By: Todd Jeffcoat
There is a common piece of advice in modern adventure design: keep your room descriptions concise. Give the GM the information they need, cut the prose, and get straight to the mechanics.
There is certainly merit to that approach. A GM doesn’t need to read a novel every time the party enters a room.
But I think the goal has been overstated.
The goal shouldn’t be less prose. It should be less redundancy.
Many GMs prefer room descriptions that combine evocative prose with concise mechanical information. Prose gives the GM something to work with when describing the environment, while bullet points provide the mechanical effects and consequences. The two can complement each other rather than compete for space.
The trick is making sure they aren’t simply saying the same thing twice.
Don’t Say It Twice
Suppose a room contains bioluminescent mushrooms.
Bioluminescent mushrooms fill the room with dim light.
You probably don’t need:
Light: Dim.
The prose already covered that.
But there can be a reason to include additional mechanical points:
Bioluminescent mushrooms cast a faint blue glow throughout the chamber.
Light: Dim, 20-foot radius.
Now the two pieces serve different purposes. The prose tells the GM what the characters perceive. The mechanical entry tells them exactly how the lighting works.
This can be applied almost everywhere.
If you have a mechanical effect called “Stench” as one of the room’s features, you can probably skip providing a description of the smell within the prose. Likewise if the prose describes loud noise in an area, you probably don’t need a bullet point for it, unless it elaborates on a mechanical effect.
Every piece of information should ideally appear once, in the format that communicates it best.
Establish Recurring Features Up Front
An easy way to keep descriptions terse is to front-load typical features of your dungeon in the introduction. If nearly every room in the dungeon is subject to shifting floors that force a check or save to avoid falling during combat, include that rule in the beginning and only describe the few times this hazard is absent.
This creates a useful distinction between dungeon-level information and room-level information.
Let Tables Do Some Heavy Lifting
Most TTRPGs have rules for when to roll random encounters, but that doesn’t mean you can’t implement features that force an encounter roll in certain rooms or the dungeon as a whole. The more robust your table is, the more work it can do, allowing some rooms to look something like this:
Area 15: The Halls of Wonder
The construction of the facility gives way to a lively cavern of diverse flora and fauna. A brass plaque above the entrance reads “You’re now entering a world of wonder! Take stock of it and rejoice!”
Mushrooms: Grow wild, spreading from the northern cave opening. Roll twice on the mushroom table.
Open Middle Ground: Roll twice on the random encounter table.
Most of this description is prose and the mechanical parts tell the GM more about how to describe the area. Rolling twice on the random encounter table means this can be a very different room depending on results. It could be combat, diplomatic, treasure, or a combination of things, again, depending on how robust the random encounter table is.
And notice one more thing. Even the name of the room is pulling weight with regard to its overall feel. Even if the GM doesn’t mention it, it can inform the tone used to describe the environment.
Make Your Tables Worth Rolling On
Of course, this only works if the tables themselves are good.
“Roll on the random encounter table” isn’t going to do much work for you if every encounter is another group of baddies who want to kill the party.
A good table can contain different kinds of play: combat, exploration, social encounters, discoveries, hazards, treasure, complications, and strange events.
You can even create tables that behave differently depending on where they’re rolled or what they’re rolled with.
For example, in my one-page dungeon, “The Gallows of Oblivion,” I have roll twice right in the middle of a bell curve, meaning it’s one of the more common results.
Most of the encounters rolled interact with one another differently.
Collapse – DC 15 DEX or fall beneath the floorboards, 2d6 damage. If rolled with Lurker, DC 15 STR or be dragged into Oblivion.
And
Lurker Beneath the Floorboards – Watches PCs from beneath the floorboards. Present for next “Collapse” result.
A good random table is almost another form of prose. It gives the GM possibilities rather than prescribing a single outcome.
Prose Has a Job Too
This is where I think the argument for purely mechanical descriptions goes too far. Haven’t you been running a game and found yourself at a loss for words, especially when players ask specific details?
A GM doesn’t just need to know what mechanically happens in a room. They need to know what the room feels like.
A mechanical entry can tell me:
Cold: Creatures entering the room take 1d4 cold damage.
But that doesn’t necessarily tell me how to describe the room.
A few lines of prose can give the GM something more useful:
Frost creeps across the walls in delicate branching patterns. Every breath hangs visibly in the air, and the iron door is so cold that bare skin sticks to it.
That prose isn’t redundant with the mechanic. It gives the GM material to communicate the mechanic through the fiction. This is the real value of descriptive writing in an adventure: it gives the GM something to say.
Concise Doesn’t Mean Bare-Bones
Ultimately, I don’t think adventure writers should be trying to minimize their word count simply for the sake of minimizing their word count.
A 150-word room can be bloated if half of those words repeat information found elsewhere.
A 250-word room can be extremely efficient if every sentence contributes something different: atmosphere, information, interaction, mechanical consequence, or inspiration.
The better goal is not:
“How can I use fewer words?”
It’s:
“What information does the GM actually need, and what is the best way to communicate each piece of it?”
Use prose for atmosphere and sensory information. Use bullets for mechanics, DCs, etc., etc. Establish recurring rules once. Let tables handle variation. And don’t mechanically restate something the prose has already made clear.
Good adventure writing doesn’t have to choose between flavor and function.
It just needs to make sure they’re doing different jobs.
About the Author
Todd Jeffcoat has been playing TTRPGs since the mid 90s and writing for them in some capacity for nearly as long. He took his first stab at publishing during the Shadowdark Kickstarter and is probably best known for his adventure module “Frostmire and the Catacombs of Whispering Rats.” His Patreon is Ironfox Gaming at https://www.patreon.com/IronfoxStudio?utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator
Leave a Reply