How To Properly Build A Scene
Header Art: Fantasy Landscape by Christian Dimitrov
Describing, or building, a scene for your players is where you create the immersion at the table. This only requires a few things to remind yourself of, and its easy as placing a post-it note on your GM screen as a gentle reminder.
The Senses
When you are creating a scene, remember that there is more to describing than just what your eyes can see. For example, when describing a city street you can describe the cracked flagstones, the muddy peasants pushing carts of lettuce, and the squat buildings made of mud and wood hanging close to the streets... But you have more than one sense. You have several, and far more than the five senses that you were taught way back when in pre-school; those are just the basic senses... the ones that small little minds can understand, but fully developed brains are capable of handling the other types of senses like spatial awareness and pain.
The other four basic senses besides sight are Hearing, Smelling, Taste, and Touch. These should all be used in your descriptions when appropriate. In our example above, I've described a few basic things you might see. But what might you hear on these busy streets?
The sound of raised voices comes out from one vendor stall, someone is unhappy about the costs of a meatpie. The sounds of horse hooves rapidly striking cobblestones comes from behind you, and you must quickly move out of the way of a horsedrawn carriage, it's steel band wheels striking sparks against the cobblestones. Off in the distance, you can hear a bard tuning their instrument and booming great tales of ancient heroes.
Other Senses
So now, we dealt with what you might hear. What about smells? Smells are incredibly important for really making yourself feel immersed in the world. You can describe the smells of a bakery, or maybe the passing alley smells of dung and worse. Smells can be a great way of targeting specific emotional centers of the brain without having to describe gore or worse.
Describe how a body has decayed, how it becomes an assault on your nose and you can't think because of the stench. You don't need to tell the players, unless it is incredibly important, that the person's intestines were ripped open, you can describe to the players that the smells of fecal matter permeate the air, that this body has been lying in the baking sun and smells like it as well. Players can start filling in with their own imagination what a body might look like at that point so long as you provide some basic input, like it is a tiefling or a dwarf with dried, caked blood around it.
And that's another thing; sometimes you can hear or smell something far sooner than you could see something. Keep that in mind when they are exploring some ruins. If you know there is a fight up ahead, describe the clashing of swords and the yelling. If they just open the door and see massive combat, they'll be confused about why they didn't hear it first.
Apart from hearing, seeing, and smelling; you have two more senses that are a bit more niche. You aren't always going to be able to touch or taste something, but that doesn’t mean we can forget them. When a player eats something, describe its taste to them. Hot, oily meat juices or sweet and succulent cakes. It all goes into creating an atmosphere for them to be immersed in.
You can also describe taste as if you taste something foul in the air. How many of us have walked past a sewer entrance and tasted how foul the air is? That can be a powerful way of describing an odor when you can actually taste it, even one that trascends just smelling it.
And lastly touching. Touching is all about being personnel with it. When the players are looking at fabrics, you can describe how it feels rough for the cheaper fabric, while the more expensive fabric is soft and smooth. For the players, buying fabric could be what is cheapest, but if you want them to spend more money, take a moment to describe the feel of the fabric. This fabric feels rough and loose, like it might tear easily. This fabric is soft and silky and holds firm. Descriptions can get players really into what they are shopping for, and end with them buying imaginary expensive clothes because of how you described it.
Other Senses
But, that's only the five basic senses. There are a lot more you can add into your descriptions. The sense of space is your literal sense of perception. How far away are things, how do they feel when closer to you. The sense of equilibrioception is your actual sense of balance, if there is an earthquake you can describe how you are trying to keep your feet under you.
Thermoception is the sense of temperature, important for knowing if they can see intense amounts of heat behind a trapped door.
Chronoception is how you are able to tell that time is passing, important for those wanting to properly time a ballista being reloaded and fired.
Proprioception is your ability to know where your body is in relation to itself, even when your eyes are closed and can’t physically see. (When you close your eyes, can you find the tip of your nose with your finger on the first try? That’s proprioception.) Adventurers rely on this sense when a darkness spell is cast upon them and they have to fight in the darkness with a sharp metal stick that could easily cut off a limb if they didn’t have this sense.
There are many, many more senses out there with fancy names. There are even senses that a human doesn’t have but other creatures do. Echolocation is used by dolphins and bats to ‘see’ what is around them. Hygroreception is the ability to sense moisture in the surrounding environment, which can be found in insects. Infrared sensing is even used by snakes to strike at vulnerable parts in their prey, using different wavelengths of heat to know the best part to bite.
Descriptions
When describing a scene, I found it helped me a lot to have a sticky note with these questions on it:
What do they See?
What do they Hear?
What do they Smell?
What do they Feel?
What do they Taste?
Layering your descriptions
But, there is more to describing a scene than just the senses. You also need to know how to layer it properly. Too often do I see descriptions in officially, published books who put the source of excitement as the first thing in the description box. Your players aren't listening to you when they hear something that will catch their focus, and they will tune out everything else you will say or immediately interrupt you.
You must first layer your descriptions. This means, you must decide what is important and save it for last, while putting everything else in front of it. When describing your setting, don't immediately blurt out that someone is being attacked; you want to describe the location first and then at the very end, describe that someone is being attacked. Its a bit misleading to bury something so important for the last thing, but it is for the good of your environment and for your players.
Let's describe a scene. We will say that there is a graveyard and someone is being chased by a pack of skeletons; we will try to incorporate a few more senses than just sight.
As you are walking through the graveyard, the sky overhead is dark with just a few stars peaking through the heavy fog, and the light of the new moon meekly shining down. Scraggly trees dot the landscape, and the cracked, old headstones of the long dead stick out of the ground like rocks. The thick fog distorts the noises around you, and clings tight to your skin, its chill, wet air sticking to you. Off in the distance you can hear yelling, but the fog makes it difficult to see very far.
A tingle creeps down your spine, something isn't right. And then a small child can be heard, her screaming echoing through the fog. She can then be seen through the thick fog, she is running, terrified of something in the dark. You can hear the panic in her screams, and they are quickly running to you. Out of the fog are strange shapes lumbering towards you, and the stench of death follows them.
Now, in this scene we've described, we started very far out. We first told the players where they were, a graveyard, and then described things from a very wide angle, and then began swooping in closer to the heroes.
During movies, they have what are establishing shots. These shots are very far out, but they allow the viewers to see where they are, and that should be included in your descriptions. You want to start out wide from the party and describe the general environment around them. Then, you start pulling in closer to them and start adding in more details that are immediately apparent to them. As you are tightening your focus, you can begin describing the taste of the fog, or how it creates the echoes of sound around the party.
Once you are finished describing the closer area to them, you can start describing how their body feels while in this environment. Is it cold? Is it wet? How do they feel? Is another sense taking part? In the description, I touched on the sense of foreboding. They just know something bad is about to happen. Once I was finished focusing tightly on the characters, I only then described the action happening before them. If I had described the girl running first, no one is going to stop and think about the fog or the moon or the cool air.
The only thing on their mind is the girl, and they are likely to immediately interrupt your description to go save the girl... which is a good thing! In so much that saving people is good. Interrupting and breaking immersion is not a good thing; we want to weave a story and to do that, you have to set the groundwork.
But, that isn't to say that you have to always describe the establishing shot every time. If your party is checking out the 5th room in a large house, you don't need to describe the look of the entire house in every description. When they first arrived, you described the house. On the 5th room, you are describing that room with the occasional callbacks to the wider focus of the house. Like, if you described the house as old and leaky, in the 5th room, you can describe the wet damage on the wood floors, or that you can hear the drip-drop of water dripping in from a window.
You want to call back to the main flavor of the house, but you don't want to keep describing it over and over.
And that's all! I just wanted to share about how to properly build and describe a scene, as I've been trying out new podcasts and it frustrates me to no end when they immediately describe little suzy being attacked and the party immediately interrupts them to go save little suzy. Its important to save little suzy, but she isn't going to die during your description because time is controlled by you, the DM, describing the scene.
An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our Patreon.
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