Chatty's Mailbag: Describing a Scene Through the Senses

No sooner am I getting back into the thick of blogging that I get an email asking me for my thoughts on a given subject. Joy, instant inspiration!

Reader Cool Cyclone chimed in last week with quite an interesting letter:

“I wanted your opinion on something.  When describing a setting for foreshadowing, how do I relay senses, besides visual stimuli, to the players?”

The Power of the Voice

Doing description is the core of GMing.  While you can augment the roleplaying experience with specific light settings and soundtracks, verbal description of the game world is what makes a scene come alive or fall flat.

Thing is, depending on your players, as a DM you can only hold the groups’ collective attention for so long.  You have to strike a subtle balance between your goals of making your game come alive past it’s numbers and rules and causing your players’ eyes to glaze over.

Sensory Overload

Using senses is a great tool.  As Cyclone mention, we’re used to describing visual stuff “You enter a 20′X30′ Room and you see 2 chairs, a Chest, a bed… oh yeah and a large troll is charging you”.   While this is okay (and its what many of us default too while GMing), there’s a way to spice this up.

The technique I propose is to try to fit the essence of each scene in one or two sentences and pack them with cues based on more than one of the 5 senses (or even a 6th one if you want to go spiritual).

“As you open the door, your are assaulted by the stench of something that’s never seen soap in many decades”  While you notice the room is quite large, yet dimly lit, and contains some furniture, your attention is immediately brought to the Grey-green hulking Humanoid uttering a guttural battle cry as it sees you, making the floor tiles shake  as it runs toward you”

“While apparently empty, this chapel features a gruesome altar made of sharp bloodstained bone spikes.  The room is filled with a cloying coppery smell and light seems to be sucked directly into the altar, making it the only clearly discernible object in the room”

“The temperature drops sharply as you cross the portal into this Ancient Crypt.  You feel the hair on your arms raise and a feeling of forboding fills you as you are convinced that the pure Essence of Evil is mixed with the air you breathe”

This mixing and matching of senses will enrich the description while keeping it short enough to allow players to ask more details or act faster.

Non verbal cues

Cool Cyclone then wonders if you should use other non-verbal tricks, to describe non-visual cues.  Like using a glass of water to simulate water sloshing or plopping a piece of less than fresh meat to simulate the presence of Zombies (!!!).

Being the klutz that I am, I usually refrain from doing that  (because I’d end up soaking my Books or my players). Instead, I usually try to do sound effects with my voice.  Yes it often sounds a bit stupid and my friends sometime snicker a bit.

In fact, the best description techniques I’ve been using is to combine Speech with entusiastic mimicking with my hands  (I’m French, we use our hands a lot when we talk).  I once described how a Giant Snake engulfed a Hafling PC and using my hands to represents the spasmic action of a Snake trying to eat something bigger than its mouth ended up being very efficient indeed.

Alternatively, I’ve seen some people use sound effects to great effect.  In fact, unless I’m mistaken, one of the readers here actually has a sound studio selling sound packages specifically for RPGs.  (See here).

Whatever your prefered techniques, I encourage people to mix and match descriptions.

When Numbers get in the way of Description

Now here’s a side point I want to address.

I’ve played with enough groups now to notice a pattern where at a certain point in the game, atmosphere and immersion takes a second seat to plain old crunch.  Especially in games with very detailed combat engines like D&D.

As fatigue sets in and a combat encounter stretches beyond the one hour point, GMs and players set into a routine where dice are rolled, numbers are called and results are noted and that’s about it.

Well this is a great time to practice adding description elements.  Try to encourage each player to describe his attack, grant bonuses to very graphic descriptions (which often helps alleviate Frustration engendered by low dice rolls).  When an attack hits, describe how the wound looks like and what the player feels like.

“After sparring for a few seconds, you land one solid hit of your Axe on the monster’s Thigh.  Most of the blow was absorbed by its thick bony hide, but you see it limp perceptively as it gets ready to retaliate”

In fact combat is probably the best time to use touch as a sense.  You can describe the feel of the weapon in one’s hand as it strikes an enemy or misses.  (Although, players don’t really care very much about having descriptions of their misses).

What about you?

What are your tricks to tricks to enrich a scene’s description.  What senses do you call to to make a scene come more alive to your players?

Sound Off!

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Playing Online Part 2: The Mediums

While I’m back in the saddle, I still have a few more guest posts for you during the holidays.  Enjoy!

Hey there again folks, thanks for the warm reception before, this is Wyatt Salazar from this place and that place again, continuing our chat from before about online gaming (and not the type you usually encounter).

Now that we’ve covered styles, it’s time to cover mediums, which also have a lot to do with styles. Each medium of online gaming has its own intricacies which will determine how you play, who you can rope into playing with you, where you’ll play, what you’ll eat during playing and whether or not you will leave play with your sanity intact. (Just kidding.) There’s something for everyone here (or almost everyone).

Now, though there’s numerous ways to play online, they all fall into one of two categories, which I like to call Correspondence Gaming and Real-Time Gaming. We’ll tackle them one at a time starting with the one less likely to give you any trouble.

Real Time Gaming

Pros: Real Time, more likely to succeed in the long run, easier to adapt to for tabletop folks

Cons: Scheduling troubles, learning curve, having to dig up the right tools

Real Time Gaming is any program where you can receive messages instantaneously. This might be as simple as an AIM Chatroom, or it might be an IRC chat loaded with bots and macros of your own design, and there are even programs designed specifically with this kind of gaming in mind. The basics needed are a chat room and a die roller, but for more complex games you’ll need more complex programs, and that involves getting into tabletop simulators.

Tools:

•Any instant messenger, including AIM, IRC or MSN, works well as a bare-bones tool for this kind of game. Some don’t have die rollers, so you’ll have to play by the honor system. If you want to avoid that, both AIM and IRC have ways of rolling die in chatrooms, so you might want to stick to those.

•Maptool is a dedicated program that allows you to host games and produce maps for them. Now, I will admit that I couldn’t get the hang of Maptool so I’m not the best guy in the world to recommend it. I would look into it if you’re a power-user who has time to get under the skin and make this baby purr. It’s lean, mean and loaded with features, and even if you don’t roleplay within it, you can use it to make maps. Therefore it’s not a waste to give it a look.

While you’re at it, Tokentool lets you make “tokens” or “pogs”, personalized character icons that take the place of minis on the virtual tabletop. It comes highly recommended and breathes a lot of life and personality into your game. It works with any online tabletop that supports square or circular tokens, so don’t be fooled by its status as an “accessory to Maptool”.

•Gametable is what I use for this sort of gaming. It’s small and easy to handle, but it does less than Maptool. For example, Gametable can’t produce a map for you to print out and use elsewhere, it can only make maps for itself.

However, it did what I wanted it to and it did it before my wire-thin patience ran out, so this is the one I can personally recommend. It supports tokens, which I feel is extremely important, as well as a very easy and intuitive system of “underlays”, pieces you put on the map that always appear beneath a PC token if a PC token is standing on it, which allows you to greatly customize maps. It also has dice macros that you can save and import later for use during your games (and every player can customize their dice macros or even create some from scratch via the program itself or in a text editor like notepad or Apple’s Textedit for Mac users, creating makeshift “character sheets” they can upload).

I also recommend an absolutely excellent blog for learning to use Gametable and other online tools, By Decree Of The Czar.

•There is also Fantasy Grounds, which is pretty and robust, but it costs money, and it was kinda clunky in my computer compared to the fast little java programs mentioned above. But it’s an option nonetheless, and the learning curve is very small compared to the java programs because of its developed user interface. They recently came out with a second version of it, which I have not tried and which might be far better and faster than I’m giving it credit for. Also, it’s Windows only.

Style:

As mentioned before in my Style post, the way I tend to play these games is not with cameras and voice chat, but using the text chat room built into these apps. That’s what I’ll be talking about. All these apps come with a built-in chat that supports basic things like bold, italic and underline text, differentiated character names (some support more advanced things like color text.) My last blog post briefly talked about a difference in the styles and etiquette differences in online gaming. We’ll cover that with a bit more depth now.

In a chat room, the game can go by in real time, like a normal session around a tabletop. However, because messages appear instantaneously, you have more freedom to talk longer in each go. You can write, as said before, like you were writing a character in a piece of literary fiction.

However, because this is real time, you have to type fast enough to get your message across, and you have to keep an eye for what messages might appear before yours so you can correct anything you say. It’s happened to me more than once that I wanted to talk to a specific character who said before I could finish that they’re leaving the room. This meant I had to delete everything and start over, or follow the character, or otherwise change my message.

Also, many chat rooms have a text limit, like AIM. It gets very annoying when AIM tells you your message is too long, but it’s a reality you have to adjust for if you want to use it. Find a good medium between the sort of brevity you encounter at a tabletop, and the lengthy novel posts you find in a play-by-post.

Be descriptive, but not so that your single message eats the entire chatroom window. Keep in mind a few tips novelists use – some details are unimportant except where they aren’t, don’t devolve into purple prose, and don’t be afraid of omitting “said” or an adverb string if everyone knows who’s talking.

Because there is no face to face contact, roleplaying is much easier and freer. Players can roleplay male or female characters without having to fake a voice that might be awkward for them, and can say much more that they would around a tabletop, so it’s great for getting shy roleplayers to open up.

That being said, this can breed a kind of hard-ass gamer who thinks they can do whatever they want. IRC chats have a kick feature that helps get rid of people like that, but it’s something to watch out for when you’re building up a group. Set clear limitations on what you want in your game. Just because it’s text doesn’t mean raping, cursing, racism or bigotry is perfectly okay with everyone. Just like a book can offend, a text chat can offend. However, if the overwhelming majority of the group enjoys these kinds of elements, and a single player does not, then that single player may want to find a different group rather than disrupt the mechanics of the majority.

Correspondence Roleplaying

Pros: By correspondence (leaving a message for later), therefore zero consumption of time and zero schedule

Cons: Less likely to hold in the long run, can be grindingly slow if the group isn’t dedicated to it

Correspondence Roleplaying comes in two forms – Play-By-Email and Play-By-Post. I will politely discourage play-by-email, because play-by-post does practically the same thing with better archiving, better tools, less confusion of who’s turn it is or chronological order, and play-by-post is a smidge faster most of the time. Play-By-Post is the way to go for this, in my humble opinion. There are numerous message boards with play-by-post, but I’ll be giving ones with large and dedicated communities, ease of use, or ones that are focused mainly on play-by-posting as opposed to general RPG discussions.

Tools:

•Myth-Weavers is in my opinion the best one. It’s got a large community (as far as this sort of thing is concerned) and easy-to-use, intuitive tools for gaming.

You create an account, and then you can create a game, which gives you your own message board with up to 20 sub-boards, wherein you can set it so only people you allow can read or post. You can recruit on the boards or bring your friends.

It has a built-in dice roller, spoiler tags that hide text unless the viewer clicks a button, private tags that hide text in plain sight so they are invisible except to the person you intended to see it, beautiful hosted character sheets with linkable character portraits, and all the bbcode functionality (and more) of any professional message board. Among many, many other things. It is free, gorgeous and easy to use, and the admins are very approachable and visible.

•RPol is another very large one. The community is utterly gigantic. I will admit I don’t have an amazing amount of experience with this. The game interface is less intuitive and pretty than Myth-Weavers from my personal experience, but it seems to accept hard HTML code in posts and character documents (I made fancy table-character sheets for an Exalted game there once) so anyone who can make that work will find they have a lot of control over how their text looks. It also comes with your basic forum functionality. This is another one to try if you feel like scouting the options.

•Nearly any gaming discussion board you already frequent is likely to have one. You can find ‘em in Giant In The Playground, Wizard’s Official Forums, wherever. These are not dedicated, so you don’t get your own forum with subforums to control and all of that, and they might lack the advanced tools others have. There are some fixes for this

– Invisiblecastle provides a dice roller with archived rolls for players, and you can always use Myth-Weaver’s sheets without hosting your game there (though you HAVE to make an account in order to use their sheets – it’s worth it even if only for that!)

•Photobucket or Flickr can host those character portraits, maps and any other image props you’ll be wanting to use pretty easily. How will you make them? It’s as simple as making a bunch of grid maps with a spreadsheet chunk and Paint, or firing up The GIMP or Photoshop or Maptool and making something pretty. I prefer photobucket for maps because it has built-in painting tools for making quick cruddy-looking sketches and dots on maps. I prefer Flickr for character portraits because it automatically creates and offers multiple sizes from your original pictures and it’s a lot less ugly-looking to deal with, but its painting tools don’t cut it much.

Style:

There isn’t much to say about the style of a play-by-post that hasn’t already been said in the first part of this series. Posts can be very long. You might want to set a limit as to how long they can be, and what elements they can or can’t include, such as pictures or fancy fonts or colored text.

There are also some things you should watch out for in play-by-posts – for example, it is very rude to assume that an NPC or PC will do something for you and therefore including that in your post. This is called “godmodding” in some forums, and means taking control of a character not your own within your post. It’s best to avoid this.

You should set a limit on the minimum number of posts and minimum number of activity you expect in a game. I expect 1 or 2 posts a day, 5 days a week. If you cannot comply, I will unfortunately have to find another player. I also like to ask for any instant messaging or email addresses of my players so I can nag them.

This is unorthodox and rude of me to do, but it comes with the territory. This is why I often game with the posse, because I know they’ll respond and I know I can go nag them. If you don’t have a posse, and game with strangers, you can find the problem of dedication. A lot of PBPs fold because of a lack of dedication.

Because there’s no schedule, players become lackadaisical and make the game even more sluggish. As a DM, be active yourself and expect activity, and reward activity. Set a good example and be demanding. Also, get a posse. It’s the best.

Some basic niceties you should look for in a forum are spoiler tags that actually hide the text (button-click drop-down spoiler tags are my favorite – mouse-over ones are annoying to me) and image tags so you can post maps and such. Private text is cool, but not needed. A lot of people like color text to differentiate characters talking – if each player has only one character though, I don’t see the point. Dice rolling is nice, but most forum dice rollers are annoying to use, so I tend to default to invisible castle, which is easier than the often arcane rolling algorhythms most forums concoct.

And I think that’s all I wanted to say about that. Tune in next time when we’ll wrap up by talking about stuff you can do to spice up the game, more online tools, and maybe any questions anyone wants answered or topics anyone wants covered.

Once again thanks to Chatty for having me, and to the readers here for being welcoming and appreciative, and I wish everyone a lot of love, platypuses and black sheep.

I also apologize for how huge this post is.

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Happy Birthday Alex!

Hey there!

December 20th marks a very special day in our family.  This is the day that the holidays officially starts as it’s my wife Alex’s birthday.  She’s the love of my life and she’s been by my side for more than 12 years!

We’ve spoken about gamer friendly significant others in the past.  I must reiterate just how incredible Alex has been.  She’s been really supportive of my gaming habits.  She’s displayed pride in my success as a blogger. She’s also surmounted an initial resistance to Video Games as a family activity and now enjoys playing Cooking Mama, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution with the kids and I.

She’s also a geek in her own way.  Having mastered the intricacies of iTunes, watching geek TV shows and being among the best Computer troubleshooters at her work place.  I’m really proud of her geek and professional accomplishments.

To you my love, I wish you the best of birthdays!

Here’s to many many more!

Feel free to add your own wishes!

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Chatty's Guests: GMing for a Convention

I’m on blogging holiday until next week.  During that time I will re-post old articles of mine or feature guest posts.

This article was written by Kameron M. Franklin who generously offered to step in during my break.  Thanks man!

This past weekend I had the privilege of DMing a 4E session for charity. The Portland D&D Meetup group  put together a twelve-hour event with several different tables running games. I’ve run games at GenCon before, so I knew that the experience would be quite different from gaming around the kitchen table. If you’re interested in GMing for a convention for the first time, or looking for some tips to help make your game part of someone’s memories from GenCon 2009, here are some things I learned that I’d like to share.

Double Your Prep Time

Convention games are generally schedule in neat, little 4-hour blocks. I’ve found it takes me at least two-hours of preparation for every one hour of playtime to put together a suitable adventure. I should mention that this is based on using a published adventure, though with some pretty heavy modifications. You may need to tack on some additional time if you’re building an adventure from the ground up.

Keep it Short and Sweet

Structure your adventure around 4-5 scenes. The adventure I ran at the charity event included 3 combat encounters and two skill challenges. Well, 3-and-a-half combat encounters. (There was technically a short rest between the two battles that comprised the climactic scene.) Do NOT use random encounters, but keep 1 or 2 in your pocket just in case your players are setting a fast pace. Also be willing to cut a scene if time is running short.

Focus on Action

A convention game table is not the ideal setting for a roleplaying-rich game. There is a lot of ambient noise from the fifteen other games being run in the same room, which is very disruptive to most attempts at immersion. The players are typically strangers to each other, and being the introverted geeks we are, that’s not the ideal audience for encouraging in-character development. If you’re a GM who favors character interaction over combat in your game, you might find yourself disappointed.

Pregenerate PCs

I can’t emphasize this enough, and for several reasons. You won’t have time to review characters the players bring, and there won’t be time to for the players to make one during the session. You know what the adventure calls for and what will give the players the best chance for success and a fun time. Therefore, you should generate the PCs the players will use as part of your prep time. Create one PC for each player you expect to participate in your game. Be sure to give each PC abilities that will allow them to shine at one point in the adventure.

I’d love to hear from other “convention” GMs about their advice for running a successful game in this type of environment. Thoughts from the players’ side are also welcome. Perhaps the best piece of advice I got came from a player after one of my sessions at GenCon (no random encounters).

About the Author

Kameron M. Franklin is a published fantasy fiction novelist who likes to dabble in game design. He has been playing D&D since the 3^rd grade and DMing for twenty-some years. He blogs about fantasy fiction at www.pensandswords.com.

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