Adventures in Adventure Formatting

Hey, it’s James. I’ve been working hard on the Delian Tomb adventure this week and been having lots of thoughts about formatting.

There are so many considerations you have to think about when putting together an adventure:

• Are we giving the Director everything they need to run this adventure?

• Are we presenting the information in a convenient and functional way?

• Are the amount of information and functional presentation causing me to go over budgeted page count for the adventure?

That last consideration is obviously at odds with first two. It makes things a little tricky, but there is a way to balance the page count with presentation and information. The first step, we need to find out is what format the adventure could take.

To Print or Not to Print?

Matt and I chated with our production and operations teams about the this adventure, like we do every product. Digital-only products, like our fifth edition products The Beastheart and Monstrous Companions and The Talent and Psionics, can be almost any reasonable length. Page count doesn’t matter in terms of printing and shipping (the more pages a book is, the heavier and more expensive to ship it becomes), though they do matter in terms of cost and time. More pages take longer to layout and typically require more words (which cost money to write and edit) and more art and graphic design!

If you’re making a print product, you have all those considerations, plus the cost of printing and shipping. Print products are also tricky in terms of updating, so you generally have even longer review periods, because you can’t say, “Whoops! We did this wrong, here’s a new book,” without a significant cost. But those considerations are often worth it, because people seem to prefer having the product in print. We have other considerations when it comes to print as well. Is this a hardcover book? A perfect bound softcover? A staple bound magazine? A boxed set? A card deck? All of these formats have different benefits and restrictions.

For the Delian Tomb, I know the initial release is going to be a PDF. However, after many conversations, there’s a chance that we’ll release a printed version of this in the form of a boxed set someday. To that end, I’m writing this product as if it is going to be a boxed set so that if that chance becomes a reality, we’ll be ready to rock.

Starter Adventure

Since the Delian Tomb is our first official adventure for Draw Steel, we want to present it as the adventure you can use to learn how to run and play the game. Every year, my friends and I get together for a weekend and take turns running new RPGs for each other. Since this was my idea, my friends call this IntroCONso, as it is our own miniconvention. Between that and running games for folks at legit conventions, I’ve learned a lot about what you need to help get folks into the fun of a new game as quickly and smoothly as possible.

I also looked at a bunch of different starter sets for RPGs that I have on my shelf, and broke down the different elements I thought would be essential for a starting adventure (in addition to the adventure itself):

• Pregenerated Characters: When most folks try an RPG, they don’t want to spend a lot of time building a character before they get to play. Picking out character options that relate to rules you’ve never seen in practice feels more like homework than fun for a lot of people. By providing more pregens than players needed, we can give the players a choice in who to play without having them make all the decisions of character creation.

• Starting Rules: If you can slim down your core rules to just the stuff needed for the adventure that everyone, players and Director, need to know in one book, then you can provide a handy reference guide with the adventure. Since we’re providing pregens and making the game’s available treasure handouts the heroes can use, this book needs to include the rules for tests, combat, negotiations, downtime, renown, and wealth. That’s actually pretty slim if we’re cutting out classes, treasures, titles, perks, and complications.

• Cheat Sheets: Having a little handy reference with the general rules of the game on it goes a super long way. This means people are only grabbing the rulebook when they need to get in-depth about something. If we do this right, many players will only ever need to reference the cheat sheet and pay attention to their Director to learn the rules of the game.

• Handouts: Handouts aren’t just great for a starting adventure. They’re amazing for any adventure! Giving the players a map of the town where they entered, a list of quest leads, or cards for treasures they find and followers they recruit gives them something to look at without constantly asking you to see pages of a book you or one of the other players might need.

• Physical Products: I don’t know if the Delian Tomb is going to become a boxed set, but if it does, I do think battlemaps and minis in the form of cardboard standees would be pretty great to come with our game, especially since Draw Steel requires these things for combat encounters.

But Wait! There’s More!

Draw Steel isn’t just books and character sheets. For a long time, Matt and I have thought that the Director should have special sheets to track combat encounters, negotiations, and montage tests. Well, Willy made it happen. So our adventure comes with those sheets already filled out and ready to go! You can check out the WIP examples of the sheets attached to this post. They’re blank, so you can use them for your adventures.

Read Aloud Text

Now that we understand what this product looks like and we have an outline for the story, I’m thinking about how information should be presented. Many adventures have read aloud boxed text, but I think we can do better. Basically, a long paragraph of text that Directors are meant to read aloud causes players to tune out and miss critical information. It’s hard for Directors to read or paraphrase text when it’s in a long paragraph, especially if they’re dyslexic. Variable information is difficult to present in this format (such as a monster who might be there if the heroes approach an area quietly verses being hidden if the heroes come in singing “We Are the Champions”). It also means everything the heroes notice when they enter a new location is up front, but that any secrets the Director should know about are NOT included at the start of the text and buried somewhere else in the location’s description.

If you’re familiar with Where Evil Lives, then you know that we have already taken a stab at reformatting read aloud text, and it was well received. That employed bullet points for read aloud text and included any secret information right after. It’s easier to read, paraphrase, and has everything the Director needs to know up front. Here’s a look at the 

We’re using a very similar style in the Delian Tomb, since this is something we know people like, it suits our purposes, and it doesn’t take up too much space!

Where Do Stat Blocks Go?

When I think about stat blocks in an adventure, I’d like them to appear whenever they’re needed. For the most part, Draw Steel stat blocks are pretty compact. You can fit four standard creature stat blocks on a page (or six if they’re minions). That means our encounters could probably be set up as two-page spreads with a minimap, similar to how they appeared in fourth edition D&D adventures. This is hugely useful for running a combat encounter and my current assumption for how the adventure will be laid out.

However, you do spend a lot of page space repeating the same stat blocks again and again with this method. For example, the goblin warrior stat block appears three times in the first four encounters of the adventure! They’re going to appear again in part 3, which means that the goblin warrior is repeated a lot and could take up more than a page total! If it only occurs once, it is taking up 1/4th of a page instead! That’s a big difference. (We could make that even smaller by having no stat block for the goblin warrior and simply refer you to Draw Steel: Monsters, but this is a starter adventure and we want to give you everything you need to run it.) This issue isn’t unique to the warrior. Lots of stat blocks show up in the adventure more than once.

For now, I want to see if we can make some version of the minimap and stat block spread work, but time will tell. We’re still working on the layout for the core rule books, and that may impact how we go about presenting information.

More Updates Coming Soon

I’m hoping to share a preview of this adventure and the layout of the core rulebooks soon. In the meantime, come talk about it on Discord! If you are a patron and want access to our patrons-only Discord channel on the MCDM Discord server, go ahead and link your Patreon and Discord accounts.

—James