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Aidan Warren's avatar

You highlight that the faction descriptions provide an order of battle for each faction. What do you think makes for a good order of battle description in this type of adventure design? It seems to be an under-discussed topic, I can’t find any blogs discussing it.

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Aidan Warren's avatar

A personal quibble about room keys: the habit of keying everything in Level-Number format is inefficient and unnecessary. It's entirely unnecessary on maps themselves. Just write "Level X" on the level's map, there's no need to write X-1, X-2, X-3, and so on for every room. It's also inefficient when writing long lists of rooms.

Take the dry location listing from construction notes: "Locations: 2-48, 2-49, 2-56C, 3-51, 3-117, 4-51A, 4-51B, 4-74, 4-151A, 4-152, 5-6, 5-18, 5-25, 5-41, 5-42, 5-46 to 5-49, 5-52, 5-104, 6-1, 6-50, 6-51, 6-54, 6-68, 6-92 to 6-98, 6-104 to 6-107, 7-78 to 7-84, 7-138, 7-139, 8-25, 8-26, 8-76, 8-159, 8-162, 8-165, 9-31 to 9-48, 9-76 to 9-82, 9-108 to 9-126, all worked areas of Level 10, SL5-32, SL5-36 to SL5-42, SL6-4, SL6-6, SL6-35, SL9-27, SL9-30"

Wouldn't it be so much easier to parse if we organized this list by level? For example:

Locations by Level: 2 - 48, 49, 56C; 3 - 51, 117; 4 - 51A, 51B, 74, 151A, 152; 5 - 6, 18, 25, 41, 42, 46 to 49, 52, 104; 6 - 1, 50, 51, 54, 68, 92 to 98, 104 to 107; 7 - 78 to 84, 138, 139; 8 - 25, 26, 76, 159, 162, 165; 9 - 31 to 48, 76 to 82, 108 to 126; 10 - all worked areas; SL5 - 32, 36 to 42; SL6 - 4, 6, 35; SL9 - 27, 30.

Ideally we would devote a line to each level, but I've kept mine to the same format restrictions as the original. Just bolding the levels in my list would go a long way.

Over-prioritizing uniformity is a common style issue in dungeon keying. In general, I think it's good to be flexible with format issues like this. The Level-Number format works great for referencing a single room, but it's very poor for maps and long lists of room keys wherein it adds redundant information at the cost of visual clutter.

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