prepared to run the game. Both of them are doing "no prep" prior to starting. But at least with the "no prep" DM, there's a chance they might have at least read the documentation some time in the past to have in their head at least somewhat of an idea what the module was about. Which I think is better than nothing, but it's still not great.

 

[Reynard]

I would suggest they are not "nothing" like the same thing, but are more "somewhat" like the same thing. Because in both cases neither DM is spending any time right before the game going over the adventure they have in front of them to actually be prepared to run the game. Both of them are doing "no prep" prior to starting. But at least with the "no prep" DM, there's a chance they might have at least read the documentation some time in the past to have in their head at least somewhat of an idea what the module was about. Which I think is better than nothing, but it's still not great.

No.

If you are going to run a module, you need to at least read it. Otherwise you are fumbling from one moment to the next rying to figure out what the text wants you to do.

That is nothing like running off the cuff, where you are there to respond to whatever the dice, the player choices, and your own whims suggest what should happen next. There is no text to fail to understand. It is as extemporaneous, and all built on the moment.

Totally different thigs.

 

[Lanefan]

I hate, hate, hate reviews of scenarios made by those who haven't actually run through them as either a GM or a player.

What comes to immediate mind are scenarios with a lot of background information the GM gets to read about but there's no suggestions for how the PCs are expected to learn it.

Sometimes it's there so that if the PCs make inquiries the DM has something to fall back on and isn't left trying to make something up on the fly.

But if the PCs don't ask, they don't and won't learn that info. So be it; some players aren't interested in that.

Other times it's there to give the DM some context as to how and-or why things got to where they are at the time the module takes place; i.e. in-setting historical background.

But that stuff does need to be kept reasonably concise and to-the-point.

 

[Reynard]

It is actually weird that we have had so much advancement in the art of RPGs on almost every level, but we are still stuck with Hickman modules after 40 years. It's baffling, really.

 

[Lanefan]

1) Yes, but we are looking for both readability (for which prose paragraphs are best) and playability (standard templates being useful here) - you look to be prioritizing the latter, which isn't meeting the brief.

I'm not so sure about the bolded.

A point-form timeline can be every bit as readable and far easier to understand (and, at the table, use) than the same history written out in long-form paragraphs.

Example: if I'm running a game in Middle Earth and want to know the history, I'm going to look at the short-form historical timeline in Appendix B rather than wade through the books to find it; and I find Appendix B every bit as readable as the long-form books.

 

[Lanefan]

Again: you can do both. You can write the module with all the depth and lore and heavy prose you like. AND you can include tools that allow people tor it easily at the table.

How do you do that without presenting the same information twice, though?

Duplication is wasted page space, and also runs the risk of errors creeping in where the info in, say, the long-form presentation contradicts the info in the short-form.

 

[Reynard]

How do you do that without presenting the same information twice, though?

Duplication is wasted page space, and also runs the risk of errors creeping in where the info in, say, the long-form presentation contradicts the info in the short-form.

I reject the premise that replicating information is inherently bad. If the information is there for two different purposes, then it makes sense to present it twice in 2 formats that best serve those individual purposes.

This is doubly true now where page count is not a major issue for most publishers, since most modules are never printed in the first place. But even if you are talking about printed materials, distilling information into a usable format is a valid and important use of space.