I agree with you completely ;)
Stat blocks in one place have several advantages:
If the dungeon crawl or adventure doesn't go as planned and the bad guys dogpile the PCs or come back for revenge later, having all the stat blocks in one place makes running such improv much easier.
Most of the time the players in my game cause something to happen that makes the bad guys all come out of their places to go look for that noise or whatever. Having all the stat blocks in one place makes that easier to run as well.
Having all the stat blocks in one place makes it easier to use a recurring monster or NPC from that adventure in another adventure.
Gives DM's a quick inventory of what the party is going to end up facing.
However, I do understand the points that James Jacobs is making regarding formatting and lengths of articles and such. It's a minor thing and it's not going to keep me from buying or re-subscribing to the magazine.
My thoughts....
The best solution is to place the stat blocks in the online pdf so we can print them out. That makes the map available without flipping, the stats available without flipping, and I can keep the magazine open to the description of the encounter.
Is the hurdle here fear that folks won't buy the magazine if they can get the maps and stat blocks for free?
By the way, isn't there another thread running on this? I seem to recall lots of folks voting to maintain the status quo.
Ashenvale...I had suggested this before as well. PDF's of stat blocks would rock!! I'd even pay for them because it would save me so much time!! However, there were several reasons, if I recall correctly, to not do that: not enough editors, fear that magazine sales would suffer, Wizards might balk....
Erik Mona actually answered my letter about that topic in a previous issue of Dungeon to shoot that down. I don't have my magazines here right now, but I recall the reasons for not doing it to be pretty compelling ones.
The letter I wrote asking for the stat blocks to be put into one section at the back of an adventure or the whole magazine was my second attempt to ask Paizo to do something to make the adventures easier to run for me. Now that both attempts have been shut down, I'll probably just shut up.
Like I said, it's not that big a deal, but it would save me a few hours of game prep a month, which is a precious commodity.
Ashenvale...I had suggested this before as well. . . . Erik Mona actually answered my letter about that topic in a previous issue of Dungeon to shoot that down. I don't have my magazines here right now, but I recall the reasons for not doing it to be pretty compelling ones.
Your letter and Eric's reply may be what I'm recalling, not another thread on the boards hitting this topic. Thanks for trying! And what a shame. I'll go dig out the issue and check out the reply.
If pdf stat blocks are a no starter, I'm not deeply vested in either proposal - stat blocks in the text or at the end. I tend to copy out what I need and will still do so to avoid flipping wherever the blocks may land.
But pdf would have been sweet.
Creative Director
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I wouldn't say that putting the stat blocks in the PDF is impossible... it certainly makes sense from a "making the adventure easier to run." But also, there has to be a line where we stop putting the contents of the magazine up for free (or for sale) online. We already put a fair portion online (maps and art), and our license with WotC forbids us from puting a whole magazine online as a PDF until that issue is sold out, so there's a LOT of things that need to be sorted out before we can start putting statblocks online.
As for grouping the stats at the end of an adventure or the end of an issue... Dungeon is more than just 3 adventures per month. It's also a magazine. And there are certain things about the way magazines are made and have to be put together. Advertisements often have to be put in a specific part of the magaizne, for example. Certain other elements have to be in specific places as well, due to the conventions and realities of producing a magazine. And finally, I'm VERY hesitant about putting a lot of stat blocks at the end, when I think that the block of Dungeoncraft + Campaign Workbook + Downer + Map of Mystery makes a much stronger bookend to each issue than would a generally uninteresting to-look-at section of a lot of stat blocks.
ANYway... we do vaule our readers' opinions. If everyone wants stat blocks to be online or in one spot, that actually does make a difference when we decide what to do with the magazine. Up until now, though, when one takes in messageboards and emails and in-person conversations and all that, there doesn't seem to be a strong preference.
Unless there's a huge outcry to change, in other words, don't expect things to change. That said... unless we ask questions, it's difficult to determine if things need to change.
Ugh... kinda a long, rambling post. In any case, I'll be keeping an eye on this thread and keeping what goes on here in mind as we forge ahead with new issues of the magazine.
I'm going to second something James just said here, the visual feng shui of the magazine would suffer I think a bit with 7-10 pages (using issue 139 as an average) of stat blocks dropped near the end. I have never been a big fan of the drop them-at-the-end format nor am I the sort that retypes stat blocks out, or use 3x5s or even the actual printed stat blocks themselves depending on my mood and the needs of the game. Also trying to find the right stat block in a eight page glut of them isn't to me significantly easier than picking the same stat block out in twice as many pages of prose. Even breaking the thing up into three (one for each adventure) would be a pain for higher level play (espeically in the case of the 22,000 word AP episodes). How many pages would "Stike on Shatterhorn's" statblock section been?
And then there is the tactics section to consider in some encounters....
GGG
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I'm happy with the stat blocks where they are, for a couple of reasons:
A) When reading an adventure to familiarize myself with it, I like to have the stats at hand as I read along, rather than doing a bunch of page-flipping to check them out.
B) I like having the portraits and stats of NPCs reasonably close to one another; it makes no sense to me to put the visual description of a villain in a different part of the magazine from his or her statistical description. If you put the stats at the end, then the art for the characters either gets divorced from the game elements, or gets shuffled to one spot in the magazine, leaving the other pages bland and empty.
When prepping for a game, I copy all of the character and monster stats for an adventure onto initiative cards anyway, so my game wouldn't be greatly impacted by a change in the placement of stats within the magazine, but I think the experience flows better if the stats are embedded in the adventure text.
When the bad guy is revealed and I deliver his dialogue and describe the setup of the coming fight, the question "what is he wearing" shouldn't send me flipping to the back of the magazine. :)
I can see the arguement for keeping them together but agree that for the "feng-shui" of the mag, as GGG put it, it would be a disaster. Chris puts forward some good points too about art and stats being together.
I vote to leave as is.
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Personally, I hate having stats collected in a single place - the page flipping really irritates and they can be hard to find. Of course, it depends on the size and formatting - in Dungeon it wouldn't be that big a deal, but it certainly was in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, a page-flipping frenzy of an adventure which is seared on my memory for all the wrong reasons. Having the blocks in context is much easier - you still have to flip, but only a page or two at most. And the adventure flows much better as a reading-experience - which, let's face it, is what most of the adventures really are (nobody can play them all, and probably most of us probably only play a fraction of them).
I imagine one of the reasons that stat blocks are not available as an on-line resource is because not every customer has access to the net or even uses Paizo's website.
I don't see how you escape page flipping no matter what format you use. Its the nature of the beast. I like the idea of an adventure's stat blocks being centrally located for an adventure. I can slide paper clip or book mark right into place and presto.
On the flip side, its not really that inconvenient either. For this topic, I think you do whats best for the magazine because in the end its kind of nitpicking (IHMO) when you consider the quality and how well put together it is.
I guess that is a tell tale sign eh? When our biggest concern is the location of the stat blocks? Paizo you guys do great work. :-)
I guess that is a tell tale sign eh? When our biggest concern is the location of the stat blocks? Paizo you guys do great work. :-)
Absolutely. It's kind of like the color of the interior of my Toyota truck. I wish it was available in darker colors, but does that mean I'll quit buying Toyota trucks? No, I've driven nothing else in 22 years because they do things right on the things that matter.
Thanks for replying again, James, even though I was satisfied with your response in the letters section in 139 already. I guess I got all excited when I found someone agreeing with me, the starter of this thread, Rezdave. I'll also defer to Matt's superior feng shuiness.
BTW: I really dug the picture drawn for your first editorial. As a hopelessly nostalgic child of the 80's, the thought of a fiendish T-rex in a Don Johnson style suit with a Delorean behind him made me smile.
GGG, reminding you to buy American only when it doesn't suck, cause otherwise you are only encouraging them. I guess capitalism kinda sucks when it's not going your way, doesn't it Big 2 1/2. I would be laughing at the irony if it didn't seriously effect the economy and the lives of so many Working Joes (and Janes).
May we all reap what we sow,
GGG
Detroit, Michigan
Matt....my "other" car is always American. My wife drives a Pontiac Montana. By reminding people on these boards to buy only American, are you suggesting our friends across the pond(s) should do the same????? Have you priced American cars in Europe lately? (I haven't either, but it can't be good)
I'm a 90's Buick fan/owner myself, but my next car is probaby a Subaru Outback.
G'day,
Matt
By reminding people on these boards to buy only American, are you suggesting our friends across the pond(s) should do the same????? Have you priced American cars in Europe lately? (I haven't either, but it can't be good)
Only when it doesn't suck. Now before this becomes a bigger digression than "Erik Mona's Latest Secret Project" (which should be called "Story Time with Uncle Rob"). We return you to your regularly scheduled thread. Sorry about the huge block of car stats right in the center of the page....
;)
GGG
After my experience with the stat blocks in the SCAP hardcover book I have come to this decision about seperate state blocks... I LOATHE THEM!!!
If they were in a seperate booklet they would have been fine, but that thing was a serious pain to run. It was just as bad to read, I found I wouldn't waste time flipping to the stats and therefor wouldn't really get a clear picture of the battles and how they could go... not a good way to prep.
So my vote is for keeping them as is, in the encounter they belong in (or if already covered in the adventure a reference to the initial point). I can understand placing new creatures at the end of the adventure in an appendix, but even that bothers me (I just have no better solution for that one).
All that said, I would LOVE a PDF of a text file that I could print out and have next to the mag as I run it. THAT would make life easier. Wouldn't need to be anything fancy, just the stat block. I can't imagine that giving it away free would impact sales as I don't think there are many people who buy the mag just for stat blocks (at least I can't imagine doing that... could be wrong though).
Sean Mahoney
I'm happy with the stat blocks where they are, for a couple of reasons:
I agree with Chris. I think there is less of a chance of errors, confusion, and ommissions by leaving the stat blocks where they are.
I wholeheartedly agree with Chris and Sean - I like stat blocks in the text, for all the reasons they mention. Just to reiterate the biggest reason (for me), though: When I read the adventure to get an idea for it, I don't want to be flipping pages back and forth from the text to the stat blocks. It creates a discontinuity that makes preparing difficult.
Stat blocks where they are in the magazine, and having them in the PDF would satisfy most people, IMHO.
I really would like them in the PDF, please.