Ep 26: the black wyrm of Brandonsford

[sam_the_bold]

Put another way, maybe, how much information is enough for you to feel comfortable running a game or adventure?

A big question, of course, but here are a couple of specific things I've noticed from adventures I've been running (most recently The Feast of Tegny Wood, The Black Manse, and Aberrant Reflections) that I want: 

1. For multi-floor dungeons or other "multiple big regions containing other, smaller keyed locations" I really value and appreciate, like, overview descriptions. If I enter "Level 6: Geothermal Forge," I find brief overview descriptions of the entire floor helpful, things that are true of every room unless noted otherwise. Some of this is like logistical detail—ceiling heights, the materials of the walls, the types of stone or trees in an overland region, etc.—but some of it is also just tone and mood. I think brevity is key, like it shouldn't be any longer than another key, but something to say "Here is what the whole over-arching region is like" I think can be very helpful in supplying some of those details. 
   
2. I think "micro" random search tables (as opposed to "macro") are still somewhat underutilized. Like there's that bit in the original blorb post where Snan talks about using a rule to determine the contents of a desk in an office (as opposed to having it written down or just improv'd), and I don't know if I've ever seen that done quite the way I would find most helpful. I feel like most random search tables either include too many important things—you know, the key to the shortcut to the 3rd Floor is the "12" on a 1d12 table—or else are not repeated often enough (a 1d6 table for a single box) to warrant being randomized. But if I'm on the Office Floor of the dungeon where there might be hundreds of desks, a 1d20 or even 1d100 table of "random desk contents" could, I think, be super valuable and enable much wider play. It's also easy to go too broad with these kinds of tables, you know, randomizing entire rooms or something, but this is the importance of the "micro" in my mind: big random tables with a lot of entries are good for smaller, sub-single-key elements, like the contents of containers.  
   
3. I appreciate all numbered specifics, measurements, and quantities of physical spaces, especially when they don't take up too much room on the page but are just listed somewhere. I'm thinking of: ceiling and roof heights; wall thicknesses and materials; the number of barrels in the wine cellar or coins in the hoard; the height, width, length (and sub-lengths, like limbs and tails), and weight of monsters; the directions doors swing open; the location (and dimensions) of windows; population counts; all this kind of stuff. I think a lot of people assume it will require huge amounts of time and space to explain, but I don't think that's true. A lot of this I think again can be listed per-region or per-floor rather than per-key, but it's all stuff that I find very helpful. Reminds me that we're playing in a world that's not just squares on a grid, and now I have the information to give to players for them to exploit. 
   

All of these are things that I think to a lot of GMs and writers just... don't matter very much? Or they wouldn't think they matter? Kind of thing where a GM might just say either "Yeah, roll for it" or "I'll just make up something good." But each of these three are things I've found myself missing in various adventures I've read, one way or another. And having recurring details like these I think can really help make an adventure location or set of locations feel like a coherent place, rather than just abstracted rooms one to the next.