Late Dungeons & Dragons third edition introduced us to one a significant innovation in D&D adventure design: The “Delve” format, which laid out tactical encounters on a one- or two-page spread, including all the relevant information you needed. It became the dominant format of fourth edition adventures.

Unfortunately, it was a disaster!

It was excellent for its primary purpose: running set-piece combats. When you have an encounter which you know will be combat, it is worth considering.

However, it came with many flaws. For me, the biggest problem was that 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 scenarios seemed to be nothing but set pieces!

Different Styles for Different Adventures

Here is a strange aspect of 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 detailing each room make it harder to link the areas together.

This aspect caused me significant problems running Courts of the Shadow Fey by Kobold Press. Courts is a brilliant adventure that supports role-playing, intrigue, and perhaps some romance, while still having action and adventure. However, every so often, it introduces several very long stat blocks, and the text stops dead. It is an adventure that relies heavily on referencing different sections of the book and creating something from them.

I was spending too much time trying to find information because the stat blocks scattered it too far apart in the book.

When you are writing an investigative adventure, you need different layout and tools than a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. You need to emphasise different ways of providing information.

What is the best way? It depends! You can find many different ways in all the RPGs and their adventures over the past 45 years. And some of these formats are quite alien to the Dungeons & Dragons mindset.

Magnifying the Flaws

In addition, the Delve format was most used during D&D 4E. How many of our problems derived from 4E and its concentration on combat abilities?

Surprisingly, not that many. It didn’t help, of course. So many people abandoned 4E that they never truly gave the Delve format a chance.

However, even given that, the Delve format had problems. It had noticeable flaws even when introduced in 3E.

Apart from making it harder to see the story amongst the blocks, it also presumed that most of these encounters would be resolved with combat. And those combats were static. If the characters went away and came back, these set pieces were harder to adjust.

This then limited the types of adventures you could tell. 4E is full of linear combat fests, and it seemed that was a design dictate. It was rare that the designers could try something else. The combination of “Delve Format” and the dictate of “Simple, Limited Adventures” linked together well. Too well. And the adventures were often poor.

One experiment Wizards tried with the format was to put the adventure in one book and the tactical combats in another. When you came to a fight, you opened the other book and ran the easy-to-use battle from it. I loved this idea, but it didn’t work well.

Why not? Mainly due to how it split information. Often, some essential information only appeared in one book. You’d be reading the main adventure book, but something was missing, and you needed to find that one bit in the combat book. Especially when you were at the table, trying to find which book the key item was listed in was very frustrating.

Revisiting the Format

I would be curious to see someone use it again. But you would have to think about it. Do you know that there is only one way to approach the encounter?

For instance, imagine the final battle with Strahd in Curse of Strahd. That could take place in several locations, each with different attributes and allies available to Strahd. There is nothing fixed about it. That would be a tremendously poor place to use the Delve format.

However, the final battle with Acererak in Tomb of Annihilation is more defined. It has all the necessary elements that make the Delve format sing: interesting terrain, several different opponents, and environmental effects that matter.

I would prefer not to put the delve description of the encounter in the main text, however. Keep the book as it is. However, for DMs who want the benefits of the delve format, an appendix that reformats the encounter or a separate PDF would be preferred. That way, you would not need to use the delve encounter to make sense of things, but you would have a better format available when necessary.

Should you be designing Delve Encounters?

I’ve written a bit recently about designing situations and not encounters. I need to write more on that. But part of what you should consider when designing adventures is how much you constrain the players with the path you lay down.

Many, many adventures presume there is only one way to solve a problem. And that is the problem with the delve encounter in a nutshell: most of the time it assumes the characters will win by combat.

And it then limits the parameters of that combat.

Doing so isn’t inherently wrong, but when every encounter is limited, then the players are less able to surprise you and improvise.

So, think about how much the format limits what the players can do – and what other options are available to you!