D&D General Stop Yapping, Start Playing: Trimming GM Descriptions

[BookTenTiger]

Three sentences??? What luxury. I've boiled my writing down to one single sentence:

As you peer through the narrow, stone-lined doorway, jostling each other for a prime position to see with your two eyes (except for Bronwick who, as we all know, lost his eye in the previous adventure to the arrow of a rather astute and dextrous goblin named Flynn who came from the village of Coldwax, known primarily for its exports of wax from Goliath Bees, a large and dangerous breed of insect whose honey is poisonous, and which causes terrible hallucinations of demonic figures (such as Gnarlgrot the Three-Pronged, general of the Spikehorn Warriors, infamous for their invasion of the City of Glass (which, as we remember from our previous adventure, isn't actually made of glass, but is known to be so vulnerable to invasion that it earned this fragile nickname (unlike Shell City, which is actually made of the shells of giant hermit crabs, and Mistopia, a legendary city of Air Elementals who use actual clouds as building materials, whipping up cumulus columns and long streets of cirris-stones, which do occasionally fall to the Earth, and wind up incorporated into the huts of ordinary peasants, who are unfortunately now cursed to spend the rest of their lives shrouded in fog (though this is not always a curse, as the constant fog-layer surrounding Three River Valley is what kept is safe from the dragon Emeralk, when she went raiding across the realm and searching for her lost egg, which had been stolen by a Halfling thief named....

Oh, um...

You see an orc standing in front of a pie.

 

[Umbran]

I'd assume the DM knows the details already, but just isn't describing all of them until-unless asked. In other words, she does have a plan.

I would not make such an assumption. I have seen too many GMs (including myself) have to pause an think about the answer to a player's question of, "Is there X in the room?" It says to me that, broadly, we leave a great many details unconsidered. It's a tavern, there are tables and chairs. Exactly how many chairs? And which ones of them have that one short leg that makes them wobble? Um...

And, I note: There's nothing wrong with that! - being exhaustive would be exhausting, and nobody has time for that nonsense!. Like, on the bookshelf next to me, even if we don't count the hundreds of individual books, there's some 36 separate items on the shelves. There are four other bookshelves in the room, with similar loads of stuff - dozens of items that say, "cluttered bookshelf", but I wouldn't expect to be detailed by the GM individually. The GM has a day job that isn't doing set dressing for their campaign!

 

[TwoSix]

And, I note: There's nothing wrong with that! - being exhaustive would be exhausting, and nobody has time for that nonsense!. Like, on the bookshelf next to me, even if we don't count the hundreds of individual books, there's some 36 separate items on the shelves. There are four other bookshelves in the room, with similar loads of stuff - dozens of items that say, "cluttered bookshelf", but I wouldn't expect to be detailed by the GM individually. The GM has a day job that isn't doing set dressing for their campaign!

Players who start asking things like "What are the names of the books on the cluttered shelf?" are going to be asked "Tell me some of the titles of the books you see", no exceptions.

 

[Umbran]

Players who start asking things like "What are the names of the books on the cluttered shelf?" are going to be asked "Tell me some of the titles of the books you see", no exceptions.

You may be missing the forest for the trees, by way of being a bit dismissive.

We don't render our worlds in 4k super-duper fidelity. There are valid things to interact with that GMs haven't specified before play. The approaches suggested in the thread are fine for elements that the GM has considered beforehand, but are going to be hard to apply to runtime additions.

 

[TwoSix]

You may be missing the forest for the trees, by way of being a bit dismissive.

We don't render our worlds in 4k super-duper fidelity. There are valid things to interact with that GMs haven't specified before play. The approaches suggested in the thread are fine for elements that the GM has considered beforehand, but are going to be hard to apply to runtime additions.

I was agreeing with you.

No one should walk into a game expecting the GM to have detailed lists of every environmental doodad. If a player wants to be cheeky and "check" to see if I've created those details (like all the books in the bookshelf), I will generally go right into "ask the player for a prompt" mode.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There are these other people at the table, called.players, and they frequently feel no need to be restricted to what the GM plans.

One of the foremost reasons some GMs give so much detail is that they abhor players adding material, so they must include everything the players might interact with.

But, if you aren't one of those GMs, then you are adding detail as you go, for which you don't have a plan.

This is why I recommend situations, locations, and events--not plots, arcs, or sequences of player actions. I can't presume the players will do specific things. Sure, I can usually guess where their choices are likely to go on a small scale, but not much more than that.

By not expecting patterns, and simply having the setup for a pattern to appear on its own, I can maintain a world that feels like it progresses naturally, while not needing to manipulate the players when they inevitably go off-script. There is no script to go off, there's just a soft-edged map, which fills in over time. The more we learn, and the more we establish info, the more we can collectively develop toward a satisfying conclusion on something, be it big or small.

 

[Desdichado]

How about just, "you're not a writer and this isn't your novel. Just describe stuff conversationally, the way you would when talking normally." I actually think a few descriptive elements is more important for players than GMs; they should find ways to remind people of who they are. I don't like the idea that they say their name and give their descriptions once in the first session, and then good luck everyone else; you've gotta remember that! Players who go out of their way to mention their curly hair or blazing silver-chrome eyes or whatever once or twice a session are much more memorable.

But yeah; otherwise, I think the premise is over-thinking it. The problem is caused by GMs who get too carried away thinking that they're writing descriptive text in a novel, when in reality this is an oral, conversational story-telling format, and if you just talk that way, the problem tends to take care of itself.