D&D General Stop Yapping, Start Playing: Trimming GM Descriptions

[BookTenTiger]

Three sentences??? What luxury. I've boiled my writing down to one single sentence:

As you peer through the narrow, stone-lined doorway, jostling each other for a prime position to see with your two eyes (except for Bronwick who, as we all know, lost his eye in the previous adventure to the arrow of a rather astute and dextrous goblin named Flynn who came from the village of Coldwax, known primarily for its exports of wax from Goliath Bees, a large and dangerous breed of insect whose honey is poisonous, and which causes terrible hallucinations of demonic figures (such as Gnarlgrot the Three-Pronged, general of the Spikehorn Warriors, infamous for their invasion of the City of Glass (which, as we remember from our previous adventure, isn't actually made of glass, but is known to be so vulnerable to invasion that it earned this fragile nickname (unlike Shell City, which is actually made of the shells of giant hermit crabs, and Mistopia, a legendary city of Air Elementals who use actual clouds as building materials, whipping up cumulus columns and long streets of cirris-stones, which do occasionally fall to the Earth, and wind up incorporated into the huts of ordinary peasants, who are unfortunately now cursed to spend the rest of their lives shrouded in fog (though this is not always a curse, as the constant fog-layer surrounding Three River Valley is what kept is safe from the dragon Emeralk, when she went raiding across the realm and searching for her lost egg, which had been stolen by a Halfling thief named....

Oh, um...

You see an orc standing in front of a pie.

 

[Umbran]

I'd assume the DM knows the details already, but just isn't describing all of them until-unless asked. In other words, she does have a plan.

I would not make such an assumption. I have seen too many GMs (including myself) have to pause an think about the answer to a player's question of, "Is there X in the room?" It says to me that, broadly, we leave a great many details unconsidered. It's a tavern, there are tables and chairs. Exactly how many chairs? And which ones of them have that one short leg that makes them wobble? Um...

And, I note: There's nothing wrong with that! - being exhaustive would be exhausting, and nobody has time for that nonsense!. Like, on the bookshelf next to me, even if we don't count the hundreds of individual books, there's some 36 separate items on the shelves. There are four other bookshelves in the room, with similar loads of stuff - dozens of items that say, "cluttered bookshelf", but I wouldn't expect to be detailed by the GM individually. The GM has a day job that isn't doing set dressing for their campaign!

 

[TwoSix]

And, I note: There's nothing wrong with that! - being exhaustive would be exhausting, and nobody has time for that nonsense!. Like, on the bookshelf next to me, even if we don't count the hundreds of individual books, there's some 36 separate items on the shelves. There are four other bookshelves in the room, with similar loads of stuff - dozens of items that say, "cluttered bookshelf", but I wouldn't expect to be detailed by the GM individually. The GM has a day job that isn't doing set dressing for their campaign!

Players who start asking things like "What are the names of the books on the cluttered shelf?" are going to be asked "Tell me some of the titles of the books you see", no exceptions.

 

[Umbran]

Players who start asking things like "What are the names of the books on the cluttered shelf?" are going to be asked "Tell me some of the titles of the books you see", no exceptions.

You may be missing the forest for the trees, by way of being a bit dismissive.

We don't render our worlds in 4k super-duper fidelity. There are valid things to interact with that GMs haven't specified before play. The approaches suggested in the thread are fine for elements that the GM has considered beforehand, but are going to be hard to apply to runtime additions.

 

[TwoSix]

You may be missing the forest for the trees, by way of being a bit dismissive.

We don't render our worlds in 4k super-duper fidelity. There are valid things to interact with that GMs haven't specified before play. The approaches suggested in the thread are fine for elements that the GM has considered beforehand, but are going to be hard to apply to runtime additions.

I was agreeing with you.

No one should walk into a game expecting the GM to have detailed lists of every environmental doodad. If a player wants to be cheeky and "check" to see if I've created those details (like all the books in the bookshelf), I will generally go right into "ask the player for a prompt" mode.