A Different Kind of Unboxing

I ended last week's blog post with the distinct feeling that it was time to get somebody else to look at examples of some of the boxed text I have written so far for "Release from the OGL Vault and ask them their opinion.

I did so for the following example, asking members of Sly Flourish's and Teos "Alphastream" Abadía's Discord of what they thought:

The question I put was the following:

Dear fellow DMs, I would like to pick your brains on boxed text. M.T. Black talks about "Frustrated Novelist Syndrome" in his "The Anatomy of Adventure", and Shawn Merwin makes the same point in his article on boxed text on the DNDBeyond blog. In the words of Shawn: "DMs and adventure designers often have stories to tell. However, boxed text is not the place to unleash that inner novelist. Nothing slows a game more than paragraph after paragraph of boxed text, especially when the DM has to stumble through prose so purple that not even a rainbow wants to admit association with the color."

The bold stuff in the text is an attempt to also cater to DMs who dislike boxed text: the idea is that they can grasp the salient facts at a single glance and then narrate the scene with their own voice.

What do you think? Am I too verbose, should the text be shorter, is it too purple, should I reign in my inner frustrated novelist some more? Do you like the idea with the bold face, or should I drop it or modify it (e.g., using italics, which is not quite as "into your face" as bold text?)

I would really be grateful for any feedback you might have -- don't worry about hurting my ego, if I want to publish stuff, I must learn to deal with criticism rather sooner than later...

Not too many liked the idea about the bold/emphasized text in the boxed text. Some did like it, but more thought that it reduced readability. That is kind of unfortunate for me, because I am really wedded to the idea of using boldface or emphasis to highlight the most important parts in an adventure text -- I wish all adventures would do that to help me skim-read them more quickly. I'll have to see what to do about this part of the feedback.

The overall judgment regarding the text itself was that it was still was too long. The fact that parts of the text told the characters what they were doing and made them mere bystanders was especially disliked. That is something I could have known, did in fact know, but thought that for a relatively short sequence of events, it might be OK.

Teos Abadía was so nice to comment extensively, giving the following advice on how to do more with less words:

Boxed text should be long when there is a lot of information the players and their characters must hear. Many introductions to both an adventure and the setting are this way. Descent into Avernus, for example, has to position w here you are in the moment and also where you are in the world. It requires words.

Sometimes a room is complex, and there are four things to describe. It requires words.

But, when possible, we want to chop that down and experiment with twisting the words around so they do more with less.

In this case, you can play around with:

• what is the action taking place

• what should the characters see now vs as events unfold

• what do you want characters to do or choose from

(...) You can probably reduce the text down to the key elements, especially if the lord and men are expected to continue on their way while the halfling and the players speak. Much of the additional information can be in the form of player involvement.

So I went back to the writing board and tried to follow all the advice I was given. I came back a couple of days later and presented the Discord channel with the following result:

Then M.T. Black stepped in and gave me a masterclass in getting to the essence of things:

I like where you are going, but I would recommend tightening it up even further. The more concise it is, the more understandable it will be.

• "The halfling peddler approaches the lord, takes a humble bow and offers his pies." -> "Faldorn bows to Lord Hath and offers him a pie."

• "The lord's facial expression changes from what was a display of boredom into sudden rage." -> "The lord's face twists with rage."

• "You hear him cry 'Don't you address me without being spoken to first, you hear?" -> "Don't speak unless you are spoken to!" he snaps and gives the halfling a shove."

• Linking it together with a conjunction: "Faldorn bows to Lord Hath and offers him a pie, but the lord's face twists with rage. 'Don't speak unless you are spoken to!' he snaps and gives the halfling a shove."

At this point I realized, that in this particular case, boxed text probably was not needed at all -- M.T. Black's version evocative, clear, and to the point and could just as well be included in the general information for the DM about the scene.

So now we are at the following (with the former boxed text in its present form highlighted in yellow):

Lessons learned

Where does this experience of unboxing my boxed text leave me? In a way, I have come a full circle, since I had started out with a desire to get rid of boxed text for most location descriptions (e.g., my posting about "Setting the Scence") In my first blog post specifically about boxed text for Release from the Golden Vault I had done some handwaving about why there will be quite a bit of boxed text in the adventure, nevertheless:

Actually, there is quite a bit of boxed text. Almost never for location descriptions, but often for getting an encounter started or for highlighting something special happening (or likely to happen, with players you never know, of course.) My concession towards my own desire to be able to get a quick glance over what is in text is to set the essential information in the boxed text in bold face.

It might be a good idea to get a little more concrete and (1) develop criteria for when to use boxed text as well as (2) a sort of style guide for boxed text.

Some candidates for the style guide are:

• Use "you" rarely, and if you do, only as object, never as subject: in effect, "you" would only be used if the boxed text describes a scene in which something happens to the characters. For a room description, this should not occur all that often, but might, e.g., in "A gnome sits at the table and scrutinizes you through a monocle clamped into his left eye."

• Place paragraphs such that they coincide with moments where the players might want to interrupt This was advice from one of the Discord members for those cases where longer boxed text is required to set the scene.

I'll have to think some more about criteria for using boxed text and the "Bent Goblin" style guide for writing boxed text before I continue to review the encounters I have already written for Release from the OGL Vault.

I am extremely grateful to everybody on Sly Flourish's and Teos "Alphastream" Abadía's Discord servers who answered my plea for feedback and thrilled to have received feedback even from M.T. Black and Theo Abadía!