Blog Hoard: Alyssa Visscher on Creating Engaging Scenes
Continuing my efforts to dig into blog posts that I saved as interesting, but hadn't yet dug into - I enjoyed reading this post on D&D Beyond by Alyssa Visscher. She has a focus and a talent for making ideas clear and understandable, especially for new DMs. As always, I'm summarizing for myself what the major points are to help me process it - and sharing here in case someone else might find it interesting. But there is a lot more great stuff in the post, so I hope you'll click through and read the whole thing.
How to Create Engaging Scenes for Your Players
In this post AV talks about how to set up and describe a scene so that the players have a clear sense of how they can interact with it - what their objectives and possible actions might look like. She says that a scene is actionable if after the setup (the DM's initial descriptions) "the players have a clear sense of their available choices". The post gives DMs (particularly new DMs) advice on how to achieve that. Throughout she builds an example scene involving a wererat.
- Direct Objectives: AV suggests starting with a "strong character objective", where the noun-verb of the scene has a very specific noun and a strong verb. Having strong phrases gives focus and direction, without removing agency; ambiguous nouns and verbs can create confusion and inaction. "Investigate the inn" is vague; "retrieve the onyx statue from the wererat at the inn" is specific but still lets the players decide how. The more inexperienced your players are, the more you may need to break the objective down into even smaller and more specific parts ("acquire the guild leader's financial information" -> "steal the guild leader's account book from their office").
- Interactive Locations: the DM's initial description should suggest multiple things in the scene to interact with: dynamic features, useful objects and interactive set pieces. AV suggests several useful types of random tables as resources for thinking of these elements: monster motivations to identify creature's goals to let the PCs leverage that, dungeon dressing for potentially useful items, wilderness features/hazards for outdoor locations, and the Trap Triggers table for ideas of what effects might come from PC's actions. Think about "what might the PCs do with this?" for each element.
- Communicating Goals Before the Scene: The Dm can give some of these elements before the scene even begins, e.g. a quest giver defining the goal; or the general context implying a goal (e.g. if hired to defend a caravan, the players know what to do when bandits attack). However, if the situation is less clear, or if the players might be unsure how this scene fits into a larger goal - talk to them above the table, especially to clarify assumptions and answer questions.
- Setting the Scene: AV gives some advice for how to have your initial descriptions communicate the key information effectively: (a) Write some descriptive information in advance, whether it is box text or bullet points; (b) Go "big to little" - starting with the atmosphere and scenery, then to general set pieces, then to specific interactive elements; (c) Use "purposeful adjectives" - think about why you put the element in the scene to decide how to describe it (e.g. if you put a tree in for cover then it is better to focus on it being "broader and wider than a person" versus that it "towers ominous"); (d) Keep in mind your players' memory constraints - convey the most important info, and leave the rest to come out from the players' follow up questions.
- Troubleshooting: If you do all this but your players still seem confused, AV suggests the following strategies: (a) Three things recap - remind the players of three actionable things they see; (b) Use hand gestures - sometimes players have a hard time imagining the layout of a space in theater of the mind, so you can use hand gestures to indicate the imaginary locations (e.g. crates on the right, barrels on the left, wererat in the middle"); (c) Narrow down the options - use "A, B or something else" to suggest two clear options of what the players can do, while clearly indicating that they still have agency to take a different path; (d) Player prompts - pick a PC and prompt them with something they note based on a character-specific trait (tool, skill, language, background, class, etc.); (e) Be honest - it is okay to give above the table suggestions or ask the players pointed questions if they get stuck.
My Thoughts
while some of this is common advice (but for a reason! It is very good advice), it is all really well written - and had some ideas I'd not seen before. I really like the prompt to connect how you're describing an element to what you had originally thought might be interesting and interactive about it - that's just good information design. I also liked the idea of using the Trap Triggers table for inspiration of what an item or action might do.
After I shared this on the Discord, there have been several conversations people gave a shoutout to published products where they liked the way the creator handled descriptions and locations keys, particularly Necrotic Gnome (most especially Dolmenwood) and the work of Sersa Victory. I ran Hole in the Oak and definitely felt like it game me useful details to work with. However, the layout is focused on efficiently presenting to the DM the key elements of the location (e.g. a dungeon room) in a structured format, with bold text and bullet points. It is more that it gives you good ingredients that focus on what players can interact with, but you’ll want to turn it into a description I haven't rune one of Victory's dungeons, but have heard good things. From a flip through of Shrine of the Jaguar Princess it looks to have a similar approach of terse but structured and actionable keys. A "here are the ingredients" approach to keying probably puts the DM in a better position to apply AV's tips (especially things that are likely to be contextual, like framing the goals) than fully written out box text.
I also have the Dolmenwood campaign book and have heard really good things about its hex stocking, so I need to take some time to dig into that. I also saw that Victory has a Kickstarter for a new dungeon going on now - maybe some hoard exploring warrants a bit of hoard expanding 😄.