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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 7775998" data-attributes="member: 6879023">This whole focus on a couple of words that has triggered moderation and long diatribes is ridiculous. It is at best tertiary and by far that as part of a discussion of stat block formatting which is the matter at hand. This is not a political forum. Having said that: Half the reason I haven't been buying D&D adventures from WoTC (have bought some third party stuff) is exactly BECAUSE they are more interested in producing Works of Art rather than functional reference books. As someone with older eyes (been dungeon crawling since 1981), my eyes aren't what they used to be. I definitely prefer clean, openly kerned, non-serif fonts with very clean characteristics on backgrounds that are fairly decent contrast and uncluttered by all sorts of background art. If I wanted Art Works, I'd buy paintings. When I'm buying core rulebooks, I want clear reference sources that harness the best information presentation to be complete, clear, and concise and well referenced. If I'm buying a module, I want to have key things jump out at me (boxed, bolded, different font, some sort of delimete) and not a lot of 'blah blah blah' prose. At best, that should go into an introduction or section labelled 'the enemy plan' where the motivations, strategies, and so on of the foes are laid out in some detail. Area or encounter descriptions should focus on point form, high scan-ability, and concise and uncluttered presentation of necessary tactical key points and critter data. Furthermore, putting stat blocks into a computer for any purpose is helped a lot by any sort of organized and adhered to standard of presentation that has set locations and identification for different fields. Long prosaic passages are the anathema of ever being able to extract data for game supporting purposes. Other publishers get this. I'm a big fan of maps, infographics, point form, concise shorthands that are standardized and don't leave out obvious things like NPC level (who thought that was a good idea? really?). I'm also a big believer that boxed text was (beyond the first halting adventure anyone played) a bad idea that need never recur. Usually the players' eyes glazed over as the DM worked his way through the boxed text (and often enough they missed key obvious things in their boxed text that the players should have seen so as a DM you could not rely on the boxed text). There was also the issue of the boxed text giving too much away. Clean up your books, realize they are reference materials for gaming, not some sort love letter to posterity. If you want to print 500 copies of the core books with faux dragonhide complete with scales, with gold gilt vellum pages, hand written by an order of ascetic AD&D rules lawyers.... that's your business. But if you want to sell books to those of us who like to actually play the game (vs. simply chat about it), we'd prefer for the most part to have our info in easy reference formats, sans distractions and over-heavy prose. This post was probably twice the size it needed to be, or three times. This is the kind of bogginess you get with natural language without shorthands and a focus on concise writing.</blockquote>

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