Quote from: Brad on January 18, 2023, 10:56:41 AM
I think this thread demonstrates something very important: good GMs should write their own adventures and dungeons. When you're using a published adventure, you have to succumb to the sensibilities of someone who might do things differently than you would, and you also have to wade through a bunch of crap that might be too sparse to be useful or so verbose to be impenetrable. When I write a description of a dungeon room, I put whatever I think is important and/or interesting, and I *remember* that. Because I wrote it. It might be a bullet point or two, or it might be a paragraph, but because I wrote it myself I know how it's supposed to work in the grand scheme of things. Contrast with a published megadungeon and it becomes a pain in the royal ass to keep everything working properly. I tried to run Undermountain once because I am enamored with it, but that was an exercise in futility.

As I'm going through the old Undermountain material I'm finding that the two best aspects are the fact that very little of the original dungeon is filled in (and those maps are great, albeit large & unwieldy), and you've got a thin backstory to work with as much or little as you like.  But damn those room and encounter descriptions can get convoluted to the point of uselessness. 

In some ways the 5e version is easier to use or at least comprehend.  Maps are smaller and tighter; the room descriptions are nested lists with a mix of bolded text and bullets; and the whole thing is explicitly tied to the mad mage Halaster.  They also allow for expansion on every level.  But it also tries too hard to push factions and alliance building which is annoying given that pretty much everything in the dungeon is evil and will betray you sooner or later.  Guess it's part of the 5e "gray area" moral agenda.  We stake vampires and end drow, not befriend them.  Not positive though, as I own no other 5e products.

So with all this together, I'm pleased as I can make it my own, echoing one of the points made above.  But I don't think I'd run any published version of it quite as written.

I want minimal, but interesting.

Huge pile of broken chairs dominates the chamber (giant rat lair)
...rat clan will defend area to death

Chained coffin floats over an crescent shaped altar made of volcanic rock
...coffin shakes if approached

Absolutely empty, except for sticky mucous on the floors, walls and ceiling.
...a giant slime cube just left the area dragging valuable treasure with it

I absolutely will NOT read (nor write) boxed text.

Rytrasmi nailed it - there's something about reading boxed text that causes players to tune out, even short text! Far better to glance down, read a quick reminder about the room and describe it aloud quickly giving eye contact to the players.

Quote from: Spinachcat on January 19, 2023, 12:22:01 AM
I absolutely will NOT read (nor write) boxed text.

Rytrasmi nailed it - there's something about reading boxed text that causes players to tune out, even short text! Far better to glance down, read a quick reminder about the room and describe it aloud quickly giving eye contact to the players.

That's why I've been experimenting with putting key words for the initial impression of the room into a box.  I'm trying to reform boxed text into something useful, i.e. not something you read aloud, but things that are supposed to really stand out.

I admit that the results so far are mixed, and I attribute most of the negatives to the connotations that a box of text brings to mind when you see one.  I've also tried this with some success:

- Room Name and Number as header
- Initial room phrases in short paragraph, occasionally bullets when useful
- "Box" with creature info, but with the box formatted to only have top and bottom border, not sides.
- Any longer text for clarity
- Trap: Short stats on trap, explanation as needed, though description and interactions are in earlier text.
- Treasure: Stats on treasure, ditto on earlier descriptions and interactions, often uses bullets.

Leave out any section that doesn't apply to the room.  This format seems to break up the wall of text effect while still allowing for longer text when needed.  Plus, creature stats in a box with left and right borders feels kind of cramped, but taking the sides out works fine.

However, lately I've been just sticking "Creature: " before "Trap", using bullets for multiple type or short stat block for single type.  It's not quite as useful in play as the above format, but it's notably easier to copy, paste, modify when I'm writing or editing the adventure.

Another question is Keying the dungeon:

How do you label rooms, levels, areas, etc not only in a single dungeon but in a multilevel Delve.   I have a 10 level megadungeon with thousands of rooms.  How would and do people handle this sprawling amount of room structure. 

Please keep the conversation to discussing the topic of Dungeon Keying and  not as to why I chose to the number and type of rooms.

Quote from: THE_Leopold on January 19, 2023, 08:07:42 AM
Another question is Keying the dungeon:

How do you label rooms, levels, areas, etc not only in a single dungeon but in a multilevel Delve.   I have a 10 level megadungeon with thousands of rooms.  How would and do people handle this sprawling amount of room structure. 

Please keep the conversation to discussing the topic of Dungeon Keying and  not as to why I chose to the number and type of rooms.

Keep in mind the rule of 7, as in a person can generally only keep in their head a maximum of seven things at once--less under non-optimal conditions (e.g. after running a game for several hours).

A full list of rooms, 1 through 3,000 is obviously bad.  It's keyed but almost useless to organize.  Less obvious, is that breaking it down by level is still not enough, especially if there is a lot of vertical paths (and there should be in a megadungeon). 

Let's say you have 3,000 rooms.  OK, 300 per level, on average.  Divide those into logical groupings by architecture, monster areas, etc into 4-7 rooms each.  Say 5 rooms on average.  That gets you down to 60 groupings per level.  Still way too many.  So you need another level of organization between the groupings and the dungeon level.  There will be about 10-15 of those per level. Call them regions.

If it were me, I'd make it a point of thinking about entrance/exit to both room groups (easy) and regions (somewhat harder to do well, but worth it).  Then summarize the dungeon level to level passages at the start of the level, with references to the regions for more details. 

It's almost impossible to get a handle on a dungeon that large, but if it can be done at all, it will be because there are carefully chosen bits of information organized in the correct room/group/regions/level/overall dungeon descriptions.  Rooms 97-102 might as well be useless, but Rooms 97-102 of the Goblin Outpost (group) in the Red Goblin Lair (region) of Level 1, is something I can remember at a high level when the party approaches it and then drill-down to recall as they hit it.

Since I'm only writing for myself with no intention of ever publishing the stuff, I keep my keys straightforward and simple.  Usually I'll jot down notes about the level itself, including random encounters/events/discoveries and features germane to that level.

Every room gets a name and number, though some might be grouped together like (25-30: Cell block).  Sometimes I number consecutively through the whole dungeon, other times I restart the numbering for every level.  In some cases if there are, say, a bunch of small interconnected caverns, rooms or whatever, I'll just put together a mini table with random rolls periodically to determine what the PCs find/see.  This could include maps, small bits of treasure, discarded backpacks, etc., to keep things interesting.

Pretty vanilla, but that's how I grew up doing it and I see no reason to change at this point.

I am glad that folks spoke up about Regions, Groups, and Zones to further break down the massive amount of areas.

This was my thinking as well to cluster the dungeons/areas into groupings to categorize them further as some of the areas populated by certain monsters span multiple levels.

I am interested to see how others would do such as tying both Original Topic and this concept together has been a challenge for me in my megadungeon.

Quote from: Persimmon on January 17, 2023, 04:21:44 PM
What about you?  Where do you fall in the description spectrum?  Minimalist or over the top? This presumes you're using something someone else wrote, though I put my principles into practice in my own games.

I like minimalist.

I'm a module collector. I love them. But if I'm going to be honest with myself, 90%+ of all modules add no value at all. The time and energy it takes to read through a module, read it a second time taking notes, and a third time fine-tuning, is far, far more than it takes to just create your own adventure. Story ideas? Fine. But it takes me longer to read a module than it does to watch a Steven Seagal movie, and the plots usually aren't a lot better. I'm more likely to steal a plot idea from an old John Wayne western or an episode of the Thundercats, as they are so effective at telling a complete story in 20 minutes. So I can't even grant most modules credit for idea mining. Contemporary professional standards in module publishing guarantee complete uselessness. Still, collectors like me will buy them.

But that still leaves the <10% of modules that actually do bring something to the table.

I consider Keep on the Borderlands to be one of the best modules ever created. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate the content a 7. It's good. It's fun. But it's nothing earth-shattering. I bump that up to 8 because it covers the bases of what you'd need to run a campaign. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And then I bump that to a 10 for what I feel most sets it apart from the rabble. This module legit does save me a lot of time and energy. I can run it zero-prep.

What makes it work is the descriptions are kept brief enough that I can read ahead the next 3 rooms while the players explore the current room.

It wouldn't work if the stat blocks were put in a separate place. Too much flipping back and forth.
It wouldn't work if the stat blocks were nicely formatted. That would take up too much space on the page. Brief in-line stat blocks are key. In my own notes, my in-line stat blocks are even leaner than what you see in Keep.
It wouldn't work if the descriptions had box text. That would take up too much space.
Bulletted lists any any forced format or outline also needlessly add space with no real return on the page real estate investment. With some exceptions, plain old paragraph format is usually the most space efficient.

Quote from: Brad on January 18, 2023, 10:56:41 AM
I think this thread demonstrates something very important: good GMs should write their own adventures and dungeons. When you're using a published adventure, you have to succumb to the sensibilities of someone who might do things differently than you would, and you also have to wade through a bunch of crap that might be too sparse to be useful or so verbose to be impenetrable.

Given my feelings on the 90%+ of modules, obviously I agree with this. I reached that conclusion a long, long time ago. But then it's like, okay, so I'm going to write my own adventure. And what I find is certain parts of certain types of adventures can be a lot of work. Even when I'm doing a quick prep, slap an adventure together last minute, a lot of that involves me flipping back and forth between monsters and magic items to jot down some stats so I have them handy during play. For an adventure of appreciable length and detail, that in itself can take a couple of hours or more.

So there is a lot of nuts and bolts work where modules can be a huge time saver without stepping on my creative toes.

I'm also a minimalist. If I wanted verbose descriptions, I'd feed my bullet points as prompts into ChatGPT.