On Adventure Design, A Solved Problem
These are solved problems.
In design, there are factors that go beyond taste and get into actual facts involved in the human interface.
If I put heavy black lines behind my text, that makes my text illegible. That's not to say illegible text or the aesthetics of heavy black lines can't be to your liking,
Boxed Text
You get two sentences, or about 18 words. You can want it in a module, you can think it's great, you can make whatever defense you want. But it's been examined here. The facts are, in a social situation, it is exceedingly difficult for human beings to listen to oration as opposed to conversation.
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| I'm on this blog AND in a terrible powerpoint somewhere! |
Well, then, I'd say your approach is incorrect.
You aren't doing that. If you are "coming up with descriptions from outlines" then it's a sign you haven't prepared. What you are doing, is telling someone something about what's in your head. Can you describe to a friend what the interior of your car is like? Your house when you were growing up?
What you should do, is be able to imagine the environment inside your head. This is easy for content you create and more time consuming for content you buy.
Note how I am very explicitly not saying that the module should tell you what the environment is like.
The impression is given by the setting and atmosphere. A module named "The dire caves of the were-rat terror!" Should have dank caves with shadows, flickering torchlight, ancient half-submerged objects that things can jump out of hammer horror style.
The module should never use boxed text for that. The module should use the room description to describe what the characters can interact with in the room! Check out my series on Set Design if you want my theory on that.
What about the lack of poetry in the room outline? Doesn't the outline format take up too much space?
Brendan asks these questions over here at Necropraxis.
These comments result from a lack of a published example of set design. This is something that will be rectified shortly.
His example given in the article of highlighting the important features was in fact the very method my father used to prepare an adventure. The examples used in the set design series are specific personal examples directly from my notebook. They are not how one produces a published set design.What I am saying, is that the highlighted portions of his example are literally examples of what can be written to the left of the arrow
E.G.
Guard Room w/Teleport Corridor 4)
Racks of weapons-> 15 swords, 30 spears, 3 hvy. x-bows, 200 bolts, 10 shields
Floor is strewn deeply with rushes, cracked and slightly buckled->Similar to rest of tower
Last 10' of the corridor is completely pristine->Floor nearby is cracked and buckled
|->*One Way Portal to location T between rooms 7 & 8.
A simple perusal of the number of lines required for any of my examples compared to the number of lines required for the actual written text rather succinctly addresses the format size complaints.
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