The goal of this essay is to help you, the gamemaster of Star Wars RPG, learn how to take your sessions to new heights. Quite possibly one of the most important facets which can make or break a good game is description; more specifically, how the scene is delivered to the players. With a poor description, players are missing key information and time due to asking many questions, as well as the most important part: feeling. If a player cannot feel caught up in the situation and environment you have guided them to, they are that much more challenged to roleplay effectively. It has been my experience that a good description will inspire players to interact with the game at a level they didn't even expect to. One of the talents a GM works hard to hone is description, because it is the fuel of fantasy, enabling floating motes of thought to approach temporary reality.

Well, all that's great - but what's a good description?

Writing and words - two things intimately linked yet phenomenally different. Assembling mere words does not make a peice of writing, yet writing is (among other things) an assembly of words. The use of a single word is useless most of the time, yet at other times can hold more power than a thousand of it's brethren. To tackle the subject of description, we have to first define some things carefully. For a little help, we'll call upon the WWWebster Dictionary, where the following quotes are drawn from...

Writing For our purposes, writing can be defined as "the act or practice of literary or musical composition." However, I also note that the primary definition of writing is "." We'll work more with this soon...

Words When you look up the meaning of this in the dictionary, there are roughly 10 different definitions (depending on which edition you are looking in), all of which are technical. The simplest is "a written or printed character or combination of characters representing a spoken word."

Description Quite simply, "discourse intended to give a mental image of something experienced." For our purposes, we'll consider this to apply to written description.

Now that we've defined what we're dealing with, we're still may not be clear on what is to be done. Right away, we should toss out the use of the definition of "words" - scribbling characters on any medium does not a good description make! Technically, one could combine some definitions to make one:

Written Description: The act or art of forming visible letters or characters to create a discourse intended to give a mental image of something experienced.

Hmmm....sounds a bit dry. Let me tell you what I believe to be the definition:

Good Written Description: The art of expressing a false environment and/or situation to another in such a way as to convince that person they are actually within and experiencing that environment and/or situation.

That's a little better. In other words, a bad description is writing/saying to player, "You walk in the room and get a sense of sadness" - the good description will make that player feel a sense of sadness without telling them to do so.

The best way I can convey how to make a good description is to do so through the use of an example. We'll do this as a step-by-step process. We now embark on the journey......

 

 

 

This is an original work by Tim "Nealos" Salam. Note that descriptive text included are exerpts from a work in progress.

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