Show, Don't Tell

"The DM, without telling anything like a story, describes a set of circumstances that the players see in the immediate here and now, that they're free to make a decision about ... The DM provides immediate context of what the player characters' senses tell them. The players make a MOVE. This produces a response from the DM, describing what has changed in the immediate context due to the players' move. Then the players move again...the ongoing description provided by the DM serves as the immediate backdrop for gameplay, providing the players with the information they need to make their moves and decisions. This description includes details about the environment, characters and events that are directly relevant to the current situation and the players' interactions."

 — Jargon, this blog

And so, what is this "description" that's provided?  That gets down to the bare bones of it, nyet?  As a DM, the above stipulates that we must be ready to provide a lot of description, on specifications and cue, in response to anything the players might say, to maintain the game's action.  If we can't do this, continously and fluidly, then no matter how much preparation we do, we're going to falter where it comes to the game's progress.

This is one of those things that as a DM, we tend to overlook.  We talk all around it, with phrases like, "I run on the fly" and "improvisation is an important tool for a dungeon master" ... but it comes down to communicating sufficient description for the party to be able to make sense of what they "see" and be able to make decisions about what they want to do.

Wikipedia defines description as any type of communication that aims to make vivid a place, object, person, group, or other physical entity.  And that's the crux of it also.  "Sufficient" description is not just to say what's what, but to describe in a spirited, animated, lively, full of life mannner, painting a clear and detailed picture in the reader's minds that appeals to their senses and emotions.  It aims to bring a scene, character or event to life through words, making it feel real and immersive.

Fail at this, and we fail as a dungeon master.

There are many, many practical approaches one can take to rhetoric, which has been a critical academic discipline that reaches well into pre-history.  Fundamentally, it isn't enough to be extroverted; we should want to talk, to tell stories, to explain things, to reach out and grab the imaginations of other people by speaking fluidly and persuasively to them.  Don't like to tell stories?  Don't like to explain things?  Then don't even try to be a DM.

Yet if we'd like to tell stories and we'd like to explain things, we're just not good at it, then studying rhetoric and practicing speaking day and night will help.  Like learning to play piano, however, it will take time before we can train our instrument of a voice to play the tunes that a DM needs.  It doesn't happen overnight.

I grew up in a house where talking was a constant thing.  My father loved to talk, and explain; my mother liked to talk and emote, and was a big fan of movies.  I grew up talking.  It was standard for the family to see a movie together, then talk about the movie afterwards.  When we went to church, my mother and father would talk about the ceremony just as if we'd left a movie. When we travelled, the journey was discussed in all its nuances — and during the journey, naturally, everything we saw was discussed and pulled apart, with everyone expressing their own opinion about it.

But this isn't a post about my childhood, this is a post about description.  What I said in the last post about leading players by the nose without revealing the big picture explains what to do, but it doesn't explain how.  We need to discuss providing the descriptions themselves, in a cold, practical manner, so that the technique can be duplicated by the reader.  Otherwise, we're just riffing here and wasting our time.

In cinema, a common rule that's given to convey information to the viewer is "show, don't tell."  This is a technique of filmmaking that uses visual and auditory cues such as imagery, actions, facial expressions and sound to engage and provide information to an audience instead of dialogue or narration.  It works because seeing a story unfold is more in tune with our daily experience of the world as humans, witnessing the events around us.  There is no narration in our heads, and even if we hear others speaking, usually what's overheard is so disjointed that, without asking, it's not usually clear.  This is how we're biologically pre-determined to interpret our world: to see, to gather details, to be puzzled by them and then investigate to comprehend what's going on.  In the film context, the "investigation" is provided to us by the film-maker, who first puzzles us and then clarifies our puzzlement over the space of a given time, according to a pace the filmmaker chooses.  When it's done this way, well, the film is enormously immersive.  When a narration is stacked over the events, telling us everything without our feeling any sense of puzzlement, we're rapidly bored because we already know everything.

A similar principle exists in D&D, though obviously a DM can't "show" the dungeon room that's being entered or the street scene going on around the players.  This information has to be "told," which is a huge obstacle for the DM who doesn't know how to tell it.  Yet the fundamental principle of show, don't tell has to be maintained because, like I said, we're biologically attuned to view the world this way.  We comprehend things through our senses.  Language has only been around for a tiny percentage of our biological footprint, and the sort of language that's necessary for D&D has only been around for a few hundred years.  We're constrained to respect how human beings interpret information, no matter what we might think or believe is the easiest way to convey information.

For example, it's common for a new DM to introduce a dungeon to the players with a simple phrase like, "You enter a dark cave."  While factual, it's not vivid.

Unfortunately, the usual solution we'll hear is that we should "paint a picture" of the environment, describing the cold, damp walls covered in glistening moss, the echo of water dripping from stalactites and the faint scent of earth and decay that permeates the air.  This, we're told, evokes sensory details, allowing the players to visualise the scene and feel more present in the game world.  I have given this advice myself, because I used to be stupider than I am now.

This doesn't work.  I've tried it, I've discussed it with people, and the truth is that the more words we throw at a description, the less sticks.  We don't "evoke" the senses, we convey to the listener that we're going to over-describe a bunch of details that are totally unnecessary to the campaign, and therefore doesn't need to be heard.  Players "turn off" when they hear this sort of thing.  The pundits may like it, because the "advice" sounds credible and fills up their youtube content length, but in fact its empty-headed nonsense.

See, it's still telling the players, not showing.  We have to do more than just replace the simple word "dark" with a lot of other words that still just means "dark."  As an approach, "You enter a dark cave" is better, because at least it's clear and takes only four seconds to say, meaning that it's too short a time for the players to get bored.

The solution originates from a completely different place, having nothing to do with language.  All language is telling, and we want to do more than tell.

When puzzled, biologically, this creates a feeling of concern.  The setting in which we developed as humans tended to remain much the same from hour to hour, with nearly everything around us being fairly predictable.  We knew when the trees would fruit and when the stream would bear fish, what these clouds or that wind meant for the weather and we told time by how low the sun was getting in the sky.  Things that puzzled were nearly always things that didn't fit into this framework, which in turn nearly always meant that we were probably in some kind of danger.  An odd smell or sound, for instance, was usually a hint that there were predators nearby, or that some other tribe like us had made their way into our backyard.  This argues the sentiment, anything different is bad.

This is no longer true, obviously, but in terms of our hormonal and sensory responses to things, the messages are still the old messages ... and thus we're naturally hesitant to address anything that can't be explained instantly upon seeing it.  If there's a big black spot in the bottom of the tub, for instance, even if we can't tell what it is, we ready ourselves for it being a spider ... and our blood comes up a little.  It's our nature.

So when we describe something, we want to do what film does; we want to "show" it, but we don't want to "clarify" it.  The drawback of it being a dark cave isn't the nature of the cave, but that it's only a cave.  The cave isn't going to rise up and bite us.  It's not scary in itself, no matter how gooey the walls of it are.  The cave is potentially scary because of what might be down there ... like the maybe-spider in the tub.  What we want, when we describe the cave, is a maybe-spider there.

The art of suspense asks for more information, not less.  Alfred Hitchcock, the director, argued that it was indispensible that his audience be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved for suspense to get its grip into us.  Note that the word "perfectly" in this context is key.  We might also say "explicitly."  If we're shown a bomb a bomb being put into the car, we don't have a furtive individual put something into the trunk and hope the audience guesses what that is.  We show the bomb, explicitly, taking up the entire screen with it; then we show the bomb in someone's hand, then we see that someone cross to the car, and we see them put the BOMB in the car.  There's no question whatsoever about what we're seeing.  This is, as Hitchcock points out, absolutely necessary.

Therefore, with our maybe-spider, we need to go the next step.  Consider; we're getting ready to have a bath; we take off our glasses; we pull the shower curtain aside; there's the black spot; it's as big as our thumbnail.  It's not moving.  We turn around, put on our glasses ... and that is the moment that counts for everything.  We hope its not a spider.  We feel a bit of a hitch in our throat, but we're pretty sure it's not a spider because we haven't got our glasses on and anyway, spiders are never that big.  So just having a "maybe"-spider does concern us, but it doesn't concern us enough.

If we put our glasses on, and it IS a spider, then the little hitch we felt before is nothing.  We have a problem, even if we're not especially frightened of spiders.  Although, to be honest, if we live in the tropics, a spider the size of our thumb is nothing.  My first fiancee, whom I never did marry, lived on the 22nd floor of an apartment in Singapore for five years; she knocked spiders as big as my palm out of her shoes every morning.  One day she woke and found a 25 ft. python in her living room.  Concern finds a whole new gear in such parts of the world.

This is D&D, so there are no maybes about it.  We want the spider.  But ... "You walk towards the dark cave and there's a spider" is still pretty much just telling.  We're not there yet.

Our goal is to reveal as many facts and details as we can, laying the groundwork for suspenseful moments to unfold, while reserving enough clarity for those details that the party feels concerned.  We want to do more than hint that there's a spider.  "There's an unusual web that half-covers the cave with strands that are rope-like in thickness," is definitely better, but still we're not there yet.  That suggests only one spider and I don't know any party who thinks they can't handle one spider.

See, before the party can be concerned, they have to feel an impending threat.  If they're here, safe, looking at the cave entrance before entering, concern is something they'll only feel if they decide to go ahead.  They're still safe if they're right here.  Our building a comprehensive outline of the stakes, or obstacles, along with the fearful outcomes of a situation, has to start way before the party gets anywhere near the cave.  We have to start from the premise of deciding where, in the game world, the party is entitled to be safe, and work outward from there.

I believe in a safe space.  It's called "home."  Home isn't always safe, but for the most part it should be.  In the last post I wrote, about the film Conan, home was "safe" for the first ten or so years of Conan's life ... and then it wasn't.  For our game party, if home is a bar they return to at the end of every adventure, then they're entitled to count on that home being safe for several years before we bring the encounter to them.  It's only fair.

But once the party leaves home, and long before they arrive at the cave, we need to have done our due diligence to set up this cave entrance.  Not by "telling" the party what the cave is, but by letting the party witness others describing the cave, and learning that the spiders there are pretty dangerous.  The party needs to stumble across the carcasses of dogs, bulls and maybe an owlbear sucked dry by the spiders before they come to the cave.  They need to see these things, in the manner of a proof-given of what the spiders have done.  We may have told the party that there's the carcass of an owlbear lying there, but the players see the dead owlbear in their minds and then see themselves being put into the owlbear's position.

We set up these things to give the players more and more information about what they're coming up against.  It's bad technique to assume that if it's a mystery, this is more effective at stoking a player's imagination.  Players don't have imaginations.  If they did, they'd be dungeon masters.  They're players, because they don't like to tell stories, and they don't like to explain things, and they have to have things explained for them.  And when we set out to explain things, we want to make it perfectly clear that they're not safe, they're not just entering a dark cave, that the rope-like webbing does nothing more than tell them that they've got the right cave ... and that standing here, between the cave and the owlbear corpse that they passed earlier, makes is perfectly clear than this is not a safe place to stand.

Do not tell the party that there's a mysterious castle in the wilderness and no one returns from there.  That's bad pulp fiction writing from the 19th century.  Reveal that there's a vampire there, that many people have seen the vampire, that dogs and people have been found with their throats cut out ... and then show the party the town with all the doors locked and braced tight, just as the sun is starting to set.  Make the sun go down very, very slowly.  Take out your watch and make them hammer on the braced inn door for three or four minutes of real time as you count down how long it will be before the sun sets.  Show them what it feels like to be on a street, as it gets darker, when there's a vampire who might show up in 2 minutes and 37 seconds.

36 seconds ... 35 seconds ...