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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 7651994" data-attributes="member: 58197">Examples, you say? I'll take a whack at it. Here's a bit of boxed text from "Bastion of Broken Souls." (Very minor spoilers below.)Now, this isn't awful boxed text--nothing like the infamous bit from "The Forest Oracle" with the men who are neither tarrying nor running--but it can certainly be tightened up considerably. Let's apply Gnome's process, in order.A/B: Pick the most important element of a scene and write your description of that one element. There are three elements we really need to convey in order for the players to know what they're facing: Snake tail, six arms, chains. Let's start with the snake tail. Here's what we currently have:C: Replace vague, generic words with more specific ones. How about we specify the species of snake? I'm thinking python. It conveys the appropriate implications--big, constricting coils--and it's well-known enough that most people can come up with at least a vague mental image of a python.D: Try to cut out half the words. We have 15 words right now, so we want to get to 7 or 8. First of all, by choosing "python" to replace "snake," we have already implied bigness, color, and coils, so we can cut those. Scaliness was pure fluff from the start. When was the last time you met a snake that wasn't scaly? "Appears as" is just instinctive DM pedantry--hey, it could be an illusion, so I have to qualify that it "appears" this way. This is unnecessary. Players know about illusions. Finally, "the creature" is unnecessary when referring to the subject of the previous sentence. So:E: Rinse and repeat for one or two more elements. I won't go through the procedure again in detail, but here's the end result if I apply the same techniques to the arms and chains:"Lash out of their own accord" is a replacement for "hellishly animate," which sounds dramatic but is in fact pretty vague. My revised description omits the statement that the fiend is also using the chains for armor/clothing. I gave some thought to that detail, which presumably was meant as a hint that [sblock]the PCs are dealing with a marilith/chain devil hybrid.[/sblock] In the end, I concluded that the hint wasn't necessary, for three reasons:[sblock]1) The players are unlikely to get said hint. Reading the original description, my takeaway was "uber-marilith specializing in spiked chains," not "marilith plus chain devil."2) If the players do get the hint, they are unlikely to care. There is no plot significance to the fiend's hybrid nature, nor is there any benefit to the PCs in knowing it. This is one of those cases where the DM needs a reminder not to get all excited about the back story of a thing which the party is just going to butcher, loot, and leave bleeding in the dirt.3) If the players do get the hint, and do care, it will derail the adventure as they try to figure out what awesomely horrible scheme lies behind the creation of such an abomination. Since there is in fact no such scheme and the whole demon/devil thing is just embroidery, they will only be wasting their time and making headaches for the DM.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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