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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TikkchikFenTikktikk" data-source="post: 5512489" data-attributes="member: 67494">Here's the thing about the delve format: focusing on tactical combat paints you into this corner.Tactical combat: what does this mean if you don't know the territory, the enemies' position, etc? Conditions: how do you push, pull, slide, restrain movement, unless you know where you are in relation to every enemy for the duration of the encounter.The more tactics matter the more you have to know everything about everything in the encounter. This became a sometimes avoidable problem in 3.x and unavoidable (by design, WotC wanted to sell minis) in 4E.And so here is the conflict for WotC: if you don't detail every encounter, DMs have to do it themselves. Which, if you've ever DMed a post-3.x D&D game you know is usually a <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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /> ton of work. Especially if it's something you paid for expecting to be able to run that night.But detailing every possible encounter is impossible in good adventures. In good adventures the DM and players work together to create infinite possibilities of combat and non-combat encounters as they try to overcome obstacles between themselves and their goal. The impossibility is due to the cost of paper and psychological issues that arise when DMs and Players are faced with adventures that are 1000 pages long.If WotC had a competent digital magazine team they would have recognized and exploited the opportunity they had when they brought Dungeon in house and made it a digital exclusive. But instead they insanely, naively kept the restrictions in place that were mandated because Dungeon used to be a print-only magazine!This format of presenting combat should only be used in a published product—digital or print—for climatic encounters with a very large combat area (30x30 at the minimum) with complicated traps or terrain features.Otherwise give the DM a map that covers a large area and general guidance as to where the PCs start and where the bad guys are.Combat railroad adventures are fundamentally a failure of leadership and imagination by the team that sees fit to publish them as "professional", physical products.tl;dr: WotC created a hammer and turned adventures into nails.</blockquote>

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