Room description is an art, and I find it has great value even if you play using a battle mat or a digital game table. In fact, especially if you use those tools. A problem I’ve noticed is that as soon as the battle mat or 3D terrain is revealed, players know that combat is inevitable. They stop trying to roleplay, and prepare to rollplay. Instead of producing battle mats for every moment of the adventure–which is a lot of work for little benefit–I instead use theatre-of-the-mind description whenever the party arrives at a new location, regardless of whether I anticipate combat or not. I only reveal a physical or digital battle mat when combat actually begins.
What follows are some guidelines I use when constructing room descriptions, in the order I feel they should be considered.
- Keep it brief. There’s only so much the players can absorb verbally. My goal is to keep it to a paragraph’s worth of description, or roughly 150 words, maximum. Some spaces are more complex than others, so use your judgement.
- Bury the lede. As soon as you say “and four trolls”, players stop listening and start describing their oil flask bandoleers while reaching for dice. Instead, delay describing the deadliest part(s) of the room until the very end. If you’re consistent with this, the party should stay attentive during room descriptions because of the anticipation that any description might conclude with something important.
- Describe; don’t explain. Don’t always tell players exactly what is happening; instead, use comparisons to describe things which might not be immediately obvious. Instead of saying, “you hear a heavily armoured dwarf in a nearby hallway,” say something like, “from the far door you hear someone breathing heavily and creaking like a dozen rusty hinges.”
- Senses. I find it good to start with basic sensory impressions. Someone once told me to use a few different senses for each space. Sight is our most important sense, so that should almost always be included. For example, “It’s dark, but you can smell the pitch-smoke of torches in the chill air.” (Note: vision determines much of a room’s description, so make sure you think about an area’s lighting and who has light sources and/or darkvision.)
- Dimensions. This is a very rough description, which should always be relative to the observer. Describe where the party is in relation to the rest of the room (e.g. “You peer in from a doorway in the center of the room’s south wall”), and then give the rough shape and dimensions of the room (e.g. “It’s a fairly rectangular room, about 30 feet east-west by 20 feet”). If the party has a cartographer, this will allow them to put pencil to paper immediately, and lay down a rough outline. Your descriptions shouldn’t be very accurate unless the observer has some ability that grants them a mental measuring tape.
- Familiar measures. When describing objects, it can be handy to use the same terms used to describe creatures: “tiny, small, medium, large, huge, and gargantuan.” This will provide consistency, and let the party know how an object’s size relates to their own character’s size. For example, a large door should occupy a 10 foot square section of wall. A huge chair is made for a giant, while a small desk would be appropriate for a gnome. If you omit a size description, most people will assume “medium”.
- Exits. It’s important to know if there are obvious ways into or out of the room, or if it seems to be a dead end. Give a rough description, including the exit’s position relative to the observer’s current location. For example, “There is a closed wooden door on the opposite wall, about ten feet to your left. Two small windows are spaced evenly along the west wall.”
- Notable features. It’s good to be discerning here. You don’t need to describe every object, and it’s often best to group things together where possible. It’s common to mention pillars, furniture, flames, tapestries, and so on, sparing only a few words for each. For example, “Broken furniture is scattered around the four, evenly-spaced pillars. A large stone altar occupies the very center of the space.”
- Dangers. Now we get to what some would consider the meat of the sandwich. Describe the dangerous features of the area, such as spinning blades, treacherous chasms, jets of flame, and/or the creatures who inhabit this space. Remembering to be brief, it’s good to include how a creature is armed or armoured since that will probably be at the forefront of players’ minds. Describe their numbers, location, and whether they appear aggressive, defensive or otherwise.
As an example which pulls it all together, here’s a description which sets up a combat encounter.
The large room beyond the door is dimly lit, with pools of bright light from the torch sconces along the walls. The air smells a bit like rot and you hear shuffling sounds. You’ve entered the southwest corner of a warehouse. The ceiling, about twenty feet above you, is supported by a dozen narrow, wooden pillars evenly distributed. The room might be thirty feet across and extends maybe fifty feet north of you. Directly north, stairs lead ten feet up to a wooden door. The warehouse is full of wooden crates and scattered debris, like someone had tossed the place. Six burly humanoids with pig-like faces poke their cowled heads up from behind crates around the room, aiming crossbows at you.