In the last article we looked at the basics of why an NPC is in a scene. Today we’re looking at where an encounter is taking place. I know I’ve covered it, @Brometheus has covered it, and @theangrydm has covered this before. Here I’m going to be looking at it a little differently. What happens when an NPC isn’t in the room, but you still need to get information across to the players.
Finding what you’re looking for
Describing a room in a few sentences with key points you want the players to examine because that is where you have seeded the information is great, but difficult. Adding a detail to a simple item creates a better connection in their mind for what is described. As an added bonus to being a little more specific with how you describe it, you shape how players perceive it and make them want to interact.
What is obvious to you is never obvious to anyone else. What I see and would do with a room containing a dead body is not necessarily what others would. Looking for a clue in a room is an excruciating version of twenty questions. The reason is, you have an inventory of things the players can look at and that you are going over, trying to list off the relevant things without boring them. If you have more than three or four items you’ve lost players to their phones.
Bringing the players into a room so they can find a single thing is a waste of everyone’s time. Bringing them into any situation to get more than three items promotes loot vacuuming. When setting a room for the players to look through you want three or four items for the players to find of which two share the same investigative clue. While you want the players to explore and go off in interesting directions, you don’t want clues to be missed or confused.
Painting the room
When a GM has me as a player and starts describing a scene, I mentally try to put together a room. In this room I start with a light-grey box with equal walls about fifteen feet at a side with a ten foot ceiling, with everything painted the same non-offensive grey. From there I start populating it with what the GM is describing.
The GM says an office and I think of a dark, tight-pile carpet, yellowed walls with oaken book cases going to the ceiling filled with books, and an ornate antique desk appropriate to the setting. You could be thinking of a freshly painted white walled office with nondescript art on the wall, a desk with the monitor pulled so you can’t see it from the door, and a single bookcase with very few books on the wall behind the desk. Both of these are reasonable descriptions of offices that have shown up time and again on TV shows and they both offer vastly different ideas of what could be there.
Leading the ear
An additional problem is that this is all wallpaper, there are no objects that are there unless I say something about it and the GM okays it. A GM who is learning to lead the ear puts things there, such as the bronze bust of Shakespeare sitting on the desk or a body slumped over a console with a shot through the back of its head.
These are great starts, but a few little verbal flourishes help. The bronze bust has a seam at the top of the neck, or the body has its arm stretched to a corner of the desk. Add these details will lead the mind of the listener to the detail you want them to find.
Doing it once is good, but if you do it three or four times it allows the players to find one of the paths you want them to go on while saving the others to use at a later time.
What a room is made of
When describing a room most GMs aren’t thinking of what kind of flooring is in there, what color it is and how it feels under boot. Consider that this is one of the six major walls of a room. I have yet to have a GM describe it. The ceiling of every single room my characters walk through when I am a player is painted like the Sistine Chapel since absolutely no one ever tries to set that part of the tone.
The room that an encounter takes place in is styled in your head, describe it. A very simple set of directed descriptions become something that people remember. Lead with something moderately important but that won’t ruin things if it’s missed. After that describe the room as efficiently and generally as possible but build upon the style you’ve been thinking about. This is the point when you start going through the objects you have planned; each item needs to be unique in how it is described in these moments if you want the object to be remembered.
An example of this would be:
The high roof in this seemingly abandoned mansion echoes with the clicks of a dogs step as you trail it through the house. Lightning crashes outside the window bringing everything into view for a brief moment. You see a large desk with a bronze bust of Shakespeare, its head thrown back to reveal a button that’s been jammed down many times over the years. A red phone askew on the ground is beeping incessantly. To your left is a bookcase trimmed in wood and sunk into the wall with the books all perfectly placed.
How do you try to bring the setting alive in an encounter with no one there?
