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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6970703" data-attributes="member: 4937">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:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Descriptions of player characters feelings, thoughts, and actions.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Highly anachronistic language.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Multiple paragraphs of text.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Protracted or extended scenes, particularly scenes that the PCs could interrupt at any point.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">An explicit narrator, particularly a highly inappropriate choice, such as first or second person narrator or an omniscient narrator.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Vague and unspecific descriptions, particularly those not clarified in the encounter and which put a large burden on the imagination of the DM.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Too much anticipation of the viewpoint of the encounter.</li> </ol>#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.</blockquote>

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