Late 3e and all through 4e saw one of the biggest innovations of D&D adventure design: The “Delve” format, which laid out tactical encounters on a one or two page spread, including all relevant information for running the encounter. It was a disaster! #dnd

The thing was, it was awesome for its primary purpose: running set piece combats. When you have a set piece in your adventure which you *know* will be combat, consider it. But if the players might approach it another way? Don’t! #dnd

For me, the biggest problem it has was it inhibited the flow of the adventure. It made it very difficult to determine the story as it kept being broken up by these big set pieces. And many of the adventures seemed to be NOTHING but set pieces! #dnd

There’s a strange aspect about adventure design: when you’re describing a reactive environment (say a castle) where something in one room might be relevant to another, the more space you spend describing each individual room make it harder to link the spaces together. #dnd

When you’re writing an investigative adventure, you need different layout and tools than a hack’n’slash dungeon crawl. You need to emphasise different ways of providing information. #dnd

What’s the best way? I don’t know! Different RPGs and different adventures have shown many many ways! And some take some getting used to!

One of the drawbacks of the 4e format was, unfortunately, the system. Which magnified the flaws of the format. But it also wasn’t that adaptable, in any case.

I’m very wary of people who say “put all information on the one page” for an encounter as a result of the experience with the delve layout. Inline stat blocks? Tremendously problematic because of the space they use and how they interfere with adventure flow. #dnd

One other experiment with the format was to put the adventure in one book and the tactical combats in another. Thus, when you came to a combat, you opened the other book and ran the easy to-use combat from it. This was an awesome idea, but ran into problems. #dnd

The biggest problem was splitting of information. Occasionally, some key information was only in one book, and so to make sense of the adventure, you needed to find that one key bit in the combat book. Hmm. #dnd

I’d be curious to see it revisited. But the way I’d do it is to write the adventure as normal, then reformat the combats and provide in a supplement. No new info, but better placed for combat reference. This is easier in the land of PDFs! #dnd

The point is that you could run the adventure from the basic book without giving up anything, but you have a better format available when necessary.