The Scene of the Crime Part I

Description is the bread and butter of a GM, moreso than elaborate plotlines or a mastery of the ruleset—not that these things are unimportant, but these things are all more or less outside of the point where you sit down with a few people and hallucinate and roll dice for a few hours or so. Describing the world is what links all these otherwise desperate elements of RPGs together. Without it, you’re playing something else; a plotline alone is a book, a set of rules is chess or Warhammer or Playstation. The art of describing, however, is the element of gaming I’ve found to be taken the most for granted—My personal experience with gaming groups leads me to believe that this is most likely because groups tend to place more emphasis on other parts of the game, like character interaction or ruleset issues. While I would never assert that these are the “wrong” ways to play (ack!), I will assert that a game is never harmed by a GM adopting a few descriptive styles (for different types of scenes) and incorporating them into his/her game.

The other problem I see with description is that it is difficult to attain a middle ground. Players will fall asleep or lose interest if you describe a scene too long and rattle off too much detail (oh yes, there is such a thing as too much). Conversely, it will be difficult for them to envision a world or to even care enough to attempt it if description remains spartan and bare.

Before I go on, yes, you can use miniatures and other visual props as descriptive aids. While I have made use of them in the past, I no longer use them to any great extent—I find that once a group of gamers are in sync with each other (meaning on the same level) during a game, the play is enriched much further than with the aforementioned shortcuts. Miniatures, unless you have the time/money to actively collect them, end up being further distractions from the game, as you still spend a lot of time describing all the things that the miniatures leave behind, as well as setting up each scene both verbally and physically on the table. They lend a certain amount of precision to action sequences (most noticeably combat) and that’s about all. Visual props I have less problems with, but wouldn’t really rely on them except for mood enhancing and giving players something “real” from the world.

I choose to live and die by description. Not a bad way to go, neh?

I hadn’t myself thought about what it is I do when I describe things until a session I ran just a few weeks ago. Like I said, it’s easy to take for granted what you say about the world that you or someone else has built. So… now that I’m paying attention and have thought about this some, I’ll share with you what I have uncovered.

Rainy days

You’re walking down the raining streets of downtown Seattle, heavy rain, about 6 inches worth. You’re walking through a C rated neighborhood when a man, about 6 feet tall wearing a trenchcoat walks up and puts a gun in your face and demands money.
The street of downtown Seattle is slick with acid rain. It’s heavier than usual, the wetness clinging and hanging on you like a fat parasite with bad, sulphurous breath. Go-girls with little else but transparent raingear and smiles glide lithely out of their darkened alleys just enough to solicit you, and having been turned down, withdraw back to their shadows, muttering cityspeak curses so volatile sparks leap from their lips. Neon advertisements so bright that you can’t look at the rainclouds without squinting taint the light of the street lamps below with sickly hues. A parade of Nissan Jackrabbits hiss as they hydroplane through traffic.

No one wants to be outside unprotected in this weather, not even you… so now you’re wondering why you’re out here.

In the middle of your reverie a tall, jerkily erected man in a beatup duster approaches you. He looks like he’s going to but then he stops and draws a gun on you. You’re still in a state of mild alarm when he says gruffly, “Give me your money!”

Most articles I’ve read regarding roleplaying would regard the second description as far superior to the first, mostly because it attempts to set a mood and incorporates multiple senses, in addition to a goodly level of detail. The first, most of these articles would say, is too minimal to get players involved or to be exciting/dramatic/interesting.

I would say that both descriptions are lacking.

The first because it describes the scene in a way that no one would consciously or subconsciously think of or perceive it—people tend to first see a person as tall, average, or not tall, not as 6’. It quantifies the scene far too much (ok, show of hands, how many people have had characters who have met beautiful men or women who look like “uh… a charisma of 5, at least.”?) and offers little in terms of mood or atmosphere.

The second description is more like something you would read in a book (No, don’t tell me the quality of the book it would be in—let me dream, let me dream… )—that’s the problem. Roleplaying is storytelling, but it is not literature. You might read this description with little problem, but my experience is that most players’ attention will fade in and out while listening. Remember that RPGs are part medium, part game, and the medium part is an active medium. One of the greatest potentials for boredom in roleplaying occurs when a GM gets too caught up in his creation and prattles on for hours and hours without letting the players interact—but I’ll tell you the story of the Tower of GM later. It’s rather tragic.

The second description also scripts the PC’s reactions to the elements of the scene too tightly. For example, in the description the go-girls approach and the players are assumed to reject them without the players having a choice. Now, in the interest of preserving what little family values I have left (and delaying my lightning fast descent towards hell), I’ll say that this is a probably a good thing if they do, but they should be given a choice. I don’t think it’s fair to place elements in your scene that you don’t allow the PCs to interact with, and you definitely avoid assuming how they react, unless it’s something reflexive (one could, however, argue that turning down go-girls is a reflexive action on the streets of 2060 J ).

If we assume that both examples of scene descriptions fail to satisfy us in the context of roleplaying, then we are in search of the elusive third, satisfactory mode of description, or more preferably, multiple modes that satisfy the conditions we set up, which we attend to in the next article.