Fun fact: I almost – ALMOST – called this article Presenting My Learn-to-Play Module. The reasons’ll become clear as you keep reading, but I realize that’d be sort of a cruel joke on anyone who read the title and thought they’d be clicking through to a finished product.

Anyway, I’m still sequestered away on my writer’s retreat. I’ll be back on Monday, October 12. Yes, I really am coming back. But it’s Friday – at least, it will be when you read this if you’re a Patreon supporter – so I have to post an article.

The retreat’s going well. I’ve calmed down a lot. I’ve thought a lot about what I’m doing and why and how I want to do things going forward and whether I overvalue feedback and transparency and what kind of discussions I want to host and how much work I have to do to curate the platform. But that’s not the sort of crap you want to hear in a feature article. I’ll post an update next week.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been working hard on the learn-to-play module. Which I’m going to refer to hereafter as The Fall of Silverpine Watch. Because that’s what it’s called. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be a day or three from having a completely designed and fully drafted module. Stats, maps, encounter text, introductory crap, concludory crap, the whole shebang. After that, the entire thing will need to be rewritten, revised, and polished for about seven to ten days. And then it has to go visit an editor while I do the final cartography and start working on the layout. That whole process will take another three weeks, maybe four, depending on the editing and the layout part. It might be tight hitting October 31, but I’ll do my best. And if I don’t, I won’t miss it by much.

I’ll post weekly updates though so you know where it’s at.

Why do I bring that up? Because that’s what this bulls$&% article is about. Yes, this is a bulls$&% article. No rule hacks or GMing advice here. Just me thinking through the problems of designing, running, playing, and now presenting role-playing games.

See, writing this module has been an interesting experience. It’s been slow going. Slower than I thought it would be. And not because of the year-and-a-half delay for personal and psychological reasons that won’t interest anyone who isn’t my mommy or my therapist. And frankly, they’re only interested because I pay them to be.

Anyway…

As I’ve been pouring myself full time into this thing and writing at as much of a breakneck pace as I could manage – and as I started actually LIKING what was coming out of me – I discovered a whole bunch of other issues that I didn’t see coming. Because I’ve been designing adventures for thirty years for my own use and because I’ve been s$&%ing out A LOT of words every week for A LOT of years, I thought writing an adventure module would be easy. Well, not easy. But just a matter of man-hours. Perspiration.

And it almost was. But then I realized I didn’t want it to suck.

Presenting My Learn-to-Play Module

I just winked at all the people who actually read my Long, Rambling Introduction™. And to those of you who skipped it, I apologize for that. My learn-to-play module – it’s called Fall of Silverpine Watch – is still a few weeks from being published. This article isn’t to present you with the module. It’s to talk about an interesting issue that caused me way bigger headaches than I expected while I was writing the thing. The issue of presentation.

Thing is, I’ve designed adventures before. Ever since I was a little Angry running games in mommy’s basement, I’ve pretty much exclusively run stuff I’ve written. Homebrewed adventures in homebrewed worlds. So I know how to write a good adventure. And I know how to run one. I figured once I got over myself and actually started just writing the f$&%ing module I’ve been promising for eighteen months, it’d be a pretty quick and easy process. Three days to design the thing, two weeks to write and revise all the text, and then ship it off to an editor and a layout artist while I drew pretty maps.

Those of you who’ve written modules for others to use are probably laughing your collective a$&es off so hard you’re going to need emergency gluteal reattachment surgery before the end of the article. Because you know there’s a huge difference between designing an adventure and writing a module. Especially if you give any sort of a f$&% about writing a good one.

But, look, I’m not stupid. When I wrote my book, I discovered that actually writing the thing was the easiest part of the process. I spent about 0.05% of the time it took me to publish Game Angry writing the actual words. I’ve had a lot of practice writing actual words. Once I come up with an idea and do a basic outline, I can crank out 10,000 words of a draft in one normal workday and have them revised, rewritten, and polished in another day.

I figured the same would apply here. Once I designed the adventure itself – once I figured out the goal and the plot and sketched out the flowcharts and maps and planned the encounters and statted up the monsters and designed the magical treasures – once I designed the adventure, I figured writing the text would take me just a few days. It didn’t. It took me a lot longer. And it’s not because I had trouble producing the words.

The difference between a homebrew adventure you plan to use yourself and an adventure module you plan to share with the world is that, when it comes to a homebrew adventure, you’re done when the design’s done. Once you’ve sketched out the maps and flowcharts and have a goal and a plot and some encounters, there’s nothing else to do. You just take that crap to the table in whatever form works for you and you run it.

With a module, you can’t stop when the adventure is designed. Because you have to present the design to someone else in a way that lets them run it at their table with their players without you there to help. You have to explain the adventure to someone else. You have to tell the GM running the adventure how it works. It’s a whole extra step. And that step involves putting a lot of words to paper.

That wasn’t the problem, though. I have no problem explaining things exhaustively and putting words to paper. The problem was that I realized that explaining everything and putting words to paper made a sucky module.

How Adventure Modules Miss the Point

Every adventure module published by WotC these days has a problem. So does every adventure published by Paizo. And by basically everyone else since everyone just imitates WotC and Paizo. While they provide all the information GMs need to run their adventures and spell it all out in exhaustive detail, they do it in pretty much the s$&%iest way possible.

Let’s take a look at a module. I have Ghosts of Saltmarsh sitting on my desk right now. It’s the most recent WotC adventure module I was willing to flush money down the toilet to own. Let’s open it up to a random page and take a look. Okay. Page 116. Chapter 6: The final Enemy. The players have to invade a big ole sahuagin fortress. Let’s take a look at the first encounter.

This encounter is described in a column-and-a-half of text. There’s some read-aloud text highlighted in green, but the rest is just paragraphs of normal text. One paragraph has three boldfaced phrases in it. The names of the monsters that appear in the room. Two of those monsters appear in the module’s appendix – which is called out, though there’s no page number – and the third has no callout which means it’s in the core Monster Manual.

The first paragraph explains that the doors to the fortress are locked during the day and unlocked at night. Then it explains why the doors are locked during the day and unlocked at night and how the sahuagin stationed there feel about that and how their feelings affect the odds of the party getting through the doors by various means.

The next two paragraphs – about eleven lines of prose with no special formatting – describe how the GM should resolve things if the players try a stealthy approach or try to trick the guards. The paragraph thereafter gives the stats for the doors in case the players try to force their way in.

The next two paragraphs talk about how the sahuagin react to intruders and how they fight. And, the following paragraph at the top of the next page – called out by a boldfaced header – describes a gate whose position is actually a bit unclear from the map and mentions two hidden sahuagin in the next room. There’s three paragraphs about the gate and how to get through it and then two paragraphs following another callout about a net trap in the hallway on the way to an adjoining room.

Let’s imagine trying to run this one encounter at the table. Nothing is visible at a glance except the names of three monsters. Things aren’t grouped together logically. The prose just sort of flows from one topic to the next. Like a novel. The only callouts involve things in adjoining rooms. And some very important information is buried in the prose. Such as the fact that the sahuagin can ring an alarm gong and summon reinforcements. You have to read literally every word of text before you can start running the encounter properly.

When you’re running an encounter at the table, the information you need has to be accessible. It has to be easy to spot at a glance. You’re concentrating on a lot of s$&% when you’re running a game. You can’t stop the action to read six paragraphs of text to figure out what happens when the PCs try to trick the guards. And you’ll totally forget the sahuagin can ring an alarm gong.

Piles and Page Flipping

Now, let’s imagine the situation has degenerated into a fight. It always does. There’s a total of nine monsters in this room. At a glance, though, it looks like just three. The monster names are in bold, but their numbers are not. Anyway, it’s a fight now. You’ve got three different kinds of monsters. One’s stats are in the Monster Manual and the other two’s stats are in the appendix of the book you’re currently using.

But that’s not all. If one sahuagin rings the gong as described in the sixth paragraph of this mess, they’ll bring in the monsters from two other locations in the dungeon.

Let’s assume I’m at a physical table running this thing with real books. I’ve got Ghosts of Saltmarsh open to this encounter. Now I need the monster stats. I flip GoS to the appendix and flip back and forth until I find the page with the sahuagin on it. There’s three pages of them. Fortunately, the two stat blocks I need are on the same page. For the third monster, I grab my Monster Manual and flip it to the sahuagin. I have both books open in front of me, but I can no longer see the text for the encounter.

Hopefully, I’ll remember that the sahuagin are trying to ring the alarm bell. And they’ll no doubt succeed. There’s nine sahuagin in 10-foot by 25-foot room so there’s no way a sahuagin isn’t standing right next to the gong when the fight starts. But when that happens, I have to flip back to the page with the encounter text and read that the monsters from encounters two and 12 are summoned. Then I have to flip to those two encounters to find out what shows up. And then I discover I need another monster stat block because encounter 12 introduces a fourth monster type. And it’s in the Monster Manual. And on a different page from the other stat block I’m using. Great. F$&%ing great. Then, I have to flip back to the sahuagin stats in the GoS appendix. Because I need their stats to run the combat.

I’m supposed to run a tense, fast, furious combat while flipping pages in two different books to keep track of four different stat blocks? That’ll work just fine.

But let’s say I’m a technically-minded GM who doesn’t believe in killing trees to play pretend elf games. I have a tablet and a bunch of PDFs. Don’t ask me how I got those PDFs because WotC sure as hell won’t sell them. Maybe I’m shelling out a subscription fee for D&D Beyond. Or maybe this isn’t a WotC published module I’m running. Maybe it’s a module I got at DriveThru RPG. Either way, though, I’ve got some kind of electronic version of the module to work with.

Page flipping is quicker and easier with electronics. Assuming there’s bookmarks, hyperlinks, or a good navigation pane anyway. But it’s a lot harder to have two different things in front of you. If it’s pages or spreads in a single document, you can usually have multiple tabs open and switch between them. But if each stat block or game element is its own thing, you can end up with a lot of tabs open at once. And if the blocks appear on different pages of the same, single document, you really can’t see both at the same time. Every time the players target a different creature from the one you’re looking at, or every time a player uses an action that targets multiple creatures, you’re going to be doing a lot of tab-juggling and bookmark-tapping.

I’m not saying that stuff isn’t do-able. I’m not saying it’s a deal-breaker. And I’m not saying you’re not really fast with your iThingy or laptoppy because I know you are. I’m just asking you to think about every tiny little step you have to take just to run an encounter. Every step that isn’t actually running the encounter. Just count them up.

But Prep!

Now, you might argue that GMs should expect to do some prep work to run a module. You can argue they should read the module and know what’s coming before they try to run the thing. That they should have read all about that encounter before the party approached the doors. And that’s true. You can’t run a module completely blind. But there’s a lot of details to remember. And they’re hard to find in a pinch. Even if you remember that the party can break down the doors or that the sahuagin will try to sound the alarm, you still have to be able to spot the doors’ stats and what monsters show up from what rooms when the gong rings.

But even if you only read ahead – and remember ahead – as much as you might need during one single play session, there’s still a lot to keep in your head. Look at the map on page 117. Assuming the players can explore four to six rooms – not encounters; just rooms – in a single play session, there’s fifteen rooms on that map they might get to in one night. That’s a lot to be ready for even if a few of those rooms are empty and most of the rest aren’t as complicated as that first room. In fact, the more open-ended the module, the less you can expect a GM to keep in his head because there’s just too many f$%&ing possibilities to be ready for.

Maybe the GM should take notes. Maybe the GM should take a highlighter to the text. Maybe the GM should have a bunch of tabs open and ready and setup custom bookmarks for everything themselves. Or maybe the GM should print or copy certain references to have near at hand. Or maybe the GM should just throw more money into the game by buying Monster Cards or other such products. Yep. Those are all solutions. I accept solutions exist. I do not accept that it should be on the GM to solve these problems. Especially when solving the problems involve shelling out more cash to the company that created the problem.

The module’s designer knows exactly what the module’s for. They know who’s using it for what and how. At least, they know the possible hows and whats anyway. They know whether the thing’s a physical book to be used by a human being flipping pages or whether it’s an electronic document to be used by on an iThingy or whether it could be either one. And while it isn’t possible to plan for every format and every use and to find solutions that resolve all the issues that all the formats might have, the format WotC has chosen – and the one everyone who puts out a D&D module imitates – is a format that ignores all the issues for all the formats. It’s a format that would only be chosen by someone who didn’t know what the product was going to be used for or who didn’t give a f$%& how it was going to be used.

And even if had a brain aneurism that turned me into a person capable of forgiving that sort of s$&% design – design that ignores how the product is actually going to be used – even if I forgave that s%&$, I’d still argue that forcing the user to a do the same sort of homework they did in college isn’t a great way to sell an entertainment product.

Speaking of the End User…

As I was banging out the text for my adventure module, I found myself struggling. I knew that, while I was totally in line with every product WotC and everyone else had ever published for D&D 5E, I was presenting things the worst way I possibly could. Look, I like walls of text. I’m good at them. I’ll match my ability to write walls of text against anyone’s. But I’ve built my whole brand around understanding what it FEELS like to run a game. What it’s like to actually be the GM in the trenches making the game happen. And here I was writing a product that would hurt to use. So, all I had to do was come up with a completely new way to present an adventure module.

That was probably something I could do in a day or two, right?

No. Like absolutely every human being ever, I fall into the trap of thinking anything I don’t know how to do is probably really easy to figure out. That is not something someone can just do in a week when they’re already eighteen months behind schedule on what should be a simple adventure module.

And besides, it’s not something I can do. Because my goal with this module isn’t to write a better module than anything WotC has ever produced. My goal is to write a module that teaches people how to run modules. This module is supposed to teach an inexperienced GM how to run a game for the first time and prepare them to run more games with more modules. And that’s all.

Or is that my goal?

Part of figuring out how the hell your product is gonna be used is about figuring out who’s probably going to be using your product and what they’re going to be using it for you. That is, figuring out what assumptions you can make about the person who buys your thing.

This adventure module is ostensibly a companion to my book, Game Angry. It’s called out in the book as a good first module for inexperienced GMs to run for new players. It’s advertised as a practice run for everything the reader learns in Part II. So, can I assume that only inexperienced GMs who’ve read my book will be running the module? Well, it’d be fair if I did. But a lot of my readers didn’t buy my book. They might want to run the module anyway. And a lot of my readers are experienced GMs. And they might still want to run the module. I know a few want to use it to bring new players into the game. Hell, my book wasn’t written JUST for inexperienced GMs. It wasn’t even written exclusively for GMs. The first part introduces ANYONE to role-playing games. The third part provides advice for EXPERIENCED GMs.

These assumptions matter. For two reasons. First, there’s just general design concerns. If I design a solid but simple tutorial adventure – Baby’s First Module if you will – I’ll disappoint my more experienced readers who want something they can use too. I mean, they’d probably cut me SOME slack given I said the module’s a teaching module, but there’s a limit to that. If the adventure lacks any depth and draws only on standard fantasy tropes that are interesting to newbies without confusing or alienating them, anyone who knows the D&D-verse inside and frontward is going to find it boring as s$&%. The audience I expect matters. And broad inclusivity comes with costs. But that’s a whole other story.

Second, though, I’m worried about this because this module is a teaching product. It’s supposed to teach newbie GMs how to run games. If I present my module in a radically different format from every other module that exists, I’m not really teaching newbies how to run games. I need to present them with something that looks like everything else they’ll be running after. Otherwise, they’ll have a hard time moving to crap like Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

So, I can’t change the world with this project. I can’t revolutionize the industry. And even if I could, I’m eighteen months behind schedule. So, I don’t have the time. I have to stay pretty close to what everyone else is doing.

Or do I?

I’ll come back to that question next week when I conclude this series with a look at my dream format for presenting modules.

For now, though, let’s assume I can’t change the world. That doesn’t mean I can’t clean the world up a little. Let me show you what I mean.

Presenting: The Learn-to-Play Characters

No, really. I’m going to let you have the characters for The Fall of Silverpine Watch as a sort of preview. To prove I really am close to finishing.

I designed the pregens a few weeks ago. Pretty early in the process, actually. Right after I had the basic outline for the adventure. Though I should be careful with my words. When I say I designed them, I mean I generated them. I statted them up.

I’ve made pregens for new players before. Whenever I bring new players into the gaming fold, I give them hand-made, bespoke, artisanal pregens I make myself that spell things out nice and clear in natural language. I leave off the useless crap I know won’t come up in whatever introductory one-shot I’m running. And I streamline the characters’ features and spells to make them easy to grok.

Normally, I just fill out a bog-standard character sheet. Though I usually leave a lot of things blank because of the aforementioned streamlining. On the back of the sheet, I usually print an MS Word document with background and reference information. It all looks something like this:

But I figured I couldn’t get away with those crappy sorts of production values this time around, though. Things need a more professional presentation.

I have this friend. Friend and reader and supporter. Alyssa Barnes. Recently, she’s been turning herself into a character sheet tweaking wizard. On her own initiative, she made an Angry version of the core D&D character sheet with the specific skills stripped out and just a blank space for proficiencies. It was based on what I wrote in some old article about how such a sheet would improve players’ and GMs’ approach to ability checks in D&D 5E. I asked her if she wanted to work with me on the layout for the pregens in my module. We hammered out a deal and got to work.

By the way, Alyssa gave me permission to share her cool skill-less character sheet.

I had a bunch of goals for my pregens. First, I wanted the players to have everything they needed to understand how to play their characters right in front of them. I didn’t want them to have a crack any books. And since the GM running the game was probably going to be learning the ropes themselves, I didn’t want them to have to answer any hard questions or crack any books either. That meant it had to be possible to play the character using just the information on the sheet. And the information had to be clear.

Second, I didn’t want extraneous crap on the sheet. Background features, for example, are pretty useless in most of the games I’ve run. You can say that’s a reflection on my poor GMing skills as I should be making them useful, and you can kiss my a$&. Those features are uneven and situational. And for a one-shot dungeon-crawler tutorial game, they won’t f$&%ing matter. Inspiration? Personality? Traits? Flaws? Alignment? Crap. Crap. Crapity crap. Players don’t need that s$&% and GMs don’t use it.

Third, while I wanted to dump useless, extraneous crap in the trash, I didn’t want to dump flavor. These character sheets might well be the first tangible thing these players ever see of D&D or RPGs in general. If they have the souls of tax forms, they’re not going to sell anyone on the experience. So I didn’t want to skimp on the background and world lore. Even if the details were just simple little stories the players could use or ignore as they wished.

Fourth, I figured my readers and fans would be poring over this module because I know that they – you – are always hungry for details about the Angryverse. That’s the dull, generic, default fantasy world I set my home games in. So I decided that I’d specifically set my module in the Angryverse – not that the setting matters much – and that I’d include details about the setting in the fluff text on the character sheets.

Fifth, I wanted to minimize flipping and shuffling. Not only didn’t I want people to crack books during play, but I also didn’t want them to have flip or shuffle pages. Or, if they were using PDFs on an iThingy, I didn’t want them to have to scroll between pages or waste valuable screen space on two-page views. So, every character had to fit on a single page. I could use both sides, but only if the players only needed to look at one side during the play. The front of the sheet would have to have everything needed during play. The back would have only background information needed before play or to provide extra details to clarify things on the front of the sheet in case of an emergency.

Sixth, because I wanted to teach people how to play D&D and use D&D products, my sheet had to look as much like the official D&D sheet as possible. I could clean things up, remove some elements, and expand others, but things had to stay in mostly the same places. Anyone who learned how to play on one of my sheets shouldn’t end up completely f$&%ing lost when they had to make their own character on a real character sheet later.

Obviously, no project has ever hit every bullseye. You always end up having to make tradeoffs or compromises. But Alyssa and I got pretty damned close. And I’m immensely happy with the results. She did awesome work. Check out the pregen cleric. You’ll be able to download an archive file with all the pregens below. Aside from the last proofing pass, they’re done.

 

See? Everything the cleric might do during play can be fully resolved just by looking at the front of the sheet. Even the spells and class features. And notice how the stuff is mostly where you’d find it on a real sheet. Mostly. And notice how everything can be tracked right on the sheet whether you’re using a printout or a PDF. There’s check bubbles for hit dice and spell slots and a fillable form for hit points and for the character’s name and other details.

Everything’s explained in more detail on the back and there’s a bunch of background information. Each character’s class, race, and background are written to hint at details about how the world works. From the polytheistic nature of religion to the detachment commoners feel from the feudal politics of the warring kingdoms of the Sunderlands. And the rules on the back of the sheet provide a proxy for cracking books. The front of the sheet is pretty complete, but if you do need something explained in more detail – either as a player or a GM – you can check the back of the sheet.

Don’t forget to download all The Fall of Silverpine Watch pregens.

A Not So Pointless Screed

This got ranty. Even for me. Even for a bulls$&% article. But I’m having to deal with issues I’ve only considered in passing before as I finish up this module. And to deal with a bunch of dilemmas. I have to decide whether it’s my job to teach gamers to use what’s out there or to show them a better way. Whether it’s better for me to satisfy new players and new GMs or to make my longtime fans and supporters – the ones who bought most of the copies of my book – happy. I can’t do all of that at the same time. I have to find the right middle ground. Make the right compromises. And I have to communicate clearly so that, at least, people aren’t surprised – and disappointed – when they discover halfway through it that I made a compromise that wasn’t for them.

For the next two weeks more, this s$&% will be occupying a huge amount of my time and brain space. And I think the issues are important enough to discuss. So, I’ll conclude this discussion next week by exploring how I resolved this s&$% on the GMing side. What’s in the module? How’s it presented? And how did I decide that? By that time, I’ll be well into – or done with – the final revision. And then I can move on to other content.

Meanwhile, though, I have a point to all of this. Actually, it’s a plea. To all of my readers and fans who make their own homebrew content to share with others. To all the folks who distribute adventures and encounters and monsters and s$&%. Listen, I know it’s easy to make your stuff look just like WotC’s. Tools like The Homebrewery make it easy. There’s Google Doc templates, MS Word templates, Adobe Templates, all sorts of s$&%. And WotC’s s$&% is so formulaic that it’s easy to just imitate the layout and presentation in any document editing software.

Stop.

Please stop.

Stop imitating WotC. They aren’t good at presenting this s$&%. They don’t think about the people at the table. The ones who have to use this s$&%. The GMs in the trenches. They’re too busy thinking about lifestyle gamers who watch YouTube videos and buy these modules just for the fun of owning the thing Mike Mercer ran. They’re too busy thinking about how awesome and fun it is to be a player and trying to make the player experience as cool as possible. They’ve forgotten that their job is to empower GMs to create awesome player experiences. That it’s the GMs – NOT WotC – that make the experience great.

I can’t stop them from thinking that way. But I can stop you from thinking that way. Stop.

The next time you put together a module you want to sell or share, allocate twice as much time to the project as you normally do and spend that extra time thinking about the person running your game and whether there’s a better way to get your information into their brain.

And let me end by acknowledging a bit of irony in all this s$&%. I’m writing this module because I’ve spent my whole life homebrewing. I LIKE writing game content. And I suspect that’s true of most of the indie creators sharing homebrew content. I don’t look at published content very much. I never use it at the table. I use slapdash notes and scribbled maps and crap I keep in my head. I’ve never tried to RUN Ghosts of Saltmarsh. That’s why I had no idea how bad things had gotten until I started writing my own module and realized that what I was churning out was crap. We – the homebrewers – are the ones who write the gaming content for others to use. And we have no experience running games from modules. Because we’re homebrewers. So, we present our s$&% the way WotC presents their s$&%. We assume they know what they’re doing. But they don’t seem to.

When you get down to it, we homebrewers-cum-module-writers are basically creating stuff we’d never use ourselves at our own tables. And that gives us a big blind spot. We can’t trust WotC to fill it in for us anymore.