A recent Design and Development article over at wizards.com mentioned that D&D was a conversational game, and research shows that a DM gets about 2 sentences worth of boxed text before players zone out. Oration equals glazed eyes, basically.
However, Friday, a player that I DM for and I played with his neighbor as DM. While I was quite annoyed with his God Voice style of DMing, he provided ample detail about the environment, to an extent. It seemed to me that if he wasn't familiar with a situation, it was hand-waved a bit.
After the game, during our post game eval, my player said how much he loved the DM's descriptions of everything. I was quick to point out how quickly he starts reading other books when I'm giving descriptions and then ask questions later. Of course, I've been thinking about this since Friday night, comparing my style to the other DM and wondering if I'm at fault, and if so, how I can improve without using the DM God Voice style, which I hate because I try not to elevate myself above the players.
My first thought is that I don't seem interested in the subject myself, and that passes onto boredom for my players. It's definitely something I'm working on as I try to pull our game out of not-so-tactical miniatures combat and into mutually creating a story where I only really control the setting.
Unfortunately, that's not something I can do on my own. This is something I realized in evaluating what I enjoyed on Friday. There was a serious lack of setting in Friday nights game, despite the DM's intense descriptions. Part of that was because I missed much of the session, but the other players involved expressed the same thoughts. Mostly, though, I think that since
I didn't really care much about the setting (as we
might play with this guy once a month if he's lucky), I didn't pay that much attention. Whereas, I think my player was being courteous to the new DM.
Obviously, any DM that knows the rules can run a series of disjointed adventures, running the PCs from town to town so that they're fantasy equivalents of the A-Team. "I pity the ooze." A good DM can even tell the story of his setting in a series of
related adventures, incorporating the character's backgrounds and the players interests, similar to my campaign (although, again, I need to engage the players minds when describing said setting). However, much like a drug addict that doesn't
want rehab, those players have to
want to make the setting real. They have to
want part of their brains to live in that reality, at least for the duration of the game session.
When the players engage themselves in the game as a whole (not just in the life and death situations that arise), it helps the DM to weave the setting into their minds. No description of the salt in the wind soaking the moisture from your character's skin is going to have any effect if you are comparing
sleep with
protection from evil or fuming at the rudeness of a customer from earlier in the day or the incompetency of a coworker week in and week out. Regardless of how dynamic a DM is, it's still just oration if the entire group isn't engaged. Active listening is a key conversational skill, and one that most professionals recommend a person learn to make it in the business world. It's also a simple courtesy that many people extend to their friends at the very least, and one people generally labeled as "a good person" extend to almost everybody. The trick, and what seperates a good player from an average player, is to listen
as your character would, unless of course that means you don't listen at all.
I had more, but I wrote this beast on Monday, and haven't had a chance to edit it since then. Maybe I'll revisit the premise later. For now, I just need to post something, lol.
