"We Need to Talk About Goodman Games" vs. "Eating the Book" - Why not both?

Last week, Questing Beast's Ben Milton released a video in which he talked about Dungeon Crawl Classic (DCC) adventures, and why he generally doesn't like them very much. In it, he compares Goodman Game's DCC module "Sailors on a Starless Sea" to Necrotic Gnome's Dolmenwood module "Winter's Daughter", which he likes quite a bit.

His preference is mostly about the way information is presented, not the information itself. It's very important to Milton how "usable" the text is at the table, when a GM is actually running the adventure for their players. Is information presented in a scannable way that facilitates improvisation and lessens the amount of preparation a GM needs to do ahead of time? This is the question that ultimately determines the quality of an adventure for Milton.

Both Necrotic Gnome and Milton himself are well known for taking this "command center layout" approach to somewhat of an extreme in their published work, whereas Goodman Games's adventures read like old TSR modules for the most part, with lots of text and almost no markup, which makes it very hard to parse quickly.

As an answer to Milton's video, @orthopraxy.bsky.social wrote "Eating the Book--a response to 'We Need to Talk About Goodman Games'" , in which they argue that while it's valid to have this preference for a terse, quick-to-scan layout, it's wrong to treat it as gospel—the way Milton does.

They lay out a great argument for the benefits of the more prose-like traditional style: it allows you to "eat the book" (a phrase Orthopraxy borrowed from Dennis Detwiller's 2021 Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscape). What both Orthopraxy and Detwiller mean by this phrase is that a more wordy style is easier to read before your time at the table, as it's more entertaining and allows for more flourishes that in turn spark the reader's imagination. It might even be enjoyable to read on its own, without any intention of ever running it. Either way, the reader can actually internalise the contents of the adventure, to the point where they don't need the book anymore to run the adventure it describes.

If you ignore everything about the way they are presented (and by whom), both of these preferences are equally valid in my opinion.

Which is why my immediate reaction after watching and reading them was: Why not both?

The Horror

It's only natural to feel like there is one optimal way to present any given intended experience. Now, you might even feel like that optimal way differs from experience to experience, but for some reason, we always struggle with the idea of representing the same experience in different ways, at the same time. It feels redundant somehow, inelegant, like wasted time.

But there's a great section in Jaako Stenros' and Markus Montola's book "The Rule Book" that talks about the way(s) the complicated board game Arkham Horror teaches itself, and how people, therefore, learn it.

It comes with both a reference manual of formal rules, as well as a book with play instructions– basically a step by step tutorial that tells you how to play the game. In addition to this, there are videos online that show you how to play the game. Stenros and Montola write:

We can look at the cooperative board game Arkham Horror Third Edition for various types of play instructions. The game comes with two rule books: one containing all the formal rules and one containing play instructions. The Rules Reference book let outlines the distinction:

"This document is the definitive source for all Arkham Horror Third Edition rules. This document is not intended to teach new players how to play the game. Players who wish to learn how to playfor the first time should read the Learn to Play booklet instead. As questions arise during the game, players should refer to this document."

Indeed, the Rules Reference booklet is difficult to understand if one does not already know how the game is played. The rule 001 sets the tone:

"If a component’s text directly contradicts these rules, the component takes precedence. The component overrides only the rule that applies to that specific situation."

The Learn to Play booklet strikes a very dif fer ent mood, opening with a vignette that situates the game in the Roaring Twenties:

"Yet a dark shadow grows in the city of Arkham. Alien entities known as Ancient Ones lurk in the emptiness beyond space and time, writhing at the thresholds between worlds."

The booklet then continues with an overview, explanation of components, setup, and the process of playing the game. Indeed, it is not unlike the usual printed rules in board games— except that the booklet explicitly states that it omits some rules to make learning the game easier. Having two books is very useful: Learn to Play is organized in a way that facilitates learning, and Rules Reference is organized in a way that makes it easy to solve issues during the game.

[...]

Despite these official documents, many players choose to start learning from video tutorials on the internet.

Now at least in traditional and OSR style play, it's fair to say that the adventure is part of the rules of the game . So why not treat it the same way as board games treat their rules?

Blueprint vs. Render

Both of the approaches above have different intentions, and they provide you with different things. And while I understand that part of the argument of "eating the book" is that doing so basically renders the reference obsolete, I don't tend to agree. At least in my experience, even having absorbed a traditional adventure pretty thoroughly, when the reality of play punches you in the face, it's always nice to have a well-presented key to fall back on, and improvise off of. The eaten part then informs your usage of that reference in the moment, and enlivens it in your mind.

It's akin to the difference between a technical drawing or blueprint and an architectural render. Two views of the same building, that serve different purposes in the process.

Image Source: https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/samples.html

A Third Way

Now, just as in the case of the above Arkham Horror players opting for the third option of learning the rules via videos, ideally we could do the same with adventures.

For at least two of them, we actually can. Ironically, thanks to the person who started all this in the first place: Milton has released both a video of him running Winter's Daughter, as well as one of him running the Mothership adventure The Haunting of Ypsilon 14.[1]

The latter is actually what really saved my ass when I recently found myself having to run Ypsilon 14 for a group of 8 semi-strangers without ever having run Mothership at all before. I had watched that video by Milton and having seen what he did helped me immensely in the moment. The "command center layout" couldn't have done that on its own (though Ypsilon 14 arguably sits somewhere in-between the two styles discussed above.)

As Many Ways As Possible

I think ideally, every adventure would be presented in as many ways that have different advantages as possible. And I know that's not really possible for most productions, as effort, length and page count is a constant concern with these things. But I think there should be a few things from both camps that the other could keep in mind when writing adventures to make them easier to run for everyone.

In a future post, I'll try to get more specific about what all of this would look like. I promise.

[1] I struggle to recommend watching Questing Beast videos for obvious reasons , so I will do the most cowardly thing and use them as (positive) examples but not link to them.