Criteria: Evocative-Terse continuum vs. Rorschach for the referee

[The1True]

So Ease of Use is an element of Design then...

 

[squeen]

However you like to slice your spam...

In Bryce's entomology, no. He added the 4th pillar late, but that's because there was something missing from the purely mechanical elements of the first three (I think). Design can be quite broad, but I would tend to think of it as all those things that make you want to pick up an adventure to begin with, i.e. the core "Cool Idea" and additionally whether-or-not the author hit the sweet spot he was aiming for (conceptually). The other three pillars are literally just "support columns" of execution, proping up the Grand Design Notion. So, in that sense, Design is not really a "pillar"---it's the roof.

It would of course be best if The Bryce, spoke for himself. (I feel like a biblical apologist here.) But I get the feeling, @bryce0lynch is too busy fighting with the real world right now to bother.


If you go back to Bryce's review-site origins, it seems like that was mostly his point: You are executing your ideas poorly. This is bad technical writing, and you fail at the table because of it. Here's a three-pillars rubric that I used to grade you.

He almost refuses (now) to review ideas/Design because that's so subjective. i.e. What is cool?

 

[tetramorph]

I understand usability. Got it.

I understand his emphasis on evocative prose - even if I mildly disagree. In the link @Avi gave, it looks like what Lynch wants is to set up the ref to set up the players to "have some kind of feeling." I care little for this. I want the ref and the players to have fun playing a game solving puzzles and reaching goals. Watch a movie or read a book to "have a feeling." Just MHO.

So what is interactivity? As opposed to what?

And then what is design? From @squeen 's post it sounds like just designing something cool and making it playable? Yes?

Thanks for helping me understand this stuff.

 

[Beoric]

So what is interactivity? As opposed to what?

And then what is design? From @squeen 's post it sounds like just designing something cool and making it playable? Yes?

Thanks for helping me understand this stuff.

I believe interactivity refers to game elements that can be manipulated or interacted with by the PCs in open-ended ways, or that have non-obvious solutions that require experimentation. Like a pile of treasure at the bottom of a pool of acid, or a river that must be crossed with no bridge, and a dubious boat tied up on the other side, or monsters that might possibly be negotiated with. The non-interactive end of the spectrum would be "monsters attack on sight and fight to the death."

I am not entirely sure I understand what he means by design, either. I have a sense that it applies to the overall structure of the adventure, or the aggregate effect that the individual elements have on the play experience. Basic forms might be something like "hexcrawl", "dungeon crawl" or "lair assault", but to turn them into something interesting you need to think about things like frequency of wandering monster checks, the types of monsters and their goals, persistent environmental effects (like the poison gas in Tamoachan), use and goals of factions, etc. Or something like the chaos level in Marlinko, where the city gets crazier over time. But I stand to be corrected by Bryce.

 

[Avi]

Good one Avi. I did also find this:



Which in summary is:

1. Ease of Use at the Table
2. Evocative Writing
3. Interactivity
4. Design

But it's not what I remember. I wonder if the book chapter (rough draft) was taken down.

I would say:
1) Ease - how formatting helps the DM get the "room" quickly in the correct order
2) Evocative - helps the DM remember the "room" and transfer it to the players (Always causes me issues as I need to translate...)
3) Interactivity - the players have "things" to do (or as our host will put "fuck with room" ;-)
4) Design - the module has a "rhyme and reason" that is not rules derived.

 

[squeen]

I understand his emphasis on evocative prose - even if I mildly disagree. In the link @Avi gave, it looks like what Lynch wants is to set up the ref to set up the players to "have some kind of feeling." I care little for this. I want the ref and the players to have fun playing a game solving puzzles and reaching goals. Watch a movie or read a book to "have a feeling." Just MHO.

I think you are over-stating what evocative is...perhaps based on some past bad experience with a story-teller DM? It's not that.

In it's simplest form it's good adjectives. Powerful word choice. A well crafted sentence can evoke, a weak one will leave you feeling flat (e.g. "The room is large 30 feet by 60 feet...").

Why do we want to evoke? Because it puts both the player and the DM in the right mindset. They both mentally regurgitate past imagery and paint the scene in their minds (differently!...but close enough). If you don't evoke, and you want to fill out a scene with some detail...it's going to end up being a wall-of-text. Zzzzz....

There is an analogy in art/illustration. You hint as forms and make the viewers mind complete the image. That's the jedi-master way to paint. The sophmoric way is to zoom down in Photoshop to an infinite level-of-detail and fill everything in hyper-realistically (the way a computer does). The freshman way is to use stick figures.

I think you (and I) both want our players to "have a feeling", but just not in with the negative connotations of "story time". We do want our players anxious or scared when the poking through ancient ruins. We want them to have a sense of wonder when they find something amazing/unusual. We'd like them to possibly panic when they are being chased out of the dungeon. That's the sort of subtle emotional manipulations I think a good DM strives for. Evocative language when describing a setting can help.

So what is interactivity? As opposed to what?

Beoric nailed that. Basically an inert environment w/ combat.

And then what is design? From @squeen 's post it sounds like just designing something cool and making it playable? Yes?

Perhaps it's easiest to understand design by the lack of it. It's a fun-house dungeon, random monster placement. A red dragon in a 20x20 room right down the hall from 100 orcs usually equals poor Design.

I think Hawk's Bottomless pit of Zorth is a wonderful modern example of good design.

 

[tetramorph]

Okay, @squeen, I think I am starting to see it.

There must be some truly bad modules published out there to have to say outloud some of this stuff.

 

[Beoric]

There must be some truly bad modules published out there to have to say outloud some of this stuff.

There are. There are also modules that are generally accepted to be pretty good, but which suffer so badly from the design features that Bryce criticizes that I just can't read them. A lot of the 2e-era stuff falls into this category for me, including well-liked modules in the "B" series (after B4) and things like that Sahuagin series by Cordell that @PrinceofNothing likes.

 

[Yora]

I've seen several adventures in which the read aloud text at the start covers two full pages. And I think some of them actually had a really good core.

 

[PrinceofNothing]

There are. There are also modules that are generally accepted to be pretty good, but which suffer so badly from the design features that Bryce criticizes that I just can't read them. A lot of the 2e-era stuff falls into this category for me, including well-liked modules in the "B" series (after B4) and things like that Sahuagin series by Cordell that @PrinceofNothing likes.

They are a bit on the chubby side but that's okay after a couple of drinks.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

There are. There are also modules that are generally accepted to be pretty good, but which suffer so badly from the design features that Bryce criticizes that I just can't read them. A lot of the 2e-era stuff falls into this category for me, including well-liked modules in the "B" series (after B4) and things like that Sahuagin series by Cordell that @PrinceofNothing likes.

For me, the archetypal examples of this are the RPGA tournament modules. Not that they're terrible in their original context, but they have a number of faults like the "two pages of boxed text to start the adventure off" that are forgivable in that context but obnoxious outside of it, and no modern player will be using them in anything much resembling that original context.

 

[Beoric]

For me, the archetypal examples of this are the RPGA tournament modules. Not that they're terrible in their original context, but they have a number of faults like the "two pages of boxed text to start the adventure off" that are forgivable in that context but obnoxious outside of it, and no modern player will be using them in anything much resembling that original context.

That tracks. I note Rahasia was both an RPGA module and a B-series module (B7).