Boxed Text, or Read Aloud descriptions, can be the death of excitement and engagement in a game session -- or they can be a vital part of the player's engagement and enjoyment in the game. Save your game -- and keep your players plugged in -- with this four-step plan for better descriptions in your game.
Communicating visual description isn't easy -- hard especially to get right in the mind of every audience member. Just this week George R R Martin wrote about what the Iron Throne "really" looks like-- and the picture was shared all over the inter webs. (Just about everyone with a nerd-blog on the web has covered this story one way or another - now I have too!)
But if it can take years for a writer like Martin to actually see an artist create a version of the throne that matches what's in his minds eye, what chance does a run-of-the-mill DM have trying to explain what a scene looks like in his head to his players?
Precious little. For most of us, words are what we have. Unless we've got artistic skills and talent -- and the time to illustrate for our own games -- we're going to have to rely on words to create vibrant scenes for our players.
"Read Aloud" or "Boxed Text" creates a concrete, dependable block of description for a scene. It provides the key details that the players need to interact with the scene.
The problem we face is that modern listeners have a lot less patience for big blocks of narration -- much less than we had back in the bad old AD&D days. This means that it's more important than ever to make descriptions focused, tight, and powerful.
So how do we do that well?
1. Write A Good Description
There's a lot of terrible advice out there for writing descriptions. We are told to do things like appeal to all the senses, and many of the examples that we read in school take the time to give us a full description of what a character is wearing.
Those were all much more valid before Beavis and Butthead rose up out of the ether and destroyed our attention span. Now we need descriptions that hit hard and hit fast.
Try this:
The difficult but vitally important part is to use as few words as possible. Every word needs to punch above it's weight class.
NOTE If We Are Running a Print Adventure: It's no less important to own the boxed text. Depending upon the adventure's author, the descriptions may be great, or may be fluffy and lame. It's incredibly easy, when we are preparing to run an adventure, to focus on monster stat blocks, making sure we've got the minis and maps sorted out, and not spend any time with the boxed text.
I'm sure many of us -- me included -- will get in a rush and won't even read over the read aloud text before we're actually reading it to players. This is why our players choose these moments to run for the fridge.
So, to prepare to deliver that boxed text content well, we need to spend as much time with that as we do going over stat blocks and minis -- maybe more. Read over the description and find the handful of key elements you need to describe. Pull them out and come up with your own version of how to describe those elements.
2. Take The Time You Need
When we're in the middle of running a game, it's easy to gloss over creating these descriptive moments. We forget that the image we have in our own minds is not necessarily what the players have, and if we don't do what we can to shape that image, there's no telling what they're imagining.
When we play with maps and minis, it's very easy to allow the props to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of description; make sure that you still take the time to describe key scenes and images to your players.
Remember -- even when we go so far as to use all of the gadgets and props I love to help play, the "real" action of the game takes place between the player's ears, not on the table (or virtual table); help them imagine the action.
3. Take the time you need, but no more
Our descriptions need to be short, evocative, and effective. They need to punch for the gut and not allow our players time to think about getting another soda or taking a break to pee.
Let them pee while the wizard's taking his turn; that dude is sloooooow.
4. Delivery: Don't Read - Perform
The biggest problem with descriptive or boxed text is it gets us into very bad habits. We read. We drone. We read fast to try to get through it fast so we get get back to the *important* stuff. And the players tune us out.
We need to break out of that rut, as much as possible, and we'll do that best by making an effort to treat these descriptions as performances, not demonstrations of our reading ability.
We stand up. We use our hands. We use our whole vocal range and whatever sense of theater we have to bring those descriptions to life. If we're describing the fangs of the dragon, we mime the fangs and gnash our teeth, throw in a rumble in our chest. If we're describing the waterfall that conceals the rebel base, we use our hands to describe the flow of water, use our voice to create the roar of the water.
If we must read from our notes, we should hold the notes in one hand, and make sure we're using our other hand to gesture and shape the ideas.
A few links for more ideas on dramatic reading:
Putting it all Together
In the end, everyone needs to find their own way through this -- some will focus more on the writing side, others will focus more on the performance side. And some of us will keep on blowing off any real preparation of our descriptions. But if you take the time to be a bit more deliberate and intentional with those descriptions, your game will be better for it.
What are your favorite techniques for making your descriptions come alive for your players?
Communicating visual description isn't easy -- hard especially to get right in the mind of every audience member. Just this week George R R Martin wrote about what the Iron Throne "really" looks like-- and the picture was shared all over the inter webs. (Just about everyone with a nerd-blog on the web has covered this story one way or another - now I have too!)
But if it can take years for a writer like Martin to actually see an artist create a version of the throne that matches what's in his minds eye, what chance does a run-of-the-mill DM have trying to explain what a scene looks like in his head to his players? Precious little. For most of us, words are what we have. Unless we've got artistic skills and talent -- and the time to illustrate for our own games -- we're going to have to rely on words to create vibrant scenes for our players.
"Read Aloud" or "Boxed Text" creates a concrete, dependable block of description for a scene. It provides the key details that the players need to interact with the scene.
The problem we face is that modern listeners have a lot less patience for big blocks of narration -- much less than we had back in the bad old AD&D days. This means that it's more important than ever to make descriptions focused, tight, and powerful.
So how do we do that well?
1. Write A Good Description
There's a lot of terrible advice out there for writing descriptions. We are told to do things like appeal to all the senses, and many of the examples that we read in school take the time to give us a full description of what a character is wearing.
Those were all much more valid before Beavis and Butthead rose up out of the ether and destroyed our attention span. Now we need descriptions that hit hard and hit fast.
Try this:
- Pick the most important element of a scene. It might be a visual detail. It might be a smell. It might be a sound. Make it just one thing. Picking the right element is vital: we can say a lot about a scene with one or two well-chosen details that evoke a lot more. For example, if I describe the way a flap of skin flaps under an old woman's arm, it paints a vivid image in your mind of the whole woman, very quickly. Think of these iconic descriptors as a sort of descriptive shorthand. What's the one thing you can describe about a person or a place that will carry with it enough detail of the whole?
- Write your description of that one element.
- Replace Vague, generic words with more descriptive ones -- where we use generic terms ("hot"), replace them with more specific, descriptive ones ("steaming").
- Try to cut out half the words. This is an exercise is tightening our writing. We may not be able to cut out half of them, but make it a goal. When we write, we include modifiers -- adjective and adverbs -- and those words are actually our mortal enemies. Don't say "freezing cold", say "frigid". We also use equivocations and "to be" verbs and all kinds of other fluff that can be completely cut out. Don't say "it might be the hottest day you recall" -- go ahead and say "most scalding day ever." And then say that better (because it's still lame).
- Rinse and repeat for one or two more elements.
The difficult but vitally important part is to use as few words as possible. Every word needs to punch above it's weight class.
NOTE If We Are Running a Print Adventure: It's no less important to own the boxed text. Depending upon the adventure's author, the descriptions may be great, or may be fluffy and lame. It's incredibly easy, when we are preparing to run an adventure, to focus on monster stat blocks, making sure we've got the minis and maps sorted out, and not spend any time with the boxed text.
I'm sure many of us -- me included -- will get in a rush and won't even read over the read aloud text before we're actually reading it to players. This is why our players choose these moments to run for the fridge.
So, to prepare to deliver that boxed text content well, we need to spend as much time with that as we do going over stat blocks and minis -- maybe more. Read over the description and find the handful of key elements you need to describe. Pull them out and come up with your own version of how to describe those elements.
2. Take The Time You Need
When we're in the middle of running a game, it's easy to gloss over creating these descriptive moments. We forget that the image we have in our own minds is not necessarily what the players have, and if we don't do what we can to shape that image, there's no telling what they're imagining.
When we play with maps and minis, it's very easy to allow the props to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of description; make sure that you still take the time to describe key scenes and images to your players.
Remember -- even when we go so far as to use all of the gadgets and props I love to help play, the "real" action of the game takes place between the player's ears, not on the table (or virtual table); help them imagine the action.
3. Take the time you need, but no more
Our descriptions need to be short, evocative, and effective. They need to punch for the gut and not allow our players time to think about getting another soda or taking a break to pee.
Let them pee while the wizard's taking his turn; that dude is sloooooow.
4. Delivery: Don't Read - Perform
The biggest problem with descriptive or boxed text is it gets us into very bad habits. We read. We drone. We read fast to try to get through it fast so we get get back to the *important* stuff. And the players tune us out.
We need to break out of that rut, as much as possible, and we'll do that best by making an effort to treat these descriptions as performances, not demonstrations of our reading ability.
We stand up. We use our hands. We use our whole vocal range and whatever sense of theater we have to bring those descriptions to life. If we're describing the fangs of the dragon, we mime the fangs and gnash our teeth, throw in a rumble in our chest. If we're describing the waterfall that conceals the rebel base, we use our hands to describe the flow of water, use our voice to create the roar of the water.
If we must read from our notes, we should hold the notes in one hand, and make sure we're using our other hand to gesture and shape the ideas.
A few links for more ideas on dramatic reading:
- A good guideline for dramatic reading
- An awesome series of videos of real actors reading reviews and other found text from the internet (including "Missed Connections")
Putting it all Together
In the end, everyone needs to find their own way through this -- some will focus more on the writing side, others will focus more on the performance side. And some of us will keep on blowing off any real preparation of our descriptions. But if you take the time to be a bit more deliberate and intentional with those descriptions, your game will be better for it.
What are your favorite techniques for making your descriptions come alive for your players?
