[GMing] Description techniques

[loverdrive]

I recently caught myself that I have a favorite description technique, especially in an opening scene or a new location: describe in excruciating details all the small irrelevant things, and then just casually drop a bombshell with the most important part, like

The sky above Tsurugi Industries headquarters is the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. The sky above Tsurugi Industries headquarters is the most pleasing shade of pale blue ever known. The sky above Tsurugi Industries is of cold endless abyss full of stars that still remain burning. The sky above Tsurugi Industries is nothing but steel, concrete and graves.

You see, it's all a mater of perspective. The Tower cannot be truly comprehended, its scale is meaningless for a human mind. I can list all the factual tidbits, its height of two thousand three hundred seventy six meters, its projected occupancy of two and a half million people, every single one of eleven digits of its construction costs or conjure a new unit of measurement to denote efficiency of its on-site crematorium, but it all will be in vain — it's scale defies the very concept of reason.

What can be comprehended, though, is how perfectly arranged everything is, how well-tended plants in the lobby are, how every shape and color combination of both things that are there and things that are merely implied by the negative space is meticulously aligned with the corporation's brand book.

Not a single tiny little object is out of place in Tomoe's domain.

Well, maybe except all the bloodbath.
It works nicely to establish the mood and the general atmosphere, and then violently recontextualize it and thus prompt a bit delayed interest like, "wait, what?!"

Do you have favorite techniques?

 

[Reynard]

I prefer evocative brevity. No one wants to hear me ramble on about streets and market stalls and whatever when they enter the city. Moreover, the less you say, IMO, the deeper the players are immersed because it is their conception of the world they are in, not mine.

 

[Kichwas]

Even years before Daggerheart came out I liked the idea of getting the players to describe what they see for me.

Give a few mood triggers for a scene, then have them fill it out. I always struggled for ways to do the obvious without actually doing it - Daggerheart just suggests directly asking them to describe something.

Half the time players do that a game gets sidetracked into roleplay. But that's a good thing. That's actually what we're trying to achieve so often.

The whole time I was GMing Pathfinder I mostly didn't do this and the few times I tried the over-reliance on tactical maps felt like they got in the way. So I think good description also requires keeping players in theater of the mind while doing it. Perhaps with some mood music or a thematic visual (a picture - a still image, but not a map).

 

[The Firebird]

I like to keep descriptions short and to the point. I'm not going to give a lot of adjectives or such--"you're attacked by 4 giant spiders" rather than "they have glistening fangs and hungry eyes" or whatever. I know from the popularity of streams some people like that kind of thing, but for me it pulls me out of the game. I feel like, yeah, they're spiders, let's get on with it.

 

[Piperken]

Two posts, one towards interrogating your own setting; where it discusses 3 and 1 may be helpful.

The second by the same designer, talks about Paint the Scene.

 

[Piperken]

...Do you have favorite techniques?

In addition to above, another suggestion that works well in-the-moment is leveraging players' expertise in a relevant area that applies to the moment you're embroiled with, that you know little about.

e.g. Your party has an injured member who needs medical help, and have come to a hospital. They want to access particular supplies and not be noticed by staff. One of your players has had experience working in a hospital. You ask them what kinds of challenges might need to be navigated to accomplish this task.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I don't think I have a formalized technique, but there's a few things I try to do.

I have a cinematic mind. So I always try to have a motion to what I'm describing. From large to small, from left to right, from close to far, from large to small. There's a logical order to the things I describe.

I tend to be brief. I don't like overly literary descriptions of environments during play. I tend to stick to things, with descriptors and go from one to another.

The best tip I ever got was to explore the five senses. So I definitely lean more on what you can see, but I always try to put in at least one other strong sense (smell, hearing, etc) to ground them in the scene.

I tend to highlight interactive options to my players. It needs to be clear what's just description and what's an open hand. It's not done explicitly, but I may change my tone, or mark a pause or make some eye contact when describing something interactive.

An example. Let's say my players enter one of the last room of a dungeon. There's a second level further in the room with a sacrificial altar and the head of the cult. There's a dozen cultist kneeling down from it. There's torches of blue flames and there's rot, and flies and stuff like that.

For me, it's obvious that the motion, because of the horrific nature of the scene, is from the players, forward through the room to where the head of the cult is. So I'd probably describe things in this order:

• The sound changes, echo-y. This is a large room.
• This large room, maybe fifty feet deep was roughly sculpted into the rock. You can see the marks of chisels and picks in the ground around your feet.
• It's very dark, it takes you a moment to make out what's around you.
• You only manage to slowly adapt to the darkness because of flickering torches of blue haphazardly afixed to the walls.
• The ground is wet, sticky and the air smells of rot. You see dozens of dark figures kneeling in it, all turned towards the back of the room.
• Separating all of this, a second level in the back of the room is better lit with two huge braziers and a white sacrificial altar striped with streaks of dried blood.
• Next to the altar, stands the man you've been looking for, arms raised towards the ceiling and eyes closed.

I'll often end with the thing that matters most, or the objective, or the next door for the players to take.

 

[Heilemann]

I specifically never, ever use the metaphor of a camera and it irks me something fierce when I see it on actual plays:

"The camera moves down, it slides across the wet street, it enters a doorway where we see a man..."

You're not a freakin' director selling your spec script, don't refer to a camera! The whole table is sitting there imagining a boom, a crew, lights... NO!

"The sunset sky reflects in the street still wet from the mild summer rain. Inside a darkened doorway a man..."

 

[zarionofarabel]

I wave my hands around alot...

 

[Celebrim]

My main concern is always in describing just enough to the players to make sure the important details of the scene are shared between everyone.