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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 5483696" data-attributes="member: 7533">Here's some general advice...Description, Atmosphere and Detail.What I do is first I ask myself, "If this was a scene in a movie, how would it be filmed?"  I imagine the scenery, with way the camera would pan or zoom in.  I envision the the lighting and the sound effects and the music to set the mood.Then, I ask myself, "If this movie scene was part of a novelization, how would it be written?"  Using my favorite authors as inspiration -- and hopefully drawing from one who writes in the same genre as the adventure I'm running -- I compose a description of the scene.  Then, it's just a matter of reciting it to the players.Now, all this is to help set a particular mood for the scene.  Movies are great inspiration for getting the right "look" for a mood, and novels are great inspiration for expressing that "look" in words.What you're trying to accomplish is to get a viceral reaction out of the players through descriptive details, without resorting to incentives via the rules.  It takes a little practice, but it's use descriptions, even they use popular modern day references, that players (rather than the characters) can understand.So, for example, say the PCs enter a pyramid temple, and have found the pit that leads to the dungeon below...  "At the top of the pyramid, you find an immense stone alter made of the same perfectly cut grayish green stone that the rest of the pyramid is made of.  Channels that have been stained dark run down the sides of the altar and into a well that has been cut into the floor before the altar. The hole is perfectly round and is ringed by three concentric circles of indecipherable ruins that have been chiseled into the floor.  Even your brightest cannot penetrate the darkness to see the bottom, and at intervals, you can feel a faint, warm breeze wafting up and out, as if the pyramid itself were breathing."Or, for example, to describe a healing potion created by a not-exactly-evil necromancer... "It has the consistency of oily tapioca pudding watered down with half-melted jello, and has the taste and smell of water drained from a can of tuna if that water had been fermenting in the u-bend of your kitchen sink for a week or so."And so on.  Even a relatively empty and boring room can be described in such a fashion to set the mood...  "The warehouse is terribly dark.  Only a trickle of moonlight filters in through the narrow windows set high up on the walls.  Towering, tottering stacks of crates and barrels create a labyrinth of narrow alleys that vanish into utter darkness.  In the perfect silence, the door quietly squeaks behind you as you push it closed.  A couple of startled birds (Or are they bats?) flutter through the rafters high above.  If keep quite still, somewhere within the warehouse, you can hear faint footsteps pacing, but they echo off the walls and the crates...  You cannot tell where they come from, or who or how many are making them."The technique can be used to describe NPCs, as well.  A gypsy fortune teller I used once was described as...  "Imagine Ernest Borgnine as a woman."</blockquote>

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