Describing the World

D&D is a game meant to simulate or model something. Original D&D was based off a wargame called Chain Mail, and wargames were meant to model, somewhat imperfectly, medieval combat between soldiers, cavalry and siege engines. D&D added magic and monsters to the mix, so the “realistic simulation” was abandoned in favor of simulation of pulp novels and fantasy literature.

You might not know it with all of the setting specific games like Lankhmar, Conan, Call of Cthulu and Middle Earth Role Playing out there, but D&D was meant to emulate them all.

In any simulation there will be a mismatch between what the player knows and what the player’s character knows. One of the most obvious places where this is an issue is the question of what the character experiences. Your character sees things, you only “see” what your character sees when your DM describes things to you or shows you a picture.

Your character would obviously get a lot more out of the environment than you do, where you get a verbal description of a visual scene, your character would see, smell, touch, taste and hear the environment around them, and as such have a lot more information at their disposal than you do.

Call this discrepancy the ‘information gap’, all PCs suffer from this information gap, and it’s the DM’s job to help to fill it.

Why?

Because the DM is the only conduit of information for the players, and information about the environment is *crucial* to survival in the game.

So how a DM provides information ends up being a pretty important part of the game, but it is one that is often not specified in great detail. Here are my top 10 suggestions for how to ensure that you are giving players the information they need to enjoy themselves and excel at the game.

1. Tell them What they See – Often!

Visual information transfer is perhaps the most important aspect of the game, what characters can see is most often crucial to making good tactical decisions, and to evaluating the likelihood of death. Most modules provide “boxed text” to read to players, this can work, but it is important when running a published module to look through the whole encounter description, as they often include key details in the main text that should not be highlighted by mentioning them separately.

Describe the color and texture of surrounding areas, what is the floor like? How about the walls? Describing the weapons carried by city guards, the kind of armor they are wearing, all of these details can be both tactically important and convey flavor to your game world. Oddly enough, it’s often not the big stuff they remember, but the details, and these details make the game world come alive.

I rely heavily on illustrations where possible, as pictures fire the imagination and can provide a focal point to help players stay in the game. I have always scared up a picture for every PC in my game, and as many of the NPCs as possible as well. A good character picture can help inspire a player and a DM about that character.

Also remember that a lot of adventuring environments are dark, and darkness is a major impediment in D&D. If you cannot see your foes you are more easily surprised, and you can fall prey to traps more easily as well. When you describe a dungeon make sure to let the players know that just outside of the lighting of the torch you can see *nothing* up ahead. Knowing you can’t see anything, and that something ahead may see you, can cause delicious dread.

2. Tell them what they Hear, Smell, Taste and Touch…

Don’t just give out visual information, also provide information from all of the other senses as well. Sound is useful as it often creates a feeling of dread when you describe the sound of approaching… something!

Be aware of the fact that you can hear things before you can see them, and occasionally throw the players a bone by mentioning the sound of something before it would be seen. Describe accents and such if you are not comfortable trying to give every NPC you voice a new accent, it give the game world some depth. Don’t be horribly accurate about numbers either, if the party hears an approaching band of gnolls before they are seen, the audio information can’t give them any specific numbers.

Smell is particularly useful for creating atmosphere and alerting players to problems when their characters are not able to visually identify targets. The 1e DMG has an appendix listing of smells and sounds to add atmosphere to your game, keep them handy for on the fly descriptions.

Remember that dropping sensation based clues can reward the attentive and thoughtful player. I once had a player ask if the door their character was touching was warm or not, his reasoning being that a warm door was indicative of a populated room, as it was winter and populated rooms are kept warm.

3. Sensation and Skill

Consider a mechanism for recognition of sensations based on character skill or background. 1e AD&D is notoriously thin on skills, or rather, skills are baked into the character classes, not free floating for anyone to choose.

Still, even the bare bones 1e approach allows that your PC has other skills outside of his class membership. Consider using those skills as a basis for recognition of important things about the environment. There are a few ways to do this, but none need to be particularly complicated. I would advise either just having the PC recognize something, or rolling to see if it is recognized.

For example, say one of the fighters in your party has a secondary skill of “sailor”, if the party is on the docks meeting with a potential employer and the party fighter is checking out the employer’s ship, you have an opportunity to relate to that with sensual information. So when the fighter checks out the ship say you roll a 1 in 6 chance the fighter might notice something about the ship based on his visual inspection, as he is a former sailor. Say you roll a 1 on the d6. You then tell the player of the fighter that he notices that the main sail isn’t secured properly, the ropes on the gunwales are rotted and torn, and that the barnacles haven’t been scraped off in what appears to be years. This is done outside of the regular description given to the whole party.

4. Give and Take.

Give a good visual description of the areas of interest when you are running encounters, but don’t go on forever. Get into the habit of giving a good, short general description of the environment, then let the players ask questions. After the first few sessions they will probably notice they do better when they ask more questions, but you might have to point that out to them as well.

The goal is to get your players skilled enough that they know what sorts of questions to ask. If you attempt to tell them all the relevant data it will take too long, so you have to pick and choose, but allow player questions to drive part of your description as well.

5. Take Inspiration from the Players

Maybe that evil altar didn’t matter to you, maybe the color of that fighter’s blazon was not on your mind, but adding those details, even made up on the fly, adds to the warp and woof of your world. Keep a piece of paper and pencil handy to write down anything you improvise so you can remember it for later, but if the players ask about details you don’t have, make them up!

I once had a player ask about the crest on a fighter’s tabard. I made it up on the spot. Then they started asking about crests on other opponents, and I found myself using the crests as a way of identifying to the players that they were dealing with opponents from the same place.

If you describe a smell in an encounter area and a player suggests that smell was present the last time they encountered monster “X”, then consider dropping monster “X” into their laps when they bring it up, verisimilitude like this really deepens the immersion in the game.

6. Give Out Tactical Information

One way to address the problem of the “information gap” in D&D is to give out a degree of tactical information with your descriptions. In the case of a map you codify this information for the players to see, often giving them *more* information than their characters would have. For example, maps and minis allow the players to get the so-called “god’s eye view” of the battlefield, something their characters would not have.

So maps address the information gap.

I have also created cut-outs the size of various common AOEs (e.g. 10’ radius, 15’ radius”) so that players can place them on the map to see how much area their attack will cover. I also have a large, square piece of paper with a hole cut out of it in the middle that I place on top of the map when the characters have limited visibility.

However, some of us play “theatre of the mind”, e.g. we do not provide maps and minis and instead the DM describes the tactical information where needed.

My suggestion here is to include some combat relevant information when describing an area. This can include a host of different things:

a) approximate distances to potential targets

b) height of ceilings
c) description of the limit of vision (e.g. how far can the players see)
d) description of obstacles in their path
e) approximate number of targets and relative sizes
f) identification of exit points
g) identification of cover and concealment
h) identification of armor, weapons and items on opponents

You certainly don’t need all of these all the time, but ideally after giving out this sort of information your players will grok that these are important variables, and start asking about them on their own.

7. Keep Descriptions A Similar Length, and Describe Most Things

DM’s, like poker players, have “tells’, actions or habits that signal to the players you are about to do something. Like poker tells, DM tells are almost impossible to recognize in yourself, but easily spotted by your players.

Here is a common tell: room descriptions. I didn’t know this at the time, but back in the day I had a habit of describing areas with potential encounters in great detail, but describing uninteresting areas with only the most general details. My players picked up on this and started to anticipate danger very well, until one of them mentioned to me that I did this.

The way to avoid giving out more information than you intend is to do three things:

a)      Keep your descriptions brief, allow the players to ask for more if needed

b)      Describe both important and non-important areas

c)       Use the same amount and kind of detail for most descriptions

8. Invest in a Thesaurus.. and Read Some Books!

We could all use a bit of a language boost now and then, don’t be afraid to shake it up by saying the same thing with different words. When writing descriptions ahead of time for encounters try the thesaurus to find new ways to say “a grey castle”, or “armed opponent”. You likely won’t notice it, but your players are all listening to you game after game, and they will notice when you use the same descriptive terms over and over again.

Also, good authors can give you tips for making your descriptions more evocative. Note the way some writers describe scenes by moving you around the scene from the things the closest to you to the things the furthest away. Others describe scenes by pointing out the largest things first. Others describe the most fantastic things first, and other things not at all. Study good writers and pinch their ideas!

9. Describe the Exiting Stuff

DM’s tend to get into a habit of describing things when the players are exploring, but the minute the action starts it’s all “you hit”, “you miss”, and “you do a lot of damage”.

In a pinch these are fine, but they really drain the fun out of the game.

D&D is a game of action, brave heroes doing fantastic things, don’t short shrift the action, pull out your purple prose and put it to the test.

Make this: “You miss”

Into this: “You bring down your broadsword in a vicious cleaving stroke but the hobgoblin anticipated your blow and moves just to the right of it, your blade biting into the dirt.”

If you need help with this sort of thing don’t hesitate to make up a “location of hit table” (I have one) so you can describe where those blows land, and add some flava to your fighting.

10. Don’t Name, Describe.

There is a temptation in D&D to say, “A group of ghouls approaches”. This is fine, but it is fun and sometimes more challenging to say something like, “A shambling group of humanoid figures approach, their skin is green, grey and foul, they emit a horrifying stench, and their fangs and claws are hideously yellow and caked with blood.”

You don’t have to do this all the time, you can reward your players with exact identifications for monsters they have encountered many times before, but keeping some monsters mysterious is good for the adrenaline rush.

It’s also handy if you “re-skin” monsters, e.g. give standard monsters different stats, or change the appearance of a monster while leaving the stats the same. If you describe your monsters then the players are less likely to feel you are messing with them when you re-skin a monster.

You are the conduit that brings the game world alive for them, make it a vivid one!