What Does It Look Like? 4 Steps for Beating the Boxed Text Blues

Boxed Text, or Read Aloud descriptions, can be the death of excitement and engagement in a game session -- or they can be a vital part of the player's engagement and enjoyment in the game. Save your game -- and keep your players plugged in -- with this four-step plan for better descriptions in your game.

Communicating visual description isn't easy -- hard especially to get right in the mind of every audience member. Just this week George R R Martin wrote about what the Iron Throne "really" looks like-- and the picture was shared all over the inter webs. (Just about everyone with a nerd-blog on the web has covered this story one way or another - now I have too!)

But if it can take years for a writer like Martin to actually see an artist create a version of the throne that matches what's in his minds eye, what chance does a run-of-the-mill DM have trying to explain what a scene looks like in his head to his players?

Precious little. For most of us, words are what we have. Unless we've got artistic skills and talent -- and the time to illustrate for our own games -- we're going to have to rely on words to create vibrant scenes for our players.

"Read Aloud" or "Boxed Text" creates a concrete, dependable block of description for a scene. It provides the key details that the players need to interact with the scene.

The problem we face is that modern listeners have a lot less patience for big blocks of narration -- much less than we had back in the bad old AD&D days. This means that it's more important than ever to make descriptions focused, tight, and powerful.

So how do we do that well?

1. Write A Good Description

There's a lot of terrible advice out there for writing descriptions. We are told to do things like appeal to all the senses, and many of the examples that we read in school take the time to give us a full description of what a character is wearing.

Those were all much more valid before Beavis and Butthead rose up out of the ether and destroyed our attention span. Now we need descriptions that hit hard and hit fast.

Try this:

• Pick the most important element of a scene. It might be a visual detail. It might be a smell. It might be a sound. Make it just one thing. Picking the right element is vital: we can say a lot about a scene with one or two well-chosen details that evoke a lot more. For example, if I describe the way a flap of skin flaps under an old woman's arm, it paints a vivid image in your mind of the whole woman, very quickly. Think of these iconic descriptors as a sort of descriptive shorthand. What's the one thing you can describe about a person or a place that will carry with it enough detail of the whole?
• Write your description of that one element.
• Replace Vague, generic words with more descriptive ones -- where we use generic terms ("hot"), replace them with more specific, descriptive ones ("steaming").
• Try to cut out half the words. This is an exercise is tightening our writing. We may not be able to cut out half of them, but make it a goal. When we write, we include modifiers -- adjective and adverbs -- and those words are actually our mortal enemies. Don't say "freezing cold", say "frigid". We also use equivocations and "to be" verbs and all kinds of other fluff that can be completely cut out. Don't say "it might be the hottest day you recall" -- go ahead and say "most scalding day ever." And then say that better (because it's still lame).
• Rinse and repeat for one or two more elements.

The difficult but vitally important part is to use as few words as possible. Every word needs to punch above it's weight class.

NOTE If We Are Running a Print Adventure: It's no less important to own the boxed text. Depending upon the adventure's author, the descriptions may be great, or may be fluffy and lame. It's incredibly easy, when we are preparing to run an adventure, to focus on monster stat blocks, making sure we've got the minis and maps sorted out, and not spend any time with the boxed text.

I'm sure many of us -- me included -- will get in a rush and won't even read over the read aloud text before we're actually reading it to players. This is why our players choose these moments to run for the fridge.

So, to prepare to deliver that boxed text content well, we need to spend as much time with that as we do going over stat blocks and minis -- maybe more. Read over the description and find the handful of key elements you need to describe. Pull them out and come up with your own version of how to describe those elements.


2. Take The Time You Need

When we're in the middle of running a game, it's easy to gloss over creating these descriptive moments. We forget that the image we have in our own minds is not necessarily what the players have, and if we don't do what we can to shape that image, there's no telling what they're imagining.

When we play with maps and minis, it's very easy to allow the props to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of description; make sure that you still take the time to describe key scenes and images to your players.

Remember -- even when we go so far as to use all of the gadgets and props I love to help play, the "real" action of the game takes place between the player's ears, not on the table (or virtual table); help them imagine the action.

3. Take the time you need, but no more

Our descriptions need to be short, evocative, and effective. They need to punch for the gut and not allow our players time to think about getting another soda or taking a break to pee.

Let them pee while the wizard's taking his turn; that dude is sloooooow.


4. Delivery: Don't Read - Perform

The biggest problem with descriptive or boxed text is it gets us into very bad habits. We read. We drone. We read fast to try to get through it fast so we get get back to the *important* stuff. And the players tune us out.

We need to break out of that rut, as much as possible, and we'll do that best by making an effort to treat these descriptions as performances, not demonstrations of our reading ability.

We stand up. We use our hands. We use our whole vocal range and whatever sense of theater we have to bring those descriptions to life. If we're describing the fangs of the dragon, we mime the fangs and gnash our teeth, throw in a rumble in our chest. If we're describing the waterfall that conceals the rebel base, we use our hands to describe the flow of water, use our voice to create the roar of the water.

If we must read from our notes, we should hold the notes in one hand, and make sure we're using our other hand to gesture and shape the ideas.

A few links for more ideas on dramatic reading:

• A good guideline for dramatic reading
• An awesome series of videos of real actors reading reviews and other found text from the internet (including "Missed Connections")

Putting it all Together

In the end, everyone needs to find their own way through this -- some will focus more on the writing side, others will focus more on the performance side. And some of us will keep on blowing off any real preparation of our descriptions. But if you take the time to be a bit more deliberate and intentional with those descriptions, your game will be better for it.

What are your favorite techniques for making your descriptions come alive for your players?

 

[Rune]

Superb!

 

[Dausuul]

"Those were all much more valid before Beavis and Butthead rose up out of the ether and destroyed our attention span."

Those were never valid. Writers and editors have known the value of concise prose for a very long time. My mother taught English at the college level (she's now retired), and she's always bemoaned the way high schools teach students to pad their word counts.

That aside, all the advice in this article is spot on. And the writing tips should be used everywhere, not just when writing boxed text.

 

[Janx]

How about some examples.

take a crappy box text from a decent adventure (don't use that worst adventure ever, that's just picking on the retarded kid), then rewrite it.

I don't used canned adventurers, and I don't tend to write boxed text. that doesn't mean my adventures are brimming with great descriptions, but I'm also not in a position to "show how its done". I like articles to put their advice to an demonstration or two.

 

[Dausuul]

Examples, you say? I'll take a whack at it. Here's a bit of boxed text from "Bastion of Broken Souls." (Very minor spoilers below.)

A nine-foot-tall fiend appears out of thin air and attacks. The creature appears as a giant snake with green, scaly coils from the waist down, and as a chain-shrouded female humanoid above the waist. She has six arms, all of which wield hellishly animate loops of barbed chain. Cruelly barbed chains also serve her as armor and clothing.

Now, this isn't awful boxed text--nothing like the infamous bit from "The Forest Oracle" with the men who are neither tarrying nor running--but it can certainly be tightened up considerably. Let's apply Gnome's process, in order.

A/B: Pick the most important element of a scene and write your description of that one element. There are three elements we really need to convey in order for the players to know what they're facing: Snake tail, six arms, chains. Let's start with the snake tail. Here's what we currently have:

The creature appears as a giant snake with green, scaly coils from the waist down.

C: Replace vague, generic words with more specific ones. How about we specify the species of snake? I'm thinking python. It conveys the appropriate implications--big, constricting coils--and it's well-known enough that most people can come up with at least a vague mental image of a python.

The creature appears as a giant python with green, scaly coils from the waist down.

D: Try to cut out half the words. We have 15 words right now, so we want to get to 7 or 8. First of all, by choosing "python" to replace "snake," we have already implied bigness, color, and coils, so we can cut those. Scaliness was pure fluff from the start. When was the last time you met a snake that wasn't scaly? "Appears as" is just instinctive DM pedantry--hey, it could be an illusion, so I have to qualify that it "appears" this way. This is unnecessary. Players know about illusions. Finally, "the creature" is unnecessary when referring to the subject of the previous sentence. So:

It's a python from the waist down.

E: Rinse and repeat for one or two more elements. I won't go through the procedure again in detail, but here's the end result if I apply the same techniques to the arms and chains:

A nine-foot-tall fiend pops out of thin air and attacks! It's a python from the waist down, a six-armed woman from the waist up, wielding barbed chains that lash out of their own accord.

"Lash out of their own accord" is a replacement for "hellishly animate," which sounds dramatic but is in fact pretty vague. My revised description omits the statement that the fiend is also using the chains for armor/clothing. I gave some thought to that detail, which presumably was meant as a hint that [sblock]the PCs are dealing with a marilith/chain devil hybrid.[/sblock] In the end, I concluded that the hint wasn't necessary, for three reasons:
[sblock]1) The players are unlikely to get said hint. Reading the original description, my takeaway was "uber-marilith specializing in spiked chains," not "marilith plus chain devil."
2) If the players do get the hint, they are unlikely to care. There is no plot significance to the fiend's hybrid nature, nor is there any benefit to the PCs in knowing it. This is one of those cases where the DM needs a reminder not to get all excited about the back story of a thing which the party is just going to butcher, loot, and leave bleeding in the dirt.
3) If the players do get the hint, and do care, it will derail the adventure as they try to figure out what awesomely horrible scheme lies behind the creation of such an abomination. Since there is in fact no such scheme and the whole demon/devil thing is just embroidery, they will only be wasting their time and making headaches for the DM.[/sblock]

 

[Radiating Gnome]

Examples, you say? I'll take a whack at it. Here's a bit of boxed text from "Bastion of Broken Souls." (Very minor spoilers below.)

That's dy-no-mite.

Here's another example -- I just jumped into a copy of Dungeon on my computer already and picked one of the descriptions of a location from the first adventure I found in it -- so, very much at random -- so who knows what we're getting in to.

This is from Dungeon 213: The Dread Pirate Braxis, by Jeffrey Ludwig. Dungeon is pretty well edited, so improving it won't necessarily be softball.

Here's the description (from page 40, encounter area 2, Approach)

The ground beneath your feet slopes gradually upward as
you approach the pirate stronghold, and the thick vegetation
of the island’s interior gives way to scrub. Ahead, a
sheer cliff juts up near the island’s edge, and perched upon
the rocky promontory is the ancient fortress, its battlements
an extension of the cliff ’s forbidding face. A craggy stone
causeway, rising like a ramp out of the island’s bedrock,
provides the only access to the stronghold above, its midpoint
straddled by a squat stone tower.

What's most important? The whole thing is sort of atmospheric, really, but this is all about the access to the stronghold, which makes that squat stone tower that defends the causeway is the most important detail. That's what the PCs will have to deal with next, and it's buried in the description. Assuming you lose listeners after the first or second sentence of reading this, they're going to know about a path, scrub, and a cliff, but may have entirely lost the detail of the ancient forest.

Of the information in that block, I think the tower, the causeway, and the ancient fortress are the three things we need to have.

So, I pretty much want to start here:

A craggy stone causeway, rising like a ramp out of the island’s bedrock, provides the only access to the stronghold above, its midpoint straddled by a squat stone tower

"Craggy Stone Causeway" is all right, but not great. I look long and hard at adjectives to see if they're really necessary. Stone is probably not necessary, really -- not sure what else it would be. And that gives us the alliterative "craggy causeway" which will resonate in the listener's ear. Causeway, though, for a modern listener, is a risk. How many members of my audience will have a concrete idea of what a causeway is?

"rising like a ramp out of the island's bedrock" well, we really don't need "like a ramp" and "rising" isn't my first choice here. We want to give the sense of the cliff and fortress above, the ramp needs to climb, not rise. Rise sounds like you're floating up effortlessly.

"provides the only access to the stronghold above" Provides again is a gentle, polite word that doesn't really convey the flavor of the scene. And, the idea that the causeway is the only access to the stronghold is buried here in the last third of the long sentence -- the idea has been lost again in the froth of words.

"its midpoint straddled by a squat stone tower" I actually like this -- it's very visual and evocative. Well, actually, midpoint seems a bit clinical, but the rest is great. But this tower is the thing that stands in the way.

Now... another element of the original description. The description starts at the reader's feet -- "The ground beneath your feet slopes...", looks up to the cliff, the stronghold, it's battlements, the causeway, and the tower. So, the reader's attention is going from down (feet) to up (cliff) to up (stronghold) to up (battlements) jump all the way down (causeway) to up (stronghold) to down (tower). That seems like a lot of redirection -- putting the causeway and the tower much earlier in the description also evens out that progression a bit.

Anyway... trying to put all of those thoughts together, here's a possible revision of the causeway section:

A lone craggy causeway climbs from island bedrock through a squat stone tower and on to the stronghold above.

That's 19 words vs 29, so not quite half, but you don't always hit that goal. But, comparing this to the causeway section I started with, is any information missing? Which works better to make the important details memorable? All that's left is to add the description of the cliffs and fortress beyond. So my final version might look like this:

A lone craggy causeway climbs from island bedrock through a squat stone tower. Beyond, a crumbling ruin's battlements extend the cliff's forbidding face.

I don't want to cover the rest of that in the same detail, but some notes -- "ancient fortress" is really vague -- what kind of fortress? In what way is in ancient? I made it a crumbling ruin, but that might not be the author's intention. "Crumbling" isn't one of my favorite choices I've made here -- tried a bunch of options there. "Ruin" wasn't quite enough there, so I decided I needed it. And it bring's the "c" sounds in from the beginning of the passage. I also eliminated the "stronghold" bit of the previous section, since I'm now describing that -- and that's also a fairly vague term. What sort of stronghold is it? "Stronghold describes the pirate defensive position, not the visual image the PCs have before them, so it really doesn't belong in this description.

Here are the two -- the original and my revision -- side by side.

The ground beneath your feet slopes gradually upward as you approach the pirate stronghold, and the thick vegetation of the island’s interior gives way to scrub. Ahead, a sheer cliff juts up near the island’s edge, and perched upon the rocky promontory is the ancient fortress, its battlements an extension of the cliff ’s forbidding face. A craggy stone causeway, rising like a ramp out of the island’s bedrock, provides the only access to the stronghold above, its midpoint straddled by a squat stone tower.

A lone craggy causeway climbs from island bedrock through a squat stone tower. Beyond, a crumbling ruin's battlements extend the cliff's forbidding face.

That's 23 words verses the originals 81. I've eliminated one detail (the road at the audience's feet), but actually added concrete detail to the "ancient fortress", I've tightened the language, and I think the result is a better package.


Of course, that's not enough. When I read that to the players, I want to make sure I'm using good hand gestures to describe the causeway and the stone tower. There's interesting tension between the way the tower squats and the cliffs and battlements rise. I need to make sure my hand gestures support that difference.

###

That's a lot of work to do for every bit of boxed text in an adventure you're going to run. You probably don't have time to do this for every encounter, but try it on some and pay attention to the engagement level you have with your players when you give them these descriptions compared to when you read them the originals.

-rg

 

[delericho]

One piece of very useful advice I read on a blog somewhere (and sorry, I can't remember where) was to replace boxed text with a set of bullet points covering the salient points.

By not providing fixed text, it forces the DM to be engaged in the scene in a way that a canned description might not, plus a bullet-point description makes it easy to adapt if the PCs arrive from the East instead of the West.

(And one piece of advice I would add to it is this: make your last bullet point a list of suitable, and evocative, words to use. That way, your 'main' points can be more factual and consise without sacrificing flavour.)

Oh, and: good article!

 

[Dr Simon]

Delericho,

I remember some adventures that did this, some time in the late 80s/early 90s, but for the life of me I can't recall who made them or what game they were for - possibly some Shadowrun adventures.

Basically, encounter area had a list of "mood" words for the GM to evoke when running the encounter. More useful, I think, than florid boxed text. I think my favourite worst offender is the very first piece of boxed text that you meet in the Dragonlance series; "The air surges fierce and sweet..."

 

[Radiating Gnome]

Basically, encounter area had a list of "mood" words for the GM to evoke when running the encounter. More useful, I think, than florid boxed text. I think my favourite worst offender is the very first piece of boxed text that you meet in the Dragonlance series; "The air surges fierce and sweet..."

That sounds like it may have been an ancestor of the Fate concept of "aspects", which I find very interesting. It's basically the idea of giving a thing (person, place or thing) a descriptor that can actually be used in play to gain advantage. So, a descriptor with game impact.

Can you tell I'm dying to try FATE?

 

[Dr Simon]

It wasn't anything linked to mechanics, more a note to the GM to "evoke this kind of feel", kind of thing. That does sound intriguing, though, I'll have to investigate further!