My thoughts on including stat blocks in adventure text are shaped by a lot of very poor examples of how to do so in the third and fourth edition era.

Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition used a format that we refer to as the “delve” format. It was premiered in the final days of third edition and presented most encounters on a one or two-page spread. The format would include all the creature stat blocks, as well as details on terrain features, tactics and other useful details for the DM. When you were running an encounter, it was great.

I was very enthusiastic for this format at the start of fourth edition. However, years of running adventures using it displayed how horrible it actually was. It’s great for big set piece combats. But that was all it did well. And Dungeons & Dragons is more than that!

We occasionally think that D&D adventures are made out of encounters, but that may be a very misleading way of approaching it. It breaks down a scenario in a manner that isn’t always accurate.

Consider this: A D&D scenario is made out of situations which the players need to determine how to navigate. They may do it with combat. They may do it with roleplaying. They may do it through the use of other skills.

In adventure design, there are some situations where you know how they’ll go. They’re very constrained. You have to fight or negotiate. But other situations are far broader.

If you infiltrate a mad scientist’s lab, do you fight their monstrosities? Let them loose to cause havoc elsewhere? Capture them to sell in a zoo? Does the mad scientist enter the lab while you’re doing this? Do the parameters change due to your actions elsewhere?

Consider the end of the original Dragonlance Saga, which finds all the heroes and villains in the Temple of Takhisis. What’s going on there? It’s incredibly complicated. Hard to pigeonhole that! It’s worth checking the original design in DL14 Dragons of Triumph. Tracy Hickman included six possible resolutions to the adventure, and each required different actions from the players, so the adventure needed to account for all of them. When you read the novel, Dragons of Spring Dawning, you see one way it could unfold. I don’t think I could have run the adventure that well back then when I was a teenager. These days, I feel that I’d do a better job of it. (No, I’ve never run it, though I have run others of the series).

The basics of most D&D adventure design come down to this: You have a location with various features. You have NPCs. You have goals for the players. You have goals for the NPCs. The joy is seeing how the story emerges from those elements through play.

The challenge is presenting this information to the DM in as clear a manner as possible. The organisation of information is key.

There isn’t one true way to present this information. It changes depending on the situation. There are times where it is absolutely the best choice to include all the combat stats and terrain details, because it’s going to be a fight. But not always.

A lot of my frustrations with recent DDAL adventures have come from the fact that they correctly analysed what they needed to do in freeing up the approaches to situations, but then failed to present the information in a clear manner. (And, occasionally, they failed to present it at all!)

There are times when you can break down a scenario into encounters, but it’s not always true. Have a look at the Heir of Orcus, Verse I: the bulk of that is a situation, not a standard encounter breakdown. The problems I found with running Heir of Orcus related to running the NPCs because I wasn’t sure of what they would do given certain actions on the part of the PCs. What do they do if the PCs don’t arrive for dinner but sneak in instead? You need different information.

An attempt at providing this information can be found in current DDAL adventures. They describe NPCs with “What do they want?” and “What do they know?” sections. My feeling is that occasionally you need “What do they do?” and “How do they act?” sections; the first describing the actions they’re likely to take in response to the players’ actions, and the second describing their personality traits. Or something like that. While “What do they want?” sort of covers part of this, I like that to clearly state their goals, and a “What do they do?” section to state the methods which they’ll initially employ to find them. Not all sections should always be required – just available dependent on the needs of the adventure.

Now, the reason that stat blocks included as part of the main text irritate me so much is that they take valuable space away from describing the situation. And there are many times when describing the situation is far more key than ease of running combat. Also important is the flow of how one section links to the next. Each stat block you include stops the flow of text. A room with two orcs and a chieftain might be relatively unimportant to the greater story, but by including the stat blocks you’re elevating its importance. “Oh, this encounter takes an entire page to describe! It must be important!” However, its role in the adventure is a fairly minor combat piece or otherwise a source of reinforcements for a later encounter. The tactical delve format deemphasised role-playing and exploration adventures in favour of combat.

If you have a big complicated combat that you know will run, then, by all means, put it in a two-page spread with all the stats, terrain and tactical details included. The DMs who run your adventure will appreciate it. However, if you write your entire adventure as such, you limit the types of scenarios you can describe.

The inclusion of stat blocks as part of the text of Courts of the Shadow Fey, an otherwise excellent adventure from Kobold Press, caused me a lot of problems when running it, because I was trying to concentrate on the intrigue, exploration and role-playing when running it, and the information on that was spread over far too many pages. It would have been easier to parse and reference if they hadn’t been there. I’ll have more to say about Courts in the near future.

The big takeaway: One universal format doesn’t work for all situations. It’s very important to have consistency, but to realise when another approach is needed!