Warning: I wrote a lot more in response than I expected to at the start here. My bad!
There's this great tension that seems to exist between adventure writers about exactly how much they should dictate what the GM finds vs what the GM gets to make up on their own. I've seen people (such as Beau) argue that it should be prescribed by the module, but many others seem to favor the "random every time" approach. There are two competing priorities here.
The first is "replayability" which I think is a faulty reason. The gist is that the author wants to make it so that every table's experience is different and unique to them. If you're one of those special groups that runs the origina I6 Ravenloft every Halloween, that might be cool for replayability as well. For almost everyone else, when was the last time you ran the same adventure multiple times or cared if another table got the same magic items as you when they ran it? If you did, do you think your players even remembered that there was a ring of protection in room 23? The answer to these are "almost never", "not at all", and "not a chance".
Adventure writers are almost never best served to tell the reader that there are 2d8 gems in a room. Just roll it as the author and say "you found 5 gems (2 x A, B, C)". Making the GM roll treasure in your module probably means you need to think up more interesting things to give as treasure. People buy the modules so they don't have to roll on the treasure tables. If they don't like a piece of treasure, they can choose to change it anyway.
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The second reason is more justifiable from an authorship perspective: space. Barton's horde entry is 186 words. Beau's is 457. That's 2.5 times the words. If you're publishing a physical product, you end up being very cognoscente of trying to avoid bloat. Barton doesn't seem to care about keeping Arden Vul's layout tidy, but if you're trying to do control panel layout or keep things constrained due to page count costs, it's a real restriction. I had to make a lot of hard choices in Citadel of the Sun-Kings related to detail vs brevity so that things would fit in the final layout nicely.
If you're writing a limited-scope module (like I just did for Necrotic Gnome with Quick Delve #5 - Golden Lies, coming soon!) you are given a specific word count to stick to pretty closely. There's a real balance of getting the most out of every word. You want to drop a ton of cool ideas and fun treasure. Then you realize you've eaten up 1/8 of your entire word count on a single room. It's a tough balance.
I could go on, but I think I've rambled long enough at the bottom of someone else's blog post!
(Sorry, not trying to name drop my upcoming adventures, just using them as experience to justify my ideas.)
> The first is "replayability" which I think is a faulty reason.
Yeah, totally agree. In the instances where I have run the same module multiple times (I'm running AV for two tables, and ran lost mines of phandelver in ~4 different systems for the same group), it's the variety comes from what the players do differently or a dozen other places. I don't need the variety to come from treasure tables.
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> The second reason is more justifiable from an authorship perspective: space. Barton's horde entry is 186 words. Beau's is 457. That's 2.5 times the words.
Yeah, absolutely. When you have a space constraint, you're now trying to get the most bang for your buck out of your words. If I could edit arden vul, there's so much I would cut (fluff language, history in paragraphs, etc) that I think I could get all of the extra assistance I want without increasing the page count and have a more playable product at the end.
That said, if your book is already lean (which matters a lot more in print than pdf/digital, IMO), it's definitely a tough problem.
Thanks, as always, for dropping by and chiming in, Michael
Warning: I wrote a lot more in response than I expected to at the start here. My bad!
There's this great tension that seems to exist between adventure writers about exactly how much they should dictate what the GM finds vs what the GM gets to make up on their own. I've seen people (such as Beau) argue that it should be prescribed by the module, but many others seem to favor the "random every time" approach. There are two competing priorities here.
The first is "replayability" which I think is a faulty reason. The gist is that the author wants to make it so that every table's experience is different and unique to them. If you're one of those special groups that runs the origina I6 Ravenloft every Halloween, that might be cool for replayability as well. For almost everyone else, when was the last time you ran the same adventure multiple times or cared if another table got the same magic items as you when they ran it? If you did, do you think your players even remembered that there was a ring of protection in room 23? The answer to these are "almost never", "not at all", and "not a chance".
Adventure writers are almost never best served to tell the reader that there are 2d8 gems in a room. Just roll it as the author and say "you found 5 gems (2 x A, B, C)". Making the GM roll treasure in your module probably means you need to think up more interesting things to give as treasure. People buy the modules so they don't have to roll on the treasure tables. If they don't like a piece of treasure, they can choose to change it anyway.
---
The second reason is more justifiable from an authorship perspective: space. Barton's horde entry is 186 words. Beau's is 457. That's 2.5 times the words. If you're publishing a physical product, you end up being very cognoscente of trying to avoid bloat. Barton doesn't seem to care about keeping Arden Vul's layout tidy, but if you're trying to do control panel layout or keep things constrained due to page count costs, it's a real restriction. I had to make a lot of hard choices in Citadel of the Sun-Kings related to detail vs brevity so that things would fit in the final layout nicely.
If you're writing a limited-scope module (like I just did for Necrotic Gnome with Quick Delve #5 - Golden Lies, coming soon!) you are given a specific word count to stick to pretty closely. There's a real balance of getting the most out of every word. You want to drop a ton of cool ideas and fun treasure. Then you realize you've eaten up 1/8 of your entire word count on a single room. It's a tough balance.
I could go on, but I think I've rambled long enough at the bottom of someone else's blog post!
(Sorry, not trying to name drop my upcoming adventures, just using them as experience to justify my ideas.)
> The first is "replayability" which I think is a faulty reason.
Yeah, totally agree. In the instances where I have run the same module multiple times (I'm running AV for two tables, and ran lost mines of phandelver in ~4 different systems for the same group), it's the variety comes from what the players do differently or a dozen other places. I don't need the variety to come from treasure tables.
------
> The second reason is more justifiable from an authorship perspective: space. Barton's horde entry is 186 words. Beau's is 457. That's 2.5 times the words.
Yeah, absolutely. When you have a space constraint, you're now trying to get the most bang for your buck out of your words. If I could edit arden vul, there's so much I would cut (fluff language, history in paragraphs, etc) that I think I could get all of the extra assistance I want without increasing the page count and have a more playable product at the end.
That said, if your book is already lean (which matters a lot more in print than pdf/digital, IMO), it's definitely a tough problem.
Thanks, as always, for dropping by and chiming in, Michael