Make Your Mods Easier to Dungeon Master

Neverwinter Connections has posted a new article entitled "Make Your Mods Easier to Dungeon Master", in which they provide tips on exactly how to create your mods so that other people can get the most use out of them. Here's a teaser:

    7. Itemize your mods! It is very time consuming for a DM to itemize everything. This is due to two different things. First, a DM does not know what an item's properties are unless he spawns it in his inventory and checks. Second, in order for a DM to put an item in a chest, he has to manually open the chest and stick it in by hand. This takes time and also if your players are around they *will* see the chest/barrel/crate opening by itself and know you're there, which spoils the experience. All in all, it takes the DM between 30 seconds to 2 minutes to find the kind of item he's looking for and put it in a box, and he has to do that BEFORE his players get to the object so they don't see him. That means that every item he wants to give a player causes him to be away from the group for at least 30 seconds.