Room by Room

I'm in the process of reading "Princes of the Apocalypse", and there's something that's bugging me about this adventure. Though I should be clear: this adventure is far from the only offender; indeed, it's much rarer to find a published adventure that doesn't fall into this particular trap.

There's a 10-page section in the adventure where the PCs are interacting with a monastery populated by evil monks. So far, so simple.

So this adventure does what every other adventure does: it provides a keyed map and then details the monastery room by room, carefully detailing the contents of every room, and placing the monks in the appropriate locations, and that's that.

And it's incredibly dull. Reading through it, I was left with the overwhelming impression: surely there must be a better way to present this information?

The thing is, there's a whole lot of detail that we just don't need and that is, frankly, fairly uninteresting. Worse, the adventure text locks down a lot of detail that shouldn't be locked down - in a 'living' building, characters will naturally move from room to room.

So I found myself thinking that they'd have been better instead presenting the half-page map of the monastery on one page (and the lower level on a second), with bullet points indicating the salient features of the level right there next to the map. If need be, they could then have a couple of pages of key encounter areas, but let's not bother with a paragraph of text detailing the content of a storage room, please!

That description out of the way, they could then better use the rest of the text discussing how the life of the monastery goes on: where are the monks in a 'normal' day? How does that change if/when they come under attack? What about at night? And so on and so forth. Indeed, they could usefully provide a list of the total population of the monastery and a few random tables allowing the DM to generate the actual populace of a given room - perhaps the training hall has 8 monks in it this time (training), or perhaps they're all in the mess hall (dinner).

It seems to me that that's the better way to detail any mid-sized building, and especially a 'living' building such as a manor house, tavern, monastery, or office. People move around a lot, and tend not to be happily waiting for the PCs to kick in the door and kill them!

Plus, that should allow the book more room to detail some of the personalities present, and how they interact. Perhaps the sensei is a brutal martinet and widely disliked; perhaps Bob the monk is formenting discord, while Al and Clive are the sensei's loyal bullies. Or something. Give the PCs some levers they can pull so that they can influence the running of the place, rather than just detailing the leader and the lieutenant in isolation with no indication as to how their particular quirks influence the rest of the monks.

Of course, I may be completely wrong. Maybe the room-by-room description of the environment really is the optimum way to present the information. But, somehow, I doubt it.