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Message: <blockquote data-quote="johnnype" data-source="post: 3367366" data-attributes="member: 1944">If you don't know what I'm talking about then <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060317a" target="_blank">read this </a> as it explains it better than I can. Essentialy encounters in published adventures are now presented in one or two pages that include a map of the site where the encounter takes place. This is supposed to cut down on "frequent references to other books."Now, I haven't had a chance to try it out myself but I can't see it being all that useful or necessary. As a matter of fact it just strikes me as another way to pad the page count (what took one page before now takes two). But that's not all. John Cooper, who most of you know for his detailed reviews on this website, had this to say about it in his review of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft:"At its face value, having a book set up so that each encounter with a band of enemies takes up a single 2-page spread sounds like an excellent idea. And it is an excellent idea, don't get me wrong - if it can be sustained. The problem is, it can't: every encounter isn't going to take up the same amount of words so that it fills up a 2-page spread nice and evenly. That leads to some places where filler becomes patently obvious - like the artwork reruns within the same book - and others where important information is left out because there simply isn't room for it. The best examples of this latter problem are in the encounters with Count Strahd von Zarovich himself. The authors present Strahd's full stats starting on page 6, and they take up a whole page and a half all by themselves. Therefore, in any 2-page encounter spread featuring the Count, what we get are cropped-down stats that leave out required information like his feats, skills, and a handful of his important special abilities. In effect, what we're left with is a partial stat block that cannot actually be used as-is to run that encounter (the DM will invariably have to turn back to pages 6-7 to find out the information he'll need), so the question must be asked: why include it at all? Why not just refer the DM to pages 6-7? The answer, sadly, is that doing so would leave a gaping hole in that 2-page encounter spread, and would make it painfully obvious that the whole concept is not one that can be realized for every encounter. It's a great idea when the encounter fits nicely on 2 pages, but in many cases it's just not practical to even make the attempt. (One question I have is why the layout guys didn't monkey around with font sizes; I'd be willing to bet you could fit in a complete - and thus actually useful - set of Strahd stats if they bumped the font size down a notch or two as needed.)Another problem with the 2-page encounter spread is you end up with quite a lot of duplicated information. For example, every time a Strahd zombie shows up in an encounter - and over the course of the adventure, they show up quite a few times! - you get a full set of stats for them. All of that duplication adds up to a lot of wasted space; I'll leave the actual page count difference as an exercise for someone with a lot more curiosity (and time!) than I do, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could recover a good 20 pages or so by deleting out the duplicated entries. When you're plunking down $34.95 for a 224-page hardcover, I imagine you (like me) don't like to see all of that waste. "John has a lot more to say about the book. You can read the entire thing <a href="http://www.enworld.org/reviews.php?do=review&reviewid=3221768" target="_blank">here</a>. To me it sounds like a colossal waste of time and, excuse the pun, space. What do you think?</blockquote>

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