Boxed Text

[Morrus]

Aramis - what do you mean by "trigger information"?

Stuff that happens if the PCs trigger it.

 

[Celebrim]

I know full well, that my approach to DMing isn't your cup of tea, Celebrim, but I've found it works extremely well for the groups I've DMed for

I don't know that you know that well. This is what I actually wrote:

"In 32 years of gaming, as a player I've never once failed to enjoy an experience when the GM was well prepared, and invariably every bad experience I've ever had came down to (I soon discovered) a lack of preparation (or sometimes too much of the wrong preparation, that became immediately useless when the players went off script). The single most telling mark of a good GM is how hard they are willing to work and how much time they put into their games."

It very much sounds to me that you are putting a lot of work into your games, and your discussion of how to use published material in a session could have in its substance been written by me. If you are putting that sort of effort into your games, I imagine that they come off very well indeed.

I made quite clear that "not my cup of tea" were DMs that put no effort into their games and showed up and just tried to wing it, and in particular the ones that believe that they are so good at DMing that they don't think they need to put in a lot of effort. You've made clear that's not your approach, so there is no reason to expect you fall out of my cup of tea.

We ultimately had a minor disagreement over the organization of text in an encounter. I advocated having a short well written evocative introduction to the scene, in the style of a screenplay or story hook. You disagreed, but then instead advocated having a list of bullet points that you would turn into natural speech in the style of an oral presentation.

And, I basically feel that's only a very small difference. Both approaches clearly call out to the DM where to begin a scene, and both approaches clearly organize the important information that needs to be conveyed to the players so that they can start their investigation. In practice, if either is very well done, the results are going to be pretty similar. There are things I like about both approaches, and things I dislike about both approaches. Thinking what the bullet point version gets you, I like the following:

a) Improved possibility of eye contact, if DM has skill to pull it off.
b) Point by point presentation allows you to make sure everyone is clear over each detail before moving on.
c) Would work well if combined with visual illustrations, such a 3D model of the dungeon.

Thinking about what I don't like:

a) Natural language harder to pull off well, particularly when under stress. Most DMs likely to end up just reading large portions of the bullet points anyway.
b) Module will likely read less well to the DM (before play), and be read less well to the players (during play). DM has to compose in real time, postponing work that could be done in prep, resulting in inferior transcription.
c) Bullet points ultimately just added white space, conveying same amount of information in more page space.

Overall though, I think the approaches are far more congruent than orthogonal. Turning one into the other involves only a short amount of time and not a lot of effort with a word processor. Ultimately, which works best probably is a matter of practice - how good is your dramatic reading versus how good is your oral presentation skills.

 

[Celebrim]

Information that triggers an immediate player reaction.

Such as "He draws his gun, and continues to berate you" - a significant number of players jump at the "He draws his gun" and attack...

Yeah, I've called that out as bad in past discussions of this topic.

Poor writers of boxed text invariably write like they are writing for a novel with no consideration for the medium they are writing for. Bad boxed text will contain one or more of the following:

1. Descriptions of player characters feelings, thoughts, and actions.
2. Descriptions of things that the player characters could not have observed or which are highly subjective, such as what the NPCs intend or think rather than what they actually do.
3. Highly anachronistic language.
4. Multiple paragraphs of text.
5. Protracted or extended scenes, particularly scenes that the PCs could interrupt at any point.
6. An explicit narrator, particularly a highly inappropriate choice, such as first or second person narrator or an omniscient narrator.
7. Vague and unspecific descriptions, particularly those not clarified in the encounter and which put a large burden on the imagination of the DM.
8. Too much anticipation of the viewpoint of the encounter.

#1 is a railroading technique and should be used either not at all or very sparingly. In general, a DM should never try to play a PC or make assumptions about how players or PCs react to events.

#2 is telling and not showing, and tends to involve forgetting that you are not the PC. Often it relates to #1 in that its a view point bias. N1: Forest Oracle is filled with this sort of crap.

#3 involves poor emersion. It's not as bad as some of the others but can be unintentionally comical and character breaking.

#4 involves DM arrogance. No matter how well you write, no one wants to just hear you blab on and on. It also guarantees players will forget things even if they don't tune out. The only time you should do this is 'stories within stories' in response to player queries like, "Tell me how the Usher family came to be cursed." or "What are the Deathly Hallows?" In that case, if you really are a good oral story teller, you can take your 5 minutes or so to tell a good story. But make sure you have player buy in before you do that.

#5 like #4 involves the DM being a frustrated novelist and forgetting the PCs are the protagonists and the medium is interactive. If you want to write a novel, write a novel. Just don't make your players sit through it.

#6 is again the crime of writing a novel not a module in an campaign.

#7 is usually unintentionally writing a novel and forgetting that the game is interactive. Novelists use handwave techniques to cut over parts of a scene were the details aren't important to their story, but its not really the DMs job to decide what is important and too much handwaving tends to be subtle railroading. If you really have something that isn't important to the scene in an RPG, you might be just better off leaving it out. I'm really leery of implied content, such as characters that say 'something' without saying what they say. Bookshelves filled with books with no information about the books. I have a horror regarding bookshelves placed in rooms as color. Paintings or other artwork not described particularly if described only according to the feelings that they invoke (see #1). Anything in the scene where you can tell it was added just as background color and the writer might as well have hung a sign up saying "You aren't supposed to interact with this, it's not important."

#8 is the hardest to avoid. I admit I make this mistake all the time, forcing me to edit my own words when I come to use them. A common issue is the usage of the words 'left' and 'right' when trying to describe the layout of the room, or any other viewpoint word like 'across' or 'opposite' or 'near' or 'next' or whatever. I try to resolve this with words like 'north' or 'south', but then these often have to be translated from absolutes to relatives once you get around to using them. The implicit amount of lighting in a room is also a problem, as is that PCs with different perceptions as well as perspectives are inherently going to see different things. An even bigger problem is making assumptions about what the players have done prior to getting into an area, which is why I often give the most important piece of information about a room - what sort of creatures are in it - as part of boxed text, but improvise that once I've set the stage based on what's alive at this point since monsters are mobile and active. One of my biggest screw-ups lately was I wrote a comparison into the text to try to clarify what they were seeing, on the assumption that they already had some prior experience with the thing I was comparing to when in in fact they'd in the game avoided the thing I had intended to use as comparison. Ooops.

 

[chaochou]

I prepared this comment in a box a couple of weeks ago, just in case this thread happened.

 

[Lylandra]

Actually, I like boxed text in the same way I like bullet points. As a DM in a german speaking group, boxed text is nothing that I could read aloud anyway unless I'd take my time to translate it into german read-aloud text. Bullet points are, as has been pointed out already, condensed information that I need to fill with life. Which is fine when I need a short summary of a given scene or a general overview on a character's motivation. Read-aloud texts need more time to be read and understood, but can provide additional information on the mood, flair and feel of an environment. They can give me hints on speech patterns or general demeanor of NPC in a way condensed adjectives could never do.

I agree that read-aloud text that is truely meant to be read aloud has to conform to certain criteria. As much as I liked, for example, the way of the wicked APs, they suffered a LOT from pages of non-interactive monologue. While it can be cool to have your boss give that very long inspirational speech, it quickly becomes one-dimensional when he tries to pull it off every. single. time. Add this to a lazy DM who tries to directly translate those speeches into German without preparing the whole thing in advance...

 

[Jhaelen]

You've made clear that's not your approach, so there is no reason to expect you fall out of my cup of tea.

Well, I seemed to recall an argument in an older thread, but perhaps I'm just confusing you with someone else.

Your latest post about bad boxed text pretty much sums up why I prefer not having any. So, yes, apparently, we actually do have a very similar opinion regarding boxed texts, after all

P.S.: I just realized, I'm also looking back at 32 years of experience as a DM - gee, how time flies!

 

[Lylandra]

As for Celebrim and Jhaelen... I can agree with both of your points of view and I don't think they are necessarily exclusive.

I've only seen the one extreme Celebrim decribed before and yes, it is a sign of an over-confident and underprepared DM: To play in a session where you, as the player, can basically say anything and, depending on how much the DM likes your approach, your solution or idea suddenly becomes the "right one" which makes it feel like somehow you changed the ingame reality. Now if you happen to have one player whose ideas are favoured by the DM or you happen to percieve that it is always the second (or third) approach that somehow succeeds, then you start feeling seriously tricked. BEcause right now, you realize that there is no given adventure and the DM is making it all up on spot.

Now, don't get me wrong, I *do* like player influence on the campaign. I always try to weave the character's motivations and backstories into modules and change things on the fly, depending on how much my players like certain NPC or situations. I ask them what they've liked most or whether or not their character wants to invest into an ongoing relationship/friendship/enmity with NPC X. I *love* creative ideas and enjoy player solutions that were not forseen by neither me, nor the module and I tend to say "yes" to such approaches if they seem reasonable. but that doesn't mean that there is no range of "planned solutions" which I can invoke should my players happen to play it safe.

Because as much as I loathe "swimming" in a sea of "anything can happen" because there is nothing prepared in advance, I also hate being trapped in a published module straightjacket as a player where every second answer is "oh, that's not how it works in this module" or "this solution is not provided, so it doesn't work" even if the idea seems more elegant than the forseen path. A good DM can improvise on the spot and add in ideas of her own (be it spontaneously or in advance) while the players don't even notice that something is different.

 

[GrahamWills]

P.S.: I just realized, I'm also looking back at 32 years of experience as a DM - gee, how time flies!

Hmmm. I also am looking back at exactly 32 years of GMing. Clearly this thread appeals to a very specific age demographic ...

 

[Mad_Jack]

Hmmm. I also am looking back at exactly 32 years of GMing. Clearly this thread appeals to a very specific age demographic ...

34 here, although, quality-wise, since I started at the age of ten I'm not sure those first two or three years count, lol...

I like boxed text, in general - moreso for myself as the DM to read, though, rather than to read to the players. It gives me an idea as to what the module designer was thinking about how they wanted to present the room. It may or may not match my own ideas, but having something to compare them to tends to help me clarify them better.

 

[Lanefan]

I don'd mind boxed descriptions if they're done well. Problem is, they often aren't.

The worst are those where rooms/chambers/locations that can be approached from more than one direction - the boxed descriptions never take this into account and invariably assume approach from one particular entrance. Best to just say "you have entered a 20x30' room with exits to the north, east and south; a bed and some shelves are against the west wall, and a table and basin stand near the middle of the room". Use of hard directions (north, east, etc.) is way better than soft directions (left, right) as north is always north no matter which way the PCs approach from. The only time hard directions have to be scrapped is when the party is lost, at which point it's down to 'left-right' directions and the DM has to tweak.

The uber-worst are those where the boxed description gives away information the PCs can't see/hear/sense yet, but I find that much more common a problem with 4e-style battlemats (where it shows you the whole flippin' level when you've only just got to the first area) than boxed text.

Hmmm. I also am looking back at exactly 32 years of GMing. Clearly this thread appeals to a very specific age demographic ...

2016-1984=...well, would you look at that! Count another in the 32-year club.

Lan-"time flies when you're having fun"-efan