Modules: Made to Read vs Made to Run?

[Staffan]

Wrong about that. Many are using tablets or eReaders for content consumption, and those have limited storage and limited RAM.
My 10.5" likebook's page turn rate is severely limited by document size and complexity. Sentinel Comics was pretty much unusable. Alien PF was pretty quick, Similar sizes, but very different complexities, and very different UX. Both are much slower than the SC preview printer friendly, which is 22 pp... it can move the majority into RAM and then generate faster page turns.

Which reminds me: the Sentinel Comics adventures are pretty well tuned to be ready to run with a read through or two.

If you're going to make a book for electronic reading, PDF is a bad choice. A webpage/website is much better. A well-made website adapts to the equipment used to read it, and ideally it can offer the reader options regarding font size, light/dark mode, and so on. It also lets you have multiple instances of the same document open to different places – e.g. one tab for the map, one tab for room descriptions, one tab for each monster, one tab for each spell or special ability used by those monsters, and so on.

I have run adventures both from PDFs (e.g. PF2's The Show Must Go On and whatever part 2 was called, as well as various ETU adventures) and from D&D Beyond (Princes of the Apocalypse), and from a technical POV D&D Beyond blew PDFs out of the water. The adventure itself wasn't as good, but the technical side of things worked much better.

I get that if you primarily publish hardcopy you design for that, and then you essentially get a PDF "for free" as part of that process (though ideally, you'd massage the PDF some to put in bookmarks and hyperlinks and stuff). But if your primary channel is digital, PDF is a bad option.

 

[Bill Zebub]

If you're going to make a book for electronic reading, PDF is a bad choice. A webpage/website is much better. A well-made website adapts to the equipment used to read it, and ideally it can offer the reader options regarding font size, light/dark mode, and so on. It also lets you have multiple instances of the same document open to different places – e.g. one tab for the map, one tab for room descriptions, one tab for each monster, one tab for each spell or special ability used by those monsters, and so on.

I have run adventures both from PDFs (e.g. PF2's The Show Must Go On and whatever part 2 was called, as well as various ETU adventures) and from D&D Beyond (Princes of the Apocalypse), and from a technical POV D&D Beyond blew PDFs out of the water. The adventure itself wasn't as good, but the technical side of things worked much better.

I get that if you primarily publish hardcopy you design for that, and then you essentially get a PDF "for free" as part of that process (though ideally, you'd massage the PDF some to put in bookmarks and hyperlinks and stuff). But if your primary channel is digital, PDF is a bad option.

Fully agree with this. As I said above, I like to keep electronics away from the table, but I also don't find PDFs that much more useful than paper, even if hyperlinked.

But if the potential of the browser were unlocked? Yeah, I'd think about it.

What the hobby (industry) needs is digital publishing software for adventures, so that authors don't need to know how it works.

The HUGE feature here would be the ability to choose your system.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If you're going to make a book for electronic reading, PDF is a bad choice. A webpage/website is much better. A well-made website adapts to the equipment used to read it, and ideally it can offer the reader options regarding font size, light/dark mode, and so on. It also lets you have multiple instances of the same document open to different places – e.g. one tab for the map, one tab for room descriptions, one tab for each monster, one tab for each spell or special ability used by those monsters, and so on.

I have run adventures both from PDFs (e.g. PF2's The Show Must Go On and whatever part 2 was called, as well as various ETU adventures) and from D&D Beyond (Princes of the Apocalypse), and from a technical POV D&D Beyond blew PDFs out of the water. The adventure itself wasn't as good, but the technical side of things worked much better.

I get that if you primarily publish hardcopy you design for that, and then you essentially get a PDF "for free" as part of that process (though ideally, you'd massage the PDF some to put in bookmarks and hyperlinks and stuff). But if your primary channel is digital, PDF is a bad option.

Not for me. I will go to great lengths to convert material out of HTML into a form that doesn't require an internet connection and/or a subscription. PDF is my preference by far, because I want my electronic documents to be...mine. if I have to look at something as a web page instead, I will either not do it at all or resent that fact.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Seriously. Have you read through any of the modules some of us have pointed out in this thread? When I ran Winter's Daughter for my 5e group, the entirety of prep was uploading the maps to the VTT and lightly reworking the backstory and a couple of names to fit the setting I was using. The entire module I ran direct from the book, no prep required.

Same thing when I ran in OSE/Dolmenwood proper. 3 sessions of quality interactive dungeon crawling, no prep beyond digital logistics.

I believe reworking the backstory and changing names to fit your setting would not fall under my personal definition of 'no prep'. You actually read the module, saw what needed to be changed to fit your campaign, and then did it. I myself would call that 'prep', and thus to your credit you would not be one of the DMs I've been talking about.

Now whether you don't think what you did was enough for you to consider it being called 'prep'... that I can't answer. But at least to me, you've seemed to do what I think a good DM should be doing... preparing material prior to use so that it fits your game.

 

[mamba]

I would suggest that "easy to prep" is not the same as "little to no prep". The former is about success rate. The latter is about effort.

easy is also about effort, if it takes a lot of effort, then it was not easy

But if the DM just doesn't want to do work for their game and will just wing it because they can or because they just can't be bothered... I don't feel that is something to be applauded.

no one is applauding that, what is being applauded are adventures that save on preparation time by being concise, well organized, providing required information in the right places, etc. so that prep takes less time and effort because of that

 

[Bagpuss]

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.

So many Call of Cthulhu modules suffer from this.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

One of my pet peeves (#1,438 in my list, to be precise) is adventure background prefaced with "Sages don't know for sure, but..."

WTF?

 

[Micah Sweet]

So many Call of Cthulhu modules suffer from this.

Maybe it's not directly for the PCs? Perhaps it's for the GM to provide context to their narration of the setting and characters? Setting information is common in published adventures anyway, not all of it pertaining directly to the adventure at hand, and is considered a selling point. Hardly something an adventure "suffers from" in any way beyond personal preference.

Because it's not just about servicing the PCs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of my pet peeves (#1,438 in my list, to be precise) is adventure background prefaced with "Sages don't know for sure, but..."

WTF?

Not sure what your problem is here. Throwing a little ambiguity into the lore allows more space for alternate interpretations.

 

[Staffan]

Not for me. I will go to great lengths to convert material out of HTML into a form that doesn't require an internet connection and/or a subscription. PDF is my preference by far, because I want my electronic documents to be...mine. if I have to look at something as a web page instead, I will either not do it at all or resent that fact.

There's nothing preventing a web page from being hosted locally, though I'll admit it's not a common thing these days.

But the thing is that a PDF is designed to do one thing, and that is to preserve the formatting on a piece of paper for electronic presentation and usually printing. That makes it great if that formatting is important to you. For example, I'd rather have a blank character sheet as a PDF than an HTML file. But if you have a PDF designed to mimic a letter/A4 page and try to read it on a tablet or, God forbid, a phone, it is horrible. Heck, even reading it on a laptop is a nightmare, because it'll likely be zoomed to 70% or less and you'll have to either continually scroll up and down or try to read teeny tiny text.

Of course, PDFs aren't locked to letter/A4 format. You could make one that's designed to be read on a tablet, which would probably look a lot like the D&D Essentials books if it was printed. But then you run into the issue of: what tablet? They come in many different sizes. A PDF designed for an 8" screen would look huge on a 10" one, and ridonculous on a desktop monitor. HTML + CSS solves all that.