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Yora
2014-01-01, 01:26 PM
I started a new campaign this week and while things really went great, I once again noticed that I totally suck at presentations. I have good ideas for how I imagine the world the PCs are traveing through, but when they get to a new place or meet an NPC, I still fall back to not much more than "you find the village elder in his home". Which does the job, but is seriously bland.

So, any advice how to make interesting and powerful presentations of things for the players?

hymer
2014-01-01, 02:56 PM
My players have asked for more description in the new year, so I'm in the same boat in a sense.
I hope to write a short description for the the NPCs I create beforehand, and keep those on hand with my notes. And then I'll make a bunch of unattached descriptions of NPCs for when there needs to be an NPC that I think warrants a description.

Edit: Reading your post again, I guess you're not talking about coming up with them on the fly.
So, to add, I try to use a specific quirk or a certain descriptive word/phrase to associate with a given NPC. 'Wheezy' for an old beggar, 'crooked nose' for an inn-keeper, 'Grinning with a golden tooth' for the corrupt city guard, 'hairy' for the stableboy, etc.

Actana
2014-01-01, 03:16 PM
I think the biggest problem with the sort of describing of places and NPCs is the fundamental problem with the rule of "show, don't tell" and RPGs. In tabletop games, there rarely is much difference between showing and telling. This causes most descriptions to be long winded and hard to concentrate to, because you can never be sure what is really important and what isn't, and it's really easy to miss some piece of narration when the GM is describing something.

In many ways, the advice given in most systems on the topic is good. Describe all senses the characters have, and focus on the atmosphere and mood. Repetition often works too when talking about key elements. If it's raining, make sure the players know that it's raining when they're outside. Once they get inside, let them know that they're relieved from the rain and of the warm and cozy interior. Describe the smell of fresh food in the inn after a long travel with stale bread and nuts to eat. Instead of describing the minutiae of a place, describe the atmosphere and mood in the place. Everything you say should work towards creating the proper atmosphere the place should have.

On characters, I find it's better to describe the effects of the characteristics of NPCs instead of the characteristics themselves. If a character is strong, describe what he's doing with his strength rather than how well toned his muscles are (unless of course he is practically showing them off purely by poses or something). If a character is old and wise, mention the wrinkles on his face and thoughtful look in his eyes. They give a lot more detail and atmosphere than just the adjectives of what kind of person you're trying to describe.

Overall, I also find it best to keep things brief as possible. Attention spans may easily falter on longer descriptions, leading to questions about what you just said and general repetition. This is bound to happen eventually anyway, but it's best to try to negate as many questions as possible.

mucat
2014-01-01, 03:29 PM
One thing that I find effective is giving a few descriptive details about each place or person, then keep adding more details to the people or things that the players choose to interact with. A long paragraph of description all at once can make the players' eyes glaze over, but they tend to like getting extra details about whatever they already find interesting.

Even if the elder is an important NPC, I might stick with something like

"It is stiflingly hot inside the mayor's house, and heavy cloth drapes over every window block the sunlight. An old man seated at the heavy oak table looks up from his game of solitaire and studies you with his one good eye. 'I expected you an hour ago,' he says in a surprisingly deep voice."

as an initial introduction. That gives players enough to begin visualizing the scene. Once they tell me, by their questions and actions, what they find most interesting here, I'll start filling in (or inventing) more details about the guy's features and mode of dress, the furniture and other items in his house, or whatever else will help make the scene more vivid.

This works well for action scenes too. As I mentioned once in another thread, fighting against "four bandits and their leader" becomes far more interesting when the opponents are "The big guy, the weasely guy, the girl with the scar, the bald guy, and the sour-faced old woman." Even if the stats are identical and the adjectives are ones you made up on the spot, the players will start reacting to their opponents as individuals, and assigning them personalities based on the random vicissitudes of combat. The GM can respond by inventing more details to expand on, or play against, the ones the players are making up for themselves.

I've often had random mooks who were meant to annoy the party for one scene turn into recurring NPCs, simply because a player wants to get back at the guy who nearly took their arm off with a lucky crit, or still has grudging respect for the enemy who risked her own life to rescue a wounded comrade.

Thrudd
2014-01-01, 03:45 PM
I started a new campaign this week and while things really went great, I once again noticed that I totally suck at presentations. I have good ideas for how I imagine the world the PCs are traveing through, but when they get to a new place or meet an NPC, I still fall back to not much more than "you find the village elder in his home". Which does the job, but is seriously bland.

So, any advice how to make interesting and powerful presentations of things for the players?

Random tables can be a big help for spur of the moment descriptions. 1e DMG has some good starting points for this for NPCs and dungeon dressings. Make some tables with 20 descriptive words (or more) each for different types of environments. If you haven't decided what a place or person looks like, roll on a table. Or even just glance at the table and pick some words off of it that seem appropriate.

Slipperychicken
2014-01-01, 05:20 PM
As a player, I generally only need a few traits for important NPCs, and also one or two of them can be conveyed through personality and roleplay rather than description.

BWR
2014-01-01, 06:00 PM
I also suck at describing things. The most likely reason, I've found is that I often don't have a clear idea of what the place looks like on my own, and so tend to gloss over it in my mind, and therefore can't really explain well.
Training myself to think not only of the function of the place in the story but also the aesthetics is hard.

The best thing I've found is in old D&D adventures: write a description of everything, then read it out. Lots of those old small adventures have descriptive text for every room in the dungeon. This can be hard to put into practise because it requires a lot more prep time and only works if the game is fairly linear and everything stays on the rails.

The second best thing I can think of, which doesn't always work is have a big note on the inside of the DM screen or on top of your notes that says: Stop! Two sentences of description.
If you can give two short sentences of description about what the PCs perceive, you have already done much.
So once you have decided the PCs have come to the village elder, before you move on to actual interaction: "You find the village elder in his home. It's the largest home in the village, with several grandchildren attending his needs. The man himself is old and infirm, but his eyes are clear and sharp."

While some detailed description is nice every now and then, the players want to interact with the setting, not have it shoved in their face all the time. A few words of flavor work better on the whole than long-winded poetry.

You might also take this up with your group OOC. Just say that you feel this is a problem you want to fix and ask them to interrupt you with questions about what the place looks/sounds/smells/feels like or even just have them say "give us two or three lines of descriptive text".
At first it will be odd and awkward as you stutter and stumble a bit, but pretty soon you will find yourself thinking in this way and giving the descriptions unasked for just so those annoying players won't keep interrupting you.

Craft (Cheese)
2014-01-01, 07:10 PM
I started a new campaign this week and while things really went great, I once again noticed that I totally suck at presentations. I have good ideas for how I imagine the world the PCs are traveing through, but when they get to a new place or meet an NPC, I still fall back to not much more than "you find the village elder in his home". Which does the job, but is seriously bland.

So, any advice how to make interesting and powerful presentations of things for the players?

I have the opposite problem and tend to waaaaaaay overdo this, when I have the time to write things in advance. Here's a sample of a canned description I've written for an upcoming session:


You emerge on the summit of Mount Csith'en [tsɪ.ˈθʼɛːn], greeted by a virginal coating of autumn snows, come unusually early this year. Though the moon and stars are nowhere to be seen, the night is nearly as bright as full daylight, illuminated by the silvery light of the mysterious Tower, splitting the horizon in twain now nearly two hundred miles away. Pulsing irregularly with overwhelming radiance, the tower is a beautiful, yet disturbing sight: Even from this distance, you see that the walls of the tower quiver and writhe, as if it were made of gleaming platinum worms struggling to break free of their prison. An ocean of thick, rolling fog surrounds the peak of the mountain as far as the eye can see and seems to be slowly churning its way toward the tower. The fog drowns out all view of the world below: Occasionally another mountain peak dips above its surface, but the Tower, tall beyond words, overshadows them all a hundred times over.

With that in mind, my advice: Setting the mood for the scene is important, but so is describing to the players the facts of the scene. Ideally, you can do both jobs at once with the same exposition: The function and the aesthetics should be the same. My goal for describing the tower (it's big enough to be seen from basically everywhere so long as you're outdoors, and I have several descriptions written depending on where the players are in relation to it) is to make it a contradiction, a mixture of heavenly aspects and eldritch, pseudo-lovecraftian ones. The players shouldn't know what to make of it: This will hopefully motivate them to investigate it.

Jay R
2014-01-01, 08:17 PM
Pick a particular person you know, or character from a movie or TV show that you know well, as your image of the NPC. Then you can describe him easily.

Note: don't tell them - that makes it worse, not better. Don't say, "He looks like Gene Kelly in The Three Musketeers." Say, "He's tall and muscular, but moves with a quiet grace. His actions are always fluid, but his facial expressions seem a little overdone. He has a thin mustache and short black hair, and he wears a plain brown leather jerkin with a white shirt. He smiles most of the time, and has an infectious laugh."

I also recommend that you invent one detail that differs from the model, and mention it first. If the NPC wizard is patterned on Gandalf, start by describing his red robes. This will make it almost impossible for them to catch you at it, since their first image is a red robe.

Vitruviansquid
2014-01-01, 08:40 PM
I try to think of two or three important things about every character and location, then make sure my descriptions adequately communicate those things.

For example, if you have your party meet a village elder character, your two important things about the village elder might be 1. he's old and infirm, and 2. he commands a great deal of respect in the village. Your description should communicate, in a show-not-tell way, that the village elder is both old and respected.

"One of the villagers brings you to see the elder at the largest house in the village. The elder is a shriveled looking old man lying in a large bed attended by two women who seem to either be his granddaughters or his servants."

valadil
2014-01-01, 09:40 PM
I have good ideas for how I imagine the world the PCs are traveing through, but when they get to a new place or meet an NPC, I still fall back to not much more than "you find the village elder in his home".

Me too. I have some pretty vivid images in my head of any scene I put the players in. If asked I could tell them anything they wanted to know. But until I'm asked I don't even remember to tell them what weapon the other guy is carrying.

But I've been GMing for over 10 years. This is a known bug and I have a workaround. Basically I make sure to do the descriptions in prep time.

Most of the time I write out the description in advance. I try to keep it brief (three items or less) so that I really focus on the important items. When I present the scene I read off those items. It'd be lovely if that were something I could improvise, but it hasn't happened yet.

If I have time I prefer to draw a picture of the scene. That's a big "if", but I do enjoy drawing so it's not really time wasted. Sometimes when I'm forced to fill a page and I let my mind wander I end up coming up with more details than I would have otherwise.

The thing that I find interesting here is that when I draw the scene I don't necessarily have to show the players the drawing. Instead I look at it while describing things and I end up telling them all about the scene on paper. Drawing is an expensive investment of my time, so if I've drawn something it becomes really important that everything I draw is communicated to the players. Imagining is cheap, so there's no time wasted if a scene I imagine isn't communicated.

I'm not saying that I prefer not to show off the drawings, just that I don't have to and I still get the benefit of being able to give out more detail. Plus if something doesn't turn out so well, you don't have to embarrass yourself sharing it.

jedipotter
2014-01-01, 10:30 PM
Pick a particular person you know, or character from a movie or TV show that you know well, as your image of the NPC. Then you can describe him easily.

This works. Just try to avoid easy to spot characters, like Darth Vader. This works for places too. For places it works good to use real places, so the elven temple is based on the floor plan of Messy Jessy's Ice Cream Shoppe.

Making a list of descriptive words is a good idea. It never hurts to make up random descriptions ahead of time. Take ten minutes and write up ten generic taverns. Then when you need one, use the base you have and add and change it.

You can always check out the play-by-post games and see how other DM's do it.

Craft (Cheese)
2014-01-02, 06:20 AM
Pick a particular person you know, or character from a movie or TV show that you know well, as your image of the NPC. Then you can describe him easily.

Note: don't tell them - that makes it worse, not better. Don't say, "He looks like Gene Kelly in The Three Musketeers." Say, "He's tall and muscular, but moves with a quiet grace. His actions are always fluid, but his facial expressions seem a little overdone. He has a thin mustache and short black hair, and he wears a plain brown leather jerkin with a white shirt. He smiles most of the time, and has an infectious laugh."

I also recommend that you invent one detail that differs from the model, and mention it first. If the NPC wizard is patterned on Gandalf, start by describing his red robes. This will make it almost impossible for them to catch you at it, since their first image is a red robe.

This advice is exactly as good as your pool of reference points: I used to do this until I noticed that most of my female NPCs were teenagers with ridiculously long hair in ridiculously bright and unnatural colors wearing ridiculously short skirts or hot pants... because I was subconsciously choosing exclusively anime and video game characters to base them off of. My male NPCs were less homogenized but there was an inordinate amount of facial scars, dual-wielding katanas, and exposed, muscular chests.

Lorsa
2014-01-02, 12:04 PM
The first part of any good description starts in your own mind. In order to describe something you need to know what it looks like. Can you picture the village elder's home? What is it made of? How many windows does it have? What is the roof made of? How many floors? What does it smell of? Are there any flowers planted in front of it? Then we move on the elder. How tall is he? What clothes is he wearing? Does he have hair or is he bald? What about facial hair? How large is his nose?

Knowing these things is good for you, but not all of them need to be communicated to the players, exact pictures would take far too long, but all good description starts in your own mind. Picture things for yourself and it will be much easier to describe them.

Something like this should suffice most of the time: The house is a small log cottage of dark wood, only one floor high. It is located close to the center of the town, and outside the front is only the muddy road. From one of the windows comes a smell of cooking. When he opens the door he glares at your grumpily. He is cleanshaven with long somewhat tangled hair and a bald spot at the top of his head. He is dressed in simple grey linen clothes that looks and smells like they should've been washed a few days ago. "Whadda ya doin 'ere in the midl of dinna time?!"

Jay R
2014-01-02, 12:39 PM
This advice is exactly as good as your pool of reference points...

This is quite true. I recommend watching the kind of movie that matches your genre.

But it can also be your next door neighbor, or your aunt or uncle, or anybody you ever knew.

Also, vacation spots are quite useful, since they are places you've seen and the players have not. Many important spots in my world are based on exact locations at Philmont Scout Ranch, which I know well. In one particularly fun game, somebody went exploring, and ran into a trail simply because I know where the trails are. It was satisfying to be able to describe in detail the view he could get from above the camp he wanted to spy out - because I had stood on that real spot.

One small neighborhood was based on the UK section of EPCOT. And a blizzard caught one party at the lodge where I spent several vacations skiing.

Photos on the Internet can work well, with one limitation. You don't know what's behind the photographer.

On the other hand, you know the exact layout of the last house you lived in, and the players don't.

Lorsa
2014-01-02, 12:52 PM
On the other hand, you know the exact layout of the last house you lived in, and the players don't.

Unless that's the house we used to meet for roleplaying. :smallsmile:

Slipperychicken
2014-01-03, 06:48 PM
This advice is exactly as good as your pool of reference points: I used to do this until I noticed that most of my female NPCs were teenagers with ridiculously long hair in ridiculously bright and unnatural colors wearing ridiculously short skirts or hot pants... because I was subconsciously choosing exclusively anime and video game characters to base them off of. My male NPCs were less homogenized but there was an inordinate amount of facial scars, dual-wielding katanas, and exposed, muscular chests.

That's not so bad if you're playing an anime game :smallbiggrin:

Red Fel
2014-01-03, 10:16 PM
I agree with the above posts. For the average scene or NPC, make a conscious effort to use two to three sentences to paint the picture. No more, but certainly no less. (If it's something particularly epic, like a mountaintop or the courtyard of the palace, you can safely double that, I think. But that should be rare.)

Appeal to at least three of the five senses. Obviously, you should describe what the PCs see, but to truly immerse your players, appeal to their other senses. Mention the crackling of the logs in the fireplace or the squeaking of rats behind the walls; describe the smell of fresh bread baking in the kitchen nearby or the stench of decaying matter wafting up from the grates beneath; note the gentle breeze that dances across the skin or the oppressive heat, like a wet canvas bag over one's shoulders. Use metaphors and similes to make your imagery more distinct.

When describing an NPC, focus on two things - appearances and actions. A sentence devoted to each should suffice. An example of an action might be "He leans heavily on a gnarled cane," telling your players the NPC appears lame, or at least frail, and that he owns a cane (with an adjective to describe it). Or, "She looks up from the roses she's tending, and wipes the sweat from her forehead as you come into view." Again, an action that not only describes what the NPC is doing, but also may give hints about their personalities. With appearances, think of what catches your eye when you see a person. Old crones aren't just old, they're ancient and decrepit; the wise king is regal, proud, and serene upon his throne, but with an air of weariness. The beggar who approaches your PCs may be tattered and lanky, but his eyes sparkle with untold mischief.

When describing a place, remember that you're painting a picture. You don't have to do it all at once - most people don't notice every detail of a room as they enter. In fact, sometimes describing the room is a great way to buy time while you improvise an encounter, or to build up tension or anticipation. But certain things will jump out at a person immediately. How well lit is the room? Are there any particular smells or sounds? Is there anything moving or particularly eye-popping (an unusual color or something shiny) in the room? Be sure to mention any of these details.

One last thing - description doesn't end once you've introduced a place or person. Description can continue. As players explore a house, even if they've searched every room, they can still hear new sounds (like creaking floors or shutters that rattle in the wind) find new smells (like the leftovers from dinner or an uncleaned chamberpot) or see new sights (like the dancing candlelight or the silhouette of someone in the hall). As a scene with an NPC progresses, you can illustrate their emotional or physical state with continued descriptions, like "He stops his tale to cough, a hacking, dry sound, and all at once his face looks ten years older," or "The corners of his mouth twitch, his smile appearing more forced," or "The gold seal on his pinky finger sparkles as his hands begin to tap the armrests of his chair impatiently." They're simple, one-sentence descriptions that add more depth and color to a place or person. People aren't just a brief description followed by dialogue; they grow and evolve even over the course of a conversation. Places aren't immutable; houses, castles, and caves are full of life, and shift and change as the day wears on. Keep this in mind as your players draw out a scene.