D&D 5E How to force emotions down your players' throats?

doctorbadwolf · Sep 28, 2016

iserith said:
I would view spending "20 minutes describing every single feature of the room or area" as much of a failure on the part of the DM as describing so little that the players must ask questions to have enough context to act. Surely there is a middle ground here where the DM gives the basic scope of options sufficient for the players to have the context to act and does so in a reasonable amount of time. Or perhaps you are just exaggerating for effect here? Though to what end I can't guess.

I've explained it twice already in this thread: One is the player asking the DM a question and the DM answering. The other is the player describing what he or she wants the character to do and the DM narrating the result of the adventurer's action. The latter is in my view more in line with the basic conversation of the game as laid out in the Basic Rules and lends itself better to the flow of a story. And, at least in the case of the OP, it appears to make it easier for players to stay in character. @Lanliss says as much upthread.

From my perspective as a DM, when the Q&A is going on, the forward momentum of game play has stopped while the scene is being clarified, resuming only when the player has gotten sufficient context or pre-approval to act. Whereas when the player is describing what the character is doing, the momentum of game play continues uninterrupted, each action and result building on the next to flesh out the scene and create the emergent story.

But "I look at the tree to see how tall it is." Is a fake action. It's a weird veil thrown over what is actually happening, which is the player finding out what heir character already "knows", ie how tall the tree is. It's literally an added step. That just seems really weird, and I don't just mean ITT. I've encounter this tactic IRL, and it is so arbitrary and fakey to me that it *completely* kills immersion. I'm glad it works for you, I was just hoping that the explanation had more to it, so I was just missing something, it it seems that I wasn't. No big deal.

As for the time comment, there is a middle ground, and it includes allowing players to ask for clarification in the most efficient means possible.

The thing is, if you are in the habit of just letting the "q&a" happen, it effectively stops being out of character, because no one at the table thinks of it as a break in the action, and it resolves unanswered questions more quickly.

doctorbadwolf · Sep 28, 2016

Forgot: the 20 minute thing is basically a reference to trying to describe he room in enough detail that the players will almost certainly not need more information. I don't know your players, but mine are maddeningly clever, and inventive. For me, the only middle ground really is "let the players get clarifying info as efficiently as possible as they come up with whatever thing no one could have predicted that they are now doing."

And sometimes, even tho it really should, it just doesn't occur to the DM that Billy the Goat-Man Monk is going to want to know how the telephone pole in the neighbor's yard is, so he can gauge his ability run up the pole, jump off it near the top, and flying kick the hovering demon in the face.

What? We do modern fantasy a lot. Dresden style.

And Billy is a perfectly good name for a king fu goat man.

iserith · Sep 28, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
But "I look at the tree to see how tall it is." Is a fake action.

There is nothing fake about it. Setting aside that I would likely have said how tall the tree is anyway, it's a thing a fictional character in a story might reasonably do. If you were reading a book, that might be a sentence you would read as the author described the character's action.

doctorbadwolf said:
It's a weird veil thrown over what is actually happening, which is the player finding out what heir character already "knows", ie how tall the tree is. It's literally an added step.

It is no more an added step than the player asking a question of the DM, which I presume you find acceptable.

doctorbadwolf said:
That just seems really weird, and I don't just mean ITT. I've encounter this tactic IRL, and it is so arbitrary and fakey to me that it *completely* kills immersion. I'm glad it works for you, I was just hoping that the explanation had more to it, so I was just missing something, it it seems that I wasn't. No big deal.

Everyone's "immersion" is "killed" by something someone else does that they don't do it seems. At least in forum discussions. You'll note I never referenced "immersion" in my explanation.

doctorbadwolf said:
As for the time comment, there is a middle ground, and it includes allowing players to ask for clarification in the most efficient means possible.

No efficiency is lost here since your Q&A is no less effort than a player describing an action for his or her character. My suggestion that there is a middle ground was in reference to your outlandish claim that a DM is taking 20 minutes to describe a scene.

doctorbadwolf said:
The thing is, if you are in the habit of just letting the "q&a" happen, it effectively stops being out of character, because no one at the table thinks of it as a break in the action, and it resolves unanswered questions more quickly.

I was in the habit of letting the Q&A happen. But I broke that habit.

Imaculata · Sep 28, 2016

iserith said:
Sure, there are lots of reasons why a player might not understand the fictional situation as clearly as the DM does. However, that doesn't necessarily require the litany of questions I see at many games. Players can instead describe what they do to get the information they seek.

Something that often seems to happen, is that DM's simply provide too much information, or too little, or too much irrelevant information. And I feel that some of the commercial adventure modules encourage the latter.

Does a player really need to know what the exact measurements of the room are, when a simple small/medium/large would suffice? In my experience, such details only lead to more questions.

Does a player really need to know every last detail of the room, or would simply telling them that there's various furniture in it be enough?

Take for example this description from LmoPD:

The door opens onto a five-foot-wide landing fifteen feet above a large cellar, with stone steps descending to the floor in two short flights. Another door stands beneath the stairs to the north. A large stone cistern occupies the western part of the room, whose walls are lined with kegs and barrels.

Would you have any idea what this room looks like based on this description? I tried it with my players, and the only detail that stuck, was the two flights of stairs. By the time I was finished reading them this short piece of text, they still had no idea of the scale of the room, nor did they have any idea what a cistern is in the first place. And yet these are the sorts of descriptions that DM's are encouraged to read to their players. It does not surprise me when the players have a lot of questions.

So what does the room actually look like?

Ah, this changes things. If I need to show my players this picture to clarify things, I've already failed in my description. First of all the description leaves out one of the doors. But disregarding that error for a moment, there's a ton of questions that my players might have about this room. And the first question is quite an obvious one.

1> Where are we in the room, in relation to everything the DM just described?
2> What is a cistern?
3> How big is the room?
4> What does the room actually look like?
5> How many doors are there again, and where are they?

See, if the people who wrote this campaign module had paid a bit more attention to these 5 important points, they would have reached point 5, and caught the missing door. But point 1 is perhaps the most important of all. You should always describe things from the point of view of the party. You have to remember that the players are not looking at a top down view of the room. They are entering through the door to the right, and so everything in the description should be as viewed from that door.

robus · Sep 28, 2016

Imaculata said:
See, if the people who wrote this campaign module had paid a bit more attention to these 5 important points, they would have reached point 5, and caught the missing door. But point 1 is perhaps the most important of all. You should always describe things from the point of view of the party. You have to remember that the players are not looking at a top down view of the room. They are entering through the door to the right, and so everything in the description should be as viewed from that door.

Agree 100% - I've abandoned the NSEW terms unless the players are looking at a map. Now I say things like "Ahead of you, to your left, to your right" depending upon their entry point. And too often the read-aloud text assumes an entry point forcing the DM to convert it on the fly. (Yet another reason to abandon the read-aloud text).

iserith · Sep 28, 2016

Imaculata said:
Would you have any idea what this room looks like based on this description? I tried it with my players, and the only detail that stuck, was the two flights of stairs. By the time I was finished reading them this short piece of text, they still had no idea of the scale of the room, nor did they have any idea what a cistern is in the first place. And yet these are the sorts of descriptions that DM's are encouraged to read to their players.

I certainly don't hold up published adventures as any sort of standard for descriptions (or basically any other standard). Learning how to impart information to other people is a skill and an important one for the DM to develop in my view. And oftentimes the DM must adapt his or her descriptions for the specific group of players.

Imaculata said:
It does not surprise me when the players have a lot of questions.

If a player doesn't hear the DM clearly or doesn't know what a word means, I think a question from player to DM is fine. Otherwise, it can be put in terms of things the character is doing to gather more information.

And just a general statement for the record: Just because I don't like a particular approach doesn't mean anyone is wrong for using it. If the Q&A works for you (the general "you"), then keep on doing it. It doesn't work for me anymore.

Imaculata · Sep 28, 2016

iserith said:
If a player doesn't hear the DM clearly or doesn't know what a word means, I think a question from player to DM is fine. Otherwise, it can be put in terms of things the character is doing to gather more information.

I agree. It's fine when players ask questions. But, I think you want to prevent the most obvious questions by providing a clear description. After my initial description of a room, I want the players to have an understanding of the scale and lay out of the room, where they are in relation to it, how many doors there are, and where those doors are. That's it. This gets most of the more obvious questions out of the way.

I may mention that there are barrels in the room. But I leave any details regarding those barrels till the players decide to investigate them. Those are the finer details, and it's fine if the players want to know more about those things. But they aren't relevant for their basic understanding of what the room looks like, which is in my opinion the most crucial aspect of describing any room. The players should have a clear picture in their mind of what their characters are looking at.

Take for example the afore mentioned cistern. If I just tell them that:

"there is a cistern in the western part of the room, and the walls are lined with barrels"...

..Then they still don't have any clue where the cistern is exactly, what it looks like, and where the barrels are exactly. They also have no idea how far away they are from any of those things. Are they close to the cistern, or far away? Can they walk around the cistern, or is it up against the wall? And what does it mean that the "cistern is in the western part of the room". As the DM I can see what it means on the map, but to the players it means next to nothing.

What I would say instead, is that:

"There's a cistern; a small reservoir filled with shallow water, -in the back of the room. And on either side of it, are barrels stacked up against the wall. To the left of the reservoir, the room ends in a dead end, while on the right it leads to a door."

A little more wordy perhaps. But it is accurate, and it paints a far better picture of the lay out of the room, and where things are in relation to the party.

hejtmane · Sep 28, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
Or we simply don't want to spend 20 minutes describing every single feature of the room or area, and the players also don't want us to do that, and who even has time to plan that much detail out ahead of time, every time?

So, the players ask questions appropriate to the vague plans forming in their heads, and I answer.

Also, sometimes you describe things, and players don't have perfect short term memory. This is why I like drawing things out or using maps, but even then sometimes you can't tell/don't remember to draw everything, especially in a 3d sense. And we definitely play the game in 3d.
The "worst" I've seen with this, at the table, went vaguely like:

Player: How tall is the stairway, again?

DM:15ft, and it winds gradually, think ballroom more than tight spiral, to the south, here, ending in this area that overlooks the main room, with a rail about navel height to an average man.

Player: Ok, and do the rails up the stairway and on the landing look sturdy?

DM:<checks character's perception and investigate numbers, which in this case are quite good> Yep, not only that, but you've noticed in general that the place is in less disrepair than a cheaply built manor would be, abandoned so long. Unless I say otherwise, assume most stuff is still pretty sturdy, built to last.

Player: ok, sweet. I <describes what she wants to do, and how she wants to do it>

DM: Nice. Go for it. (it was pretty straightforward, and her description included what skills and features she'd be using at what points, all of which made sense with the game's action economy and other rules, except that she forgot to one aspect of jumping) You'll want a running start or some kind of vault for that jump, don't forget to leave enough movement in your path for that.

Player: MMMk, I think I'm good

<resolution of actions ensues, giant monster bear troll gone wrong thing gets rekt>

Her turn took a little longer than normal, but the payoff was well worth it.

Especially in 5e, which moves so much more quickly than previous editions, I just don't see the problem. I'd much rather my players feel free to ask questions in order to pull off crazy stunts and the like, than feel like they aren't "supposed" to interrupt the flow of the round to clarify things.

I am the same I had guys ask how tall the tree was because he was not a thief but a Monk with and they had archers in the tree they wanted to try a run jump with a throw assist from the Bear Totem Barbarian so it mattered. I let them do it with a dex and strength check hey it keeps the game fun

doctorbadwolf · Sep 28, 2016

hejtmane said:
I am the same I had guys ask how tall the tree was because he was not a thief but a Monk with and they had archers in the tree they wanted to try a run jump with a throw assist from the Bear Totem Barbarian so it mattered. I let them do it with a dex and strength check hey it keeps the game fun

Yeah it resolved super easily and quickly, and no one was less into their character or the world as a result.

iserith · Sep 28, 2016

hejtmane said:
I am the same I had guys ask how tall the tree was because he was not a thief but a Monk with and they had archers in the tree they wanted to try a run jump with a throw assist from the Bear Totem Barbarian so it mattered. I let them do it with a dex and strength check hey it keeps the game fun

I would have included the height of the tree or - at a minimum - how high up the archers were when describing the environment. The distance to enemies is a key description in my view, especially if one is playing theater of the mind. The players cannot make informed decisions without that information so in my view it needs to be included in the scene framing.

D&D 5E How to force emotions down your players' throats?

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle

iserith

Magic Wordsmith

Imaculata

Hero

robus

Lowcountry Low Roller

iserith

Magic Wordsmith

Imaculata

Hero

hejtmane

Explorer

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle

iserith

Magic Wordsmith

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