Hiding What You See

As a writer, description is my greatest challenge. While writing dialogs and running action comes pretty naturally to me, something I often hear from my readers is that they cannot “see” the location my characters are in. My words fail to put a clear picture in their minds of what the world looks like. I find this is also true for my D&D experience. My players too often get an un-interesting and un-adorned room in which the adventure happens. Understand that I don’t think I am being lazy by not describing things well, my brain is moving a mile a minute. Descriptions just sometimes don’t make it into the scene. When this happens I am none the wiser because the action and the drama are my strength. I have already passed by the small, oozing fountain or the moss covered, marble stelae.

That said, but not to justify my failings, I have encountered much worse as a player. I have played in a climactic moment, where my party opened the door, only to have the DM ask us what we do. I am sure you have been in this situation dozens of times, where you anxiously open the door expecting to encounter a terrible monster in the next room. We just opened the door, I think we imparted as much to the DM again. His reply was, “No, what do you do?” At that moment, the DM was asking us to act with absolutely no description of what lay ahead. I can still remember how deflated he was when we told him that we look through the now open door into the room. I suggest that the players should not have to ask for any descriptions. I guess there could be circumstances of pitch dark and so forth, but even saying “It’s pitch dark in there” is a description.

Additionally, I have played in slower run games that have also lacked description, although never again to the above standard. A slow game without description might very well be called a boring game. You have to give something.

I imagine the same would be true in a game with too much description, although I’ve never seen such a thing. If everything and every action got painfully detailed descriptions, well, that sounds like a really slow game. So what should be described? Honestly, I am not quite sure.

I think the room an encounter is in, for example should get a few lines of description. The monster or the NPCs therein certainly should. It shouldn’t be a 40’ by 30’ room with four Goblins in it, although you will notice two descriptive words there, the size of the room and the number of Goblins. How much better would it be to say the large, rectangle of a room with crumbling, mud-brick walls contains four squat, blue-skinned humanoids bearing jagged scimitars? I need to work on this.