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Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?
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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7617978" data-attributes="member: 29398"><p>One thing that occurred to me via seeing a few posts a couple of pages back is this:</p><p></p><p>One thing a description or narration should strive for, however else it's delivered or phrased, is to <em>answer any obvious questions before they need to be asked</em>.</p><p></p><p>The example given was, I think, something like "You enter a room. Passages exit to the north and west. There's a staff." in its simplified form. This leaves a boatload of unanswered obvious questions and thus fails as a useful description. Some of the numeric dimensions can be left out of the verbal description if you're using a grid and map and just draw it out (which I often do) but noting the location of the staff, what it's made of, and whether there's anything else in the room; also noting anything special or unusual about the environment here e.g. the north passage has some water on the floor and there's an unusual amount of lichen on the west wall of the room - all of these seem like no-brainers to just describe up front as they'd be fairly obvious to the PCs.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 7617978, member: 29398"] One thing that occurred to me via seeing a few posts a couple of pages back is this: One thing a description or narration should strive for, however else it's delivered or phrased, is to [I]answer any obvious questions before they need to be asked[/I]. The example given was, I think, something like "You enter a room. Passages exit to the north and west. There's a staff." in its simplified form. This leaves a boatload of unanswered obvious questions and thus fails as a useful description. Some of the numeric dimensions can be left out of the verbal description if you're using a grid and map and just draw it out (which I often do) but noting the location of the staff, what it's made of, and whether there's anything else in the room; also noting anything special or unusual about the environment here e.g. the north passage has some water on the floor and there's an unusual amount of lichen on the west wall of the room - all of these seem like no-brainers to just describe up front as they'd be fairly obvious to the PCs. [/QUOTE]
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