Yudhishthira’s Dice

Good description adds a lot to RPGs. While not everyone needs good descriptions of people, places, or actions to make their RPing experience, for a lot of us good, dynamic narration adds color that is almost necessary to getting what we want. The thing about description is that getting it right can be brutally hard, especially when you’re trying to generate it on the fly. There have been several articles with various advice and craft bits written about the subject, including things like the famous Rule of Three and having tags for characters and scenes ready to go.

Those techniques are all good things, and worth reading about, but today I’m going to give some advice on the area by talking about using the conventions, language, and genre marks of other mediums to help give focus to description and narration in RPGs.

One of the problems that I see a lot of folks struggling to come up with description at the table having is that they don’t have a media focus to hang their description about. I mean, they may have character attributes, tags, and rules of three — and those always help — but when it comes time to put those things in motion there is often a lot of stuttering as we try to get our cool cliffhanging moment to come off just so. Very often this is because while the person knows what they are trying to describe, they get caught by not have definite and clear ideas of how they should describe it. How to get the momentum of a warrior leaping at another with sword drawn across quickly and powerfully? How to set up your description so that it shows only the most important elements, while not conjuring a poorly drawn sketch in the middle of a white room? And maybe most importantly, what recurring tropes can you use to make a virtual visual language that others at the table will understand?

I have had great success in getting past this, and helping others get past it, by co-opting conventions for various other media in order to give a focus to the descriptions in an RPG. Before each game starts up I’ll say, “This game is a graphic novel” or “this game is a movie” or “this game is a western novel.” From then on in the game all the players focus their descriptions through the lens of that medium of presentation. The results are that people have a better, more tangible ability to focus the contents of their minds eye and to develop a shared language to convey the meaning behind the description by using tropes we all already know.

One of the most common methods of doing this is the movie, or cinematographic description. Lots of us already do this, I’m sure, it’s just a matter of how constantly and consciously we do it. In cinematographic description there is a lot of focus on what it would look like if the current action was in a movie. You talk about the camera, the angle of the shot, the close up and the zoom, and generally talk it up like you were a cinematographer shooting a film. Some examples of this from games I’ve played recently include:

The camera starts close in on Arjuna’s face, showing the blank anger building there, and then moves up in a crane shot, sweeping out over the surrounding street, showing the people scrambling back to their feet and emptying into every allyway and doorway in order to get out of the line of fire. The camera keeps pulling up until it shows Arjuna alone in the middle of an empty street, his only company being the bullet holes and burning trash spilled from the blown-over garbage can.

Or

Gyle steps up into center screen and starts to raise the Staff of the Deliberative above her head. Then there is a sudden cut-shot to a nearby grove, where the camera lingers for a second on the breeze blowing silent through peach trees. Suddenly a group of birds is startled from a branch, and then the background goes up in a giant flare that blinds the camera, sending everything white from the intensity of the light. The flare clears to show the birds falling to the ground, dead or blind, from the fury of the anima flare released over a mile away.

How technical you want to get depends a lot on your group. Primetime Adventures has an excellent section on cinematography and technical terms that really gives some excellent joint vocabulary for this sort of thing. Things like “rack focus” (having two elements in a shot, one in the background and one in the foreground, with one in focus until the camera shifts to the other during the scene) and “tracking shots” (where the camera follows one character as they move) can give some awesome tools. And because they are familiar tools to us from every TV show and movie we’ve ever watched, they also already have some implied meaning and joint understanding in our heads.

Another mode of description focus I’ve had a lot of luck with is the graphic novel or comic book setup. By using a series of static, iconic shots, packed together closely or loosely to show passage of time, and by referring to things like gutters, panel sizes, figure blur, sequential or parallel stills, and other comic book tricks you can quickly develop a vocabulary that helps center and focus description. It also has the advantage of drawing on a visual language that a lot of folks already understand. For example, again from AP:

In the first panel, a long thin one across the top of the page, there is a shot of DJ and Johnny sitting in the middle of a green park lawn, partly under the shade of an oak tree, with a blanket and basket full of food in between them. Then there are two shorter pannels underneath it of the sun overhead and birds flying by, then one of folks on bicycles riding past on a nearby path. Finally there is another long panel below those with DJ lying in Jonny’s arms on the now empty blanket with the shadow of the oak tree on the other side of them.

Neat how tightly that shows the passage of time, the idle afternoon picknick in the park, and the characters starting with some distance between them and getting closer until they’re back in each other’s arms and hearts in a pretty short bit of narration, isn’t it? I also liked:

The frame is set so that it only shows half of Janus’s face, with the heavy inked shading making him look tired and warn, and mostly obscured by shadows. He’s facing into the window, and his reflection looks back at him from the other side of the panel in highlights against the black background, like a negative of his actual face. The reflection is smirking at him, with teeth made of the lights of the city beyond.

Graphic novel focus also is helpful to people who can describe a single image well, but who have trouble describing the full range of motion, or get stuck on unimportant details trying to get to the important issue. I’ve had a lot of players who aren’t really into the violence in real life who used to have a hell of a time describing fight scenes because they’d get stuck on the details of how they got from dramatic moment to dramatic moment. But let them frame it as a panel, or series of panels, in which they only show the most important moments, and they’ll rush right into it.

Of course, that brevity is also a key feature of graphic novel focused description in an RPG. Getting to the point, making it in an iconic way, and then moving forward without delay are all key elements in graphic novels and comic books — you don’t mess about a lot with a thousand pictures of one thing. So when you have a group that wants to move and move quickly, while still having detail and focus to their description, this kind of focus can help a lot.

If you’re not a big graphic novel reader, and want to understand more about how this mode works, I highly recommend Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Getting my players to read that has lead to some phenomenal increase in communication through description at our table.

I’ve had others tell me that adopting a literary style for their description helps their group focus in similar ways to the recommendations I gave above. I have to admit that I’ve had good success with literary tropes in online games where everyone is typing their responses and has time to think about them. It allows for a depth and nuance that you just can’t get with the more compressed forms above. However, I haven’t had good luck with it around the table, as that type of composition requires a time and nuance that doesn’t do well with live improv nearly so well as with written communications. If anyone has any tricks to share about using the pacing and descriptive tropes of your favorite novels, however, I’d love to hear them.

Obviously different styles are going to work better for different groups. However, I’ve always found that focusing your description through a particular lens results in better, faster, tighter narration than if you try to narrate the whole of the naturalistic world of your creation.