| Delve Format: What do you think? |
| It is the perfect format for my DM style |
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17% |
[ 5 ] |
| It is ok, but I don't want to wait longer just for that |
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21% |
[ 6 ] |
| I can take it or leave it, really. |
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60% |
[ 17 ] |
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| Total Votes : 28 |
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| m8adam |
 Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 11:41 am Post subject: |
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Patron
Joined: 18 Nov 2008
Posts: 148
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| What is this delve format? |
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| xero |
| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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Patron
Joined: 19 Nov 2008
Posts: 67
Location: New Jersey
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| Unless I'm mistaken, delve is a way of formatting encounters so that everything the DM needs is on two facing pages. This has its benefits and its downsides. Obviously it makes the thing much easier for the DM to run, but it also places a hard limitation on how many different types of NPCs and how many special instructions and notes can be included with the encounter. It leads to simpler but easier to manage encounters. |
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| Wolfgang |
| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 5:30 pm Post subject: |
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Kobold Overlord
Joined: 30 Dec 2007
Posts: 5008
Location: The Mines
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Yep, that's it. Although 2 pages is the ideal, sometimes encounters run a single page, or 3 or 4 pages.
The thing is, it's a quantum format. Half-pages are forbidden. And it's meant to facilitate combat encounters more than others.
_________________
Wolfgang Baur
Publisher, Kobold Press |
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| xero |
| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:56 pm Post subject: |
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Patron
Joined: 19 Nov 2008
Posts: 67
Location: New Jersey
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I really like the aesthetic of delve, but I think a lot of the usefulness of it depends on the encounter types and adventure planning. As a DM, having all the information you need in an easily digestible format is crucial.
On the other hand, delve sometimes makes an adventure feel more linear than it has to be, and it's hard to stat out the encounters exactly where they need to be in the adventure, if you've got less than two pages' worth of non-combat whatever in between them. What often ends up happening is either the non-combat stuff gets the axe or the combat encounters get placed separately from the non-combat stuff, which can reintroduce exactly the kind of confusion that delve aims to eliminate. |
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| Daigle |
| Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:04 pm Post subject: |
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Contributor
Joined: 30 Dec 2007
Posts: 562
Location: Redmond, WA
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| I don't have a dog in this fight (or bug), but I greatly dislike the delve format. |
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| m8adam |
| Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 18 Nov 2008
Posts: 148
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| I don't think I've ever seen that formatting before, but it seems like, although it would be convenient, you're sacrificing substance for formatting, which seems backwards to me. |
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| grodog |
| Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 1:23 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 26 Mar 2008
Posts: 23
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