Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6206991" data-attributes="member: 22424">That's a really good point. Actually, there are two really good points there.The first is that something can indeed read one way and play another, and I did always find the Delve Format infinitely better in actual use than to read (not that that's hard, right enough). And, actually, the weaker the DM, the more he seemed to benefit from the Delve Format - a poor DM armed with such a module could at least run a competent game, which is actually quite a feat for the adventure to achieve.Conversely, it is true that Paizo get a lot of points for their adventures based on the way they read. And, quite often, when you dig under the flavour text you find that the underlying adventure isn't actually all that good - in particular, their recent "Reign of Winter" path was dripping with flavour, but actually consisted of a railroad built of six smaller railroads - very disappointing.(And yet, again, that "plays better than it reads" thing can apply again - if the rails are hidden well enough, a railroad can play through extremely well. I would still argue that that's still bad adventure design, because the adventure then isn't robust against PCs going "off book" - the fact that the individual group was lucky enough not to see that weakness doesn't mean it's not there.)The other really good point is this: unless you really are running the adventure without prep, the adventure has to work as something to be read first. If I start reading "Keep on the Shadowfell", and find I simply can't get through it because the Delve Format keeps breaking me out of reading-mode, then I'll never run it because I can't read it. Conversely, "Reign of Winter" was, IMO, not a good path but, because I could read it, there is at least a chance that I'd be able to run it.So, for a general-use module (as opposed to a zero-prep "Dungeon Delves"-type product), I don't think you can* trade off "reads well" against "plays well". If your adventure reads like crap, it won't matter if it plays brilliantly, because most people just won't get that far.* Okay, that probably shouldn't be an absolute statement. But you probably knew that. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification