I admit that I am a couple of issues behind as I have been running the first adventure path. By the way excellent job and I am looking forward to the hard cover. I was looking at the new AP and found that the format has changed again. I was wondering why the intro data for rooms was removed…IE light, noise, auras, and reactions? This was an invaluable tool to the DM. At a glance I knew the light source, listen DC’s and any auras that were in the room. This helped get who, what, when and where out to the party in a quick concise way and allowed the encounter to flow more smoothly. I would request its return if possible. If it is a space issue I would settle for a smaller font or smashing the info together to form more of a stat block.
Creative Director
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I admit that I am a couple of issues behind as I have been running the first adventure path. By the way excellent job and I am looking forward to the hard cover. I was looking at the new AP and found that the format has changed again. I was wondering why the intro data for rooms was removed…IE light, noise, auras, and reactions? This was an invaluable tool to the DM. At a glance I knew the light source, listen DC’s and any auras that were in the room. This helped get who, what, when and where out to the party in a quick concise way and allowed the encounter to flow more smoothly. I would request its return if possible. If it is a space issue I would settle for a smaller font or smashing the info together to form more of a stat block.
We stopped doing these intro sections for several reasons, but the primary reason was that it was simply taking up too much space. The auras seciton, especailly with the higher level adventures, was getting out of control. In one of the later installments, (Thirteen Cages, I believe), this information took up about 4 pages of text. We felt that four pages of what essentially amounted to repeat information simply wasn't worth sacrificing four pages of content.
In addition, this information is extraordinarilly time-consuming to develop and edit, since you have to double and tripple check all the auras. And it seemed ridiculous to only include magic and evil auras... why not lawful, good, chaotic, and undead auras? Dungeon runs on a skeleton-crew of editors, and if cutting time-consuming elements like the aura sections essentially meant we could spend that time giving the entire adventure one more editorial pass, so much the better.
Finally, placing this information near the front of an encounter was wreaking havoc with text flow and readability. It's no fun to look at a page full of semicolons and commas, which is one of the reasons we changed the statblock format.
Of course... all this information is still there. We make an effort to include light and noise descriptions in each area's boxed text. The reaction section has already been served by the Tactics and Development section. The only thing that really misses out is the aura section. Frankly... I'm not sure that taking 5 minutes of game-play to list out the strengths of all the magic items and spell effects in an encounter and having people make dozens of Spellcraft checks to see if they can pick up the schools of said auras makes for compelling gaming. It's certainly not as compelling as being able to add in 4 more pages of actual adventure content.
Fair enough.
Of course, if any of our esteemed readers would like to create the aura content for an adventure and post it on these boards, he might earn some serious cred.
: )
Rob
Not a bad idea. Could this be incorperated into a web enhancement of some kind?