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

[ezekielcroe9]

Agreed! Been doing something similar, but I think of it as a "spotlight" concept. People's eyes and the mind's eye can really only focus on a small area at a time, so it's counter-productive to flood them with a lot of information and details. Keep to one detail at a time, and focus it on very visceral/concrete things so that it fills the minds' eye better.

 

[plecostomus]

This is a timely thread. I had my 1st session as DM a couple days ago, and it ended with the players trying to repair a statue (putting a head back on a snake). They seemed to think something would happen, but of course I didn't even anticipate they would try to do this, so now I have to make something up.

I figured I would give them a vision of the snake the statue represents. Here's what I wrote immediately post-session when I was most excited about all this.

First Draft:

You have to twist the bronze snake to get its broken stump to line up with the rest of the shattered statue.

And then, you are no longer at the top of the ziggurat. You are no longer holding the snake. You are the snake, slithering with stone-like patience above a mass of purple rock. Your shadow drifts across the land. Fish with lights hanging from their heads scatter into the open sky as you pass. Pale winged creatures flock along your sides.

Ahead of you lays an endless night sky. Constellations you know, but you have never seen them so bright. Puffs of purple and blue aether coloring the spaces between. High above you, a stretch of bright clouds turns red, and an umbrella shape made of purple tentacles crawls into view. You don't see eyes or a head, and the shape lingers for only a moment before darkening and floating away.

Much closer to you, a spade-like face emerges from a fissure in the ground. It is another serpent, and as it loops upwards you see at least one pair of small arms folded against its sides. A cord of light wraps around one arm and trails away. The other serpent has pearlescent purple scales, and it bumps its head against yours affectionately. A corona of light flutters around its skull, suggesting a crown of horns.

You move on. There are lights boiling on the rock around you. As you proceed, you realize where they come from: stars are falling on this land. You make your way to your nest, which is assembled in the skeletal palm of an upstretched hand. There is nothing in the nest. As you layer yourself across the tips of the fingers, you notice a ship broken on the rocks below. It looks just like the Boreas. The white, winged creatures that ride your wake are sitting all over it.

Below you somewhere, you hear the slightly liquid boom of a heartbeat. It is the first time you have heard it in your journey here, and you do not hear it again.

You lay your head down and gaze through some empty rents in the rock. Hovering below your nest are three enormous stony spheres: the nearest is black, drawing in all light. The others are red and white. And distantly beyond them, you see a tiny blue speck, encased in a shield of gold.

Context:

• This scene is from the Astral Sea chapter of Vecna: Eve of Ruin, which the characters will visit much later. The "snakes" are 2 astral dragons who are friends with the dead god lying on the rock. The god is one of the three gods in the characters' current adventure (QFtIS module 1, The Lost City) and the dragons are from the setting (Dragonlance). The umbrella-shaped creature is an aberration/elder evil, which the characters are soon to meet another example of in their current adventure (Zargon).
• The little creatures following the snake around are kodragons, also from the Dragonlance setting. When writing this I was thinking a lot about this old picture from one of the Dragonlance adventures:
  
  
• My idea of what the Astral Sea looks like is informed a lot by Baldur's Gate 3, which my players have also played.
• The Boreas is a ship the players were on that got destroyed in the first session.
• Although this scene might color the characters' impression of the god, it doesn't give any immediately actionable information. It's not even a room description. It's just fluff that I thought was cool.

Conclusion:
Right now my thought is to cut everything after the first paragraph, and just say they see from the POV of this snake and the stars are much brighter than what they normally see at night.

The players can figure out for themselves that the snake they are seeing in the vision is connected to the god depicted in the statue, and I'm not sure any of the rest of this matters. The lore is of course really cool to me, but the players can learn about the god when they go into the ziggurat too. If for some reason they remember this when we get to VEoR and they choose to revive the dead god and the dragons show up, good for them.

The whole five senses thing...I guess I don't do that. I mentioned a heartbeat. That's 2 senses. I did it.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

@DinoInDisguise

I think the core of what you’re getting at—using fewer words and letting players fill in the gaps—is absolutely right. Description doesn’t have to be exhaustive to be effective, and motifs are a good shorthand for building consistency.

What I’d emphasize is that description isn’t just about painting a picture. Its function at the table is to frame decisions and set tone. If a detail doesn’t help the players decide what to do, or establish the stakes of the scene, it’s often more clutter than value. This is where “less is more” really earns its place—every extra sentence risks pulling attention away from the game itself.

The tricky part is that we’ve built up a kind of cultural bias in the hobby where a GM’s “quality” gets measured against how much detail they can generate. Long descriptions, elaborate backstories, endless world-building—it’s treated as a marker of skill. But in play, those same details often get in the way. They obscure choices, slow pacing, or simply overwhelm. More does not necessarily mean better; sometimes it just means heavier.

And this ties back to player agency. The more complete the GM’s description, the less room there is for players to question, interpret, or invent. If we stop short, we leave space for curiosity and improvisation. That back-and-forth is a big part of what separates TTRPGs from other media. A novel can afford lush, exhaustive description because the reader is a spectator; a game table thrives when imagination is shared.

That’s also why I think comparing to video games is useful. If players want full visual and audio immersion, video games deliver it better than we ever can. What makes tabletop unique is that it asks everyone at the table to bring their imagination to bear. The GM’s role isn’t to overwhelm with detail, but to spark just enough that the players take it further.

So in practice, I’d frame description with three questions: does this set the stakes, inspire action, or leave space for imagination? If it doesn’t do one of those, it’s probably better left unsaid.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Right now my thought is to cut everything after the first paragraph, and just say they see from the POV of this snake and the stars are much brighter than what they normally see at night.

The players can figure out for themselves that the snake they are seeing in the vision is connected to the god depicted in the statue, and I'm not sure any of the rest of this matters. The lore is of course really cool to me, but the players can learn about the god when they go into the ziggurat too. If for some reason they remember this when we get to VEoR and they choose to revive the dead god and the dragons show up, good for them.

The whole five senses thing...I guess I don't do that. I mentioned a heartbeat. That's 2 senses. I did it.

Congratulations on your first session as a DM! A big step.

You have some really good description there. When you do trim it, make sure you don't lose the coolnees of what you wrote. When you trim, I wouldn't just cut without thought You dont want to lose some of the evocative features like "spade-like face" or "pearlescent purple scales." It's features like these that you want to keep, because they are evocative enough to grab attention.

Just cutting down to an arbitrary line isn't always the best way to do it. And if you want your players to remember the statue, repeat the same 2-3 features every time they see it.

Hope you had fun running your first game, always good to see more thoughtful DMs jumping in.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I think the core of what you’re getting at—using fewer words and letting players fill in the gaps—is absolutely right. Description doesn’t have to be exhaustive to be effective, and motifs are a good shorthand for building consistency.

What I’d emphasize is that description isn’t just about painting a picture. Its function at the table is to frame decisions and set tone. If a detail doesn’t help the players decide what to do, or establish the stakes of the scene, it’s often more clutter than value. This is where “less is more” really earns its place—every extra sentence risks pulling attention away from the game itself.

The tricky part is that we’ve built up a kind of cultural bias in the hobby where a GM’s “quality” gets measured against how much detail they can generate. Long descriptions, elaborate backstories, endless world-building—it’s treated as a marker of skill. But in play, those same details often get in the way. They obscure choices, slow pacing, or simply overwhelm. More does not necessarily mean better; sometimes it just means heavier.

And this ties back to player agency. The more complete the GM’s description, the less room there is for players to question, interpret, or invent. If we stop short, we leave space for curiosity and improvisation. That back-and-forth is a big part of what separates TTRPGs from other media. A novel can afford lush, exhaustive description because the reader is a spectator; a game table thrives when imagination is shared.

That’s also why I think comparing to video games is useful. If players want full visual and audio immersion, video games deliver it better than we ever can. What makes tabletop unique is that it asks everyone at the table to bring their imagination to bear. The GM’s role isn’t to overwhelm with detail, but to spark just enough that the players take it further.

So in practice, I’d frame description with three questions: does this set the stakes, inspire action, or leave space for imagination? If it doesn’t do one of those, it’s probably better left unsaid.

I think the cultural bias towards detail and "immersion" is the cause of a lot of the overly long descriptions. And, in my opinion, leads to games where the GM spends upwards of 30-40% of the session babbling on about the scenery. Anyone who's played in such a game will remember how that feels, it can be soul sucking even if the GM is good at what they do.

Sitting there listening to a 4 minute exposition on rocks and snow melt, when you just want to cut the head off the Orc the GM described over a minute ago, can be mentally taxing.

So I agree, this is a player agency and a pacing issue. GMs who are overly verbose simply suck the life out of both by "hogging" the spot light a bit too much.

@EzekielRaiden mentioned that flowery exposition still has a place. And I think they are right. They are right that it should be the exception, not the rule. That way, when you do it, it lands with an impact that is worthy of the time spent.

I think the main takeaway is that we have limited time to play, and we should respect that time by giving the description meaning or cutting it.

 

[Tonguez]

The Grand Hall overwhelms with the scent of old oak, bitter wax, and a hint of lavender drifting from a marble vase. Stained-glass scatters a kaleidoscope of light across the mosaic floor whose beasts and vines seemingly writhe challenging you to enter.

Aspects: 1. Heavy with Old Scents, 2 kaleidoscope of Light, 3 The Floor writhing 4. Vase (treasure?)

- Theres your description shortened to 3: Aspects and an Asset that can now be explored and invoked.

 

[Piperken]

...Here's the problem.​

Let's talk about cognitive load theory, and why almost all players stop caring after your third sentence. Cognitive load theory suggests that when information exceeds of our mental processing capacity, retention and engagement decline. In TTRPGs, this means players may struggle to absorb and remember details after a certain threshold of description. It actually extends beyond that, but we will limit it to description for this discussion.

We can look at an example of flowery prose in scene setting to get an idea here. In this I won't even get to all five senses, but will still far exceed many people's ability to retain the details. Details we likely had no plan to revisit later, so they were extraneous from the start...

...I cannot wait to hear what you all think. How do you balance description and player imagination? I'd love to hear if someone else has a different technique.

This has been discussed a bit both here and elsewhere. Over the last year or so, I've found these blog posts helpful in broadening my understanding about the different structures and scaffolding people use for keying adventures (which includes the concept of what things to introduce to a party when they come into a new space to encourage engagement), as well as generally, what kinds of writing happens in RPGs.

Avoid consigning these to being any kind of final authority, they're more Oh, you want to get into woodworking? Here are the different kinds of tools one can use! Ymmv; you write for your particular needs (the next session, one-shot, a con game, converting to a different system, in-person campaign, VTT, etc.) and needs of your readers.

I've organized these chronologically, the first two often are cited/foundational in different RPG spaces, whereas the rest are more perspectives on style:

• Landmark, Hidden, Secret
• Dungeon Design, Process and Keys
• Bullet Points vs. Prose
• Compression and Decompression
• Thoughts on Module Writing

 

[Bae'zel]

I agree with this. 3 sensory descriptions: want more? Investigate. The world’s details are a fractal.

 

[Umbran]

You got it. You only need the details you plan to use

There are these other people at the table, called.players, and they frequently feel no need to be restricted to what the GM plans.

One of the foremost reasons some GMs give so much detail is that they abhor players adding material, so they must include everything the players might interact with.

But, if you aren't one of those GMs, then you are adding detail as you go, for which you don't have a plan.

 

[aiouh]

Kelsey Dionne does this a lot in her one-shots. (The Arcane Library, 2018) e.g. Masque of the Worms.