Doling Out Descriptive Details as a Dungeon Master

Salutations, nerds! I’ve recently been running into a recurring problem, both personally at the roleplaying game table and hearing about it through stories other people have told, regarding scenery detail and how the Dungeon Master breaks it down. So today we’re going to take a moment to talk about descriptive details. These crucial skills are viable for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons or any RPG.

The ruined keep rises like blackened bones from the ash-covered rocky plain. Carrion birds circle in the dark clouds above. “I walk up to the front gate.” Take 18d10 damage from the lava flowing down the path leading to the ruins. The descriptive details can be crucial, folks! [Art by Jeff Brown]

Balancing description in D&D

There are two major pitfalls on either side of the walkway that is “good description in a game.”’ If you don’t give the players enough detail, particularly when you are playing theater of the mind, there often ends up being a moment where you have to stop the flow in the middle and say “no wait, that isn’t necessary because I didn’t tell you…” If you give them too much, it can bog the flow of the game down with a lot of extraneous detail that your players are going to erroneously think are important.

You don’t want to have too few descriptive details

One big problem I see a lot is empty room syndrome. This is not just in newer DMs either. I’ve seen it in plenty of older ones who should know better. A scene, particularly one that is going to stage a fight, should be fleshed out, and you should give the players all of that detail immediately at once.

“You enter a large echoing chamber with a twenty foot chasm that bisects all the way through. On the opposite end of the chamber is an altar where a terrified and filthy child has been bound and a man stands over them, chanting. The sacrificial knife gleams in his hand. What do you do?”

“I take a running start and attempt to jump the chasm.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to take the bridge?”

“What bridge?”

It’s so easy for this to happen, especially when you’ve been looking at the same map for hours during game preparation, but it can make or break the seriousness and intensity of your scene. Sometimes, this is going to happen. Sometimes, you are going to forget something and at that point it’s best to mention it, laugh it off and move on, but I know some DMs who try to dole out information a little at a time to avoid info dumping descriptive details on their players.

Do not do this.

Or if you’re going to do this, at the very least be careful of which descriptive details you’re doling out. The fact that the floor of the cavern is black and shiny is not as important as the fact that there is a heavy chandelier hanging from the ceiling from which characters might be able to drop on an enemy.

Consider what objects the characters might be able to interact with.

Consider what features in the room might prove difficult for them to bypass.

Consider whether or not there’s fog and how the visibility in the room is.

Everything that is going to affect the way the characters approach your encounter goes first, up front, no matter how long it takes for you to get through it all, otherwise you’re cheating. Yes, you heard me. I don’t care if you’ve had your map written for weeks and can prove that it was already there, if your player says “I’m going to walk into the room” and you respond with “the vines growing out of the floor ensnare you,” and you didn’t mention there were vines growing out of the floor or at least ask them to roll perception to see if they see them, you’re cheating.

The characters get a fair chance to know what they are walking into, period. If you have their passive perceptions written down and it’s something hard to see, that’s fair, but anything they could reasonably be expected to know about should be listed on the tin. Fail to give that chance, no matter how prepared you swear you were, and it’s going to look like you’re making things up to screw them over.

They will be, justifiably, salty about this.

You don’t want to have many descriptive details

If this seems like a contradiction it’s only because descriptive details are a balancing act.

Writing an adventure and writing a work of fiction vary in a lot of ways but this is one that is very much the same. A D&D player’s brain, and a reader’s brain, are both working to fill in details for themselves and in many cases less is more.

Give them the broad strokes. Tell them everything practically important. Give a few sensory details to get the ball rolling. And then stop.

I know you lovingly rendered the throne room of Castle Darkskull in visceral detail. It’s enough to mention there are skeletal motifs throughout. You don’t have to separately mention there are skulls on the table, the chairs, the throne, the walls, the baseboards…you feel me?

If you are one of those DMs who likes to write things in advance, mercilessly cut everything redundant. If you aren’t, you get three purely descriptive details per room before impatient D&D players start getting glossy eyed, five for average ones and seven for very patient ones.

Your players are probably impatient.

That means you’re going to have to make decisions. And that means…

You have to be careful to pick the right descriptive details

Dappled sunlight, organic architecture and rune-carved stone obelisk are three details giving players enough to evoke an image of the scene. They can take it from there.

Let’s try an anecdote. When I first started playing tabletop RPGs, it was with a significant other (now ex) who was very big on “realism.” He used to criticize the mindset we’d come into the game from for being too meta and the example he liked to go to for this was, “If you walked into a room and I told you there was a suspicious baby, you’d run over to check out the baby.”

I think the point was supposed to be that a baby is typically innocent and wouldn’t cause trouble, so why would your character be suspicious of it? He considered it to be bad roleplaying to latch onto details like that. In retrospect, it was more like bad DMing on his part.

If you describe a suspicious baby to your players, they are going to be suspicious of the baby. Faulting them for that is just asinine. You bothered to mention it. Why would you have if it wasn’t at least relevant?

The longer you spend describing an object the more important your players are going to think it is. An okay DM might get frustrated with that, but a good one uses it to her advantage. Most players are not consciously aware of this, but piling on a lot of description to an object is the first hint this is something important and they are going to want to sit up and take notice.

Even flavor text has to be at least interesting enough to keep your players engaged. We’ve been in a thousand “musty mildew-filled flagstone corridors.” Pick something else to point out. If it lends something to the atmosphere of the dungeon, even an empty room can be an interesting experience.

Remember how I said you get three flavor descriptive details?

Tell me about how the stone floor in your dwarven mason’s guild hall has been carefully fitted together without a single bit of mortar so you can tell the stones are separate pieces but they are simply carved to lock into one another in an airtight way, and I will know your dwarves are skilled and resourceful. Tell me about how there are fossils of cephalopods bigger than I am embedded in the natural roughhewn walls of your wet, subterranean cavern, and I will know I am standing in an ancient place and might even feel small in comparison. Tell me about how the sun catches the one unshattered stained glass window of your abandoned temple throwing colorful, dappled light on broken pews, and how the motes of dust float in the rays, and I will know something terrible happened here once, even if it’s peaceful now.

Or better yet, use your other senses. I’m going to think very differently of your mason’s guild if it smells like slag and sweat, than if it is very clean and smells of freshly baked gingerbread. Your subterranean cavern will have one vibe if I can hear the sounds of the city above me at a distance, and another if you tell me there’s running water somewhere behind the wall threatening to break through. A warm temple will tell me that the god that was once worshipped here still has a foothold against the growing darkness, but a cold one will feel desolate and hopeless.

Give me another 20 by 20 foot room with some debris and a skeleton in it and you will have buy in. Give me a chamber carved from a single piece of living obsidian that gleams in the light of my lit torch, with expertly engraved grooves along the walls in a long forgotten language, and you will have immersion.

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