I’ve been advised not to call this An Angry Quickie. Apparently, that has connotations, and I don’t want another Non-Con debacle. This is somewhere between an Ask Angry and a Y’all Mind if I Rant?

Hold on. Does anyone actually give a crap what I call this? Probably not.

It’s like this. I did a thing about narrating to viewpoint characters and a reader and frequent commenter, Mike, asked how to make my advice work with box text. Now, I’ve been asked before about how to reconcile all the amazing advice I’ve given about narration over the years with box text, so I gave him the same response I always do.

You don’t; screw box text.

Apparently, that answer wasn’t good enough. I’ve been asked to expand, so expand I shall. Here’s why screw box text.

Screw Box Text

Yeah, you heard me. Box text sucks. Screw it. Don’t use it. Don’t write it. Let’s get it out of everything forever. That’s my official stance.

Y’all know what I mean by box text, right? It’s those little blurbs of set-apart text you find in the keyed entries of published modules to read aloud to your players when their characters enter a new encounter space or whatever. For example, the steaming pile of adventure included in Wizards of the Coast’s latest official Dungeons & Dragons starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands, has this block for you to recite when your players first reach the ravine in which lie the Caves of Chaos.

You pass through a dense forest of gnarled trees with grasping roots, the woods twisting as if to ward you off. Undeterred, you emerge from the tangled thicket into a stark ravine. Its rocky walls rise steeply one hundred feet or so above. Several dark cave mouths pockmark the walls at varying heights. The air is stale and quiet.

Among the rocks and dead wood that litter the ravine’s floor are the bones of animals and explorers, picked clean by scavengers. Vultures leer at you hungrily from barren branches.

Where do you want to go?

When the players start exploring, you might read other passages like this…

A twenty-foot-long tunnel leads into the cave.

…or this…

A small, bipedal reptile stands guard in this nook.

…or this…

This cave contains heaps of waste. Two giant centipedes skitter about, picking at the refuse.

That’s box text, and man does it ever suck.

Don’t misunderstand me though, it doesn’t suck because it’s badly written. As box text goes, those examples aren’t totally awful, and the module itself is actually laid out and presented better than most published modules these days. But there ends the complete list of nice things I have to say about this particular desecration of the classic module, Keep on the Borderlands.

I just wanted to make sure we all know what box text is.

Box text actually seems like a good, useful idea, right? It saves the Game Master the trouble of generating scene-setting narration on the fly and ensures the players get all the information they need about what their characters see, hear, perceive, and know. Basically, it’s idiot-proofing. Game Masters who struggle to paint good word pictures or who tend to forget to describe important details can’t ruin the scene by failing to set it right.

And yet, here I am saying that box text is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing. Even when the box text is good, it’s bad. That is, even when it’s well-written and does everything right, which the above examples absolutely don’t, I still think it needs to be burned out of every module like how you burn your ex’s face out of every picture she’s in with you. Which, by the way, I don’t recommend now that pictures are digital, because iPhone screens are expensive to fix.

I also think it’s absolutely unforgivable for homebrewer Game Masters to write box text for themselves. And if you stick around for about two thousand more words, I’ll tell you why.

When You Idiot-Proof, You Make an Idiot Out of You and Me

Let me start with my biggest personal beef with box text, even though this actually isn’t objectively its worst crime.

Box text stops the Game Master from doing one of the most skill-intensive and important parts of the whole narration gig. Recall that Game Masters have two jobs: they narrate, and they adjudicate. By raw gameplay minutes, Game Masters do more narration at the table than they do anything else. They’re constantly telling the players what the characters see, hear, perceive, and know. While the job starts with setting the scene, it also includes inviting actions, describing outcomes, delivering exposition, answering questions, and re-setting the scene every few rounds to keep the players oriented in the action.

As a Game Master, you have to carry a lot of narrative boxes, right? Well, box text is basically the module writer saying, “Wow, that looks like a lot. Let me help you,” and then grabbing one single box from the stack of ten and leaving you to schlep all the rest. It’s not like the module writer can help with any of the other boxes anyway. Every other piece of narration at the table depends on what happened immediately before it. The only thing that doesn’t depend on the action at the table is that one initial little passage of scene-setting.

Except that’s not true either. I’ll come back to that.

But so what? The scene-setting box is the biggest and heaviest box in the pile, right? It’s nice to let someone else carry it. Hell, even if it weren’t the heaviest box, it’s still nice to have any help at all. Why refuse to let someone carry one box for you if they’re offering?

Well, that’s the other part of the problem. Scene-setting is the biggest, heaviest, strongest box. Consequently, it’s the one that has to sit at the bottom of the pile. It’s foundational.

What am I yammering about? It’s like this…

When you set the scene as a Game Master, you ain’t just doing it for the players. You’re also setting the scene for yourself. You’re loading the scene into your brain. Every other bit of narration is going to follow from the players’ actions, but it’s also all getting built on the details in that first bit of scene-setting. You need those details fixed in your brain so you can keep working with them from moment to moment and action to action.

The problem is that reading a passage aloud doesn’t engage your brain the way describing a mental construct does. Many people who read things aloud barely pay attention to what they read. Most people who read a paragraph out loud can’t recall details from it afterward. See, your brain is so good at language, it can take language in through your eyes and pass it straight to your mouth without trying to actually process the ideas the language represents. You can process while you read aloud, but it’s a thing you have to learn how to do and do deliberately.

For example, I read every one of my articles aloud as part of my proofreading process. I want to make sure it reads well and catch any mistakes that I can’t count on electronic tools to spot. I’ve even taken to recording these proofreadalouds for my supporters because some of them prefer listening to reading. But I had to train myself to slow down and listen to what I was reading; otherwise I either don’t listen, which defeats the purpose, or else I gloss over the errors I’m supposed to be spotting. Every so often, I still slip up.

When you read the scene-setting narration from a box instead of constructing it yourself, you often bypass the vital step of loading the scene into your brain, which makes it easy for you to forget stuff later. Sure, you guarantee the players have all the details they need, but you’re also much less likely to have them yourself.

Beyond that, narrating is a skill. It’s a vital skill. You can’t run a game if you can’t pull narration out of your ass on the fly. Why do you think I made you do all that extemporaneous speaking homework a few weeks ago? Narrating is hard. You have to git gud at it. You need practice, and you don’t get practice if you outsource the skill. Especially if you outsource the most skill-intensive part.

And don’t bother commenting. No, box text doesn’t give you examples to read from because the skill isn’t knowing what words to say. The skill is communicating clearly, effectively, and naturally in your own words. You don’t learn creative writing by copying the entire text of A Game of Thrones into a notebook. You just get a crampy wrist.

Reading At People Bores Them

Here’s a plain, simple fact: talking to someone is more engaging than reading to them. It just is. In fact, mostly, you don’t read to people, you read at them. Now, some people are really good at reading aloud. They can actually read to people instead of at them, but it’s actually pretty rare to find someone that good at it. Hell, most people just suck at reading aloud. Ever taken an English class or sat through a Bible study? Most people are terrible at reading aloud.

Now, let me tell you a secret most of you ain’t gonna believe. The actual quality of your narration, the actual engagement you elicit, has far more to do with energy and delivery than the words you use. The plain, simple truth is that a Game Master who delivers this narration earnestly and energetically and tries to creep you out…

So you’ve been going through this thick forest for days. It’s been really hard going. But finally you’re out of the trees, and now you’re in this rocky gully thing with really high walls. You can see a bunch of caves in the walls. Some down on the ground and some high up. You can probably climb up to them. Also, there are bones everywhere. The ground is all bare and rocky, but there are all these animal bones and broken skulls all over the place. Even human skulls. The ground is like a carpet of bones. So what do you do?

Then have you recite this from the book…

You pass through a dense forest of gnarled trees with grasping roots, the woods twisting as if to ward you off. Undeterred, you emerge from the tangled thicket into a stark ravine. Its rocky walls rise steeply one hundred feet or so above. Several dark cave mouths pockmark the walls at varying heights. The air is stale and quiet.

Among the rocks and dead wood that litter the ravine’s floor are the bones of animals and explorers, picked clean by scavengers. Vultures leer at you hungrily from barren branches.

Where do you want to go?

Seriously. Try it at your table with real people. The Game Masters I’ve seen get the best compliments for setting the scene don’t talk like Billiam Shakespeare. They talk like the kids from Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

What’s even funnier is that, even though both narrators make the same crucial mistake, the players in the first instance are much less likely to get tripped up on it. I’ll bet lots of Game Masters who read that box schlock at their tables had a bunch of players staring gormlessly at them, not knowing what the hell to do without prompting.

That’s because, earnest, natural speech elicits attention. People notice more, and they retain more. When you read aloud to people, they tend to drift. Especially when there’s just too much detail.

Overstuffing the Box of Text

When it comes to narration, the biggest challenge Game Masters face is the limited attention span of every human ever. From word one of your narration, you have a very limited word count before you start losing people. Moreover, people can only keep so many details in their heads before things start getting shoved out their ear-holes to make room. The more details you add, the more the players miss, forget, or gloss over. Especially the stuff in the middle. Most people keep the most salient thing they remember, the last thing they heard, and maybe one or two small supporting details. Maybe.

That’s why you don’t bury the call to action in the middle of the scene-setting and make it the smallest, shortest sentence. You know, like, say, the caves in the walls you want people exploring. I’ll bet at least half the people who played Heroes of the Boredom Lands either started rooting through the bones or throwing rocks at the vultures.

Of course, the module writer is counting on the Game Master to just drop the map on the table so the players can just poke at cave mouths and say, “We go there.”

Anyway…

It’s easy to write too much text and overstuff it with too many details just because of the nature of writing and editing text. It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into because you read and reread text as you write it, so you don’t realize how dense it is and how hard it is to pick up on details in one verbal pass. Even I, sexy gaming genius that I am, am terrible at writing example narration. I try really hard and read it all aloud, but my example narration still doesn’t really sound like what I say at the table.

It’s actually easier to get narration right when you’re speaking it off the cuff. At least in terms of length and number of details. Especially when you realize its effectiveness is more down to delivery and energy than how good the prose is.

You see…

The Wrong Person Writes the Box Text

Remember my Hat Theory of Game Mastering? No? Come on; this shit is important.

Running a game involves three extremely different skill sets. The Game Master runs the game at the table; the Scenario Designer builds the adventures and prepares the gameplay; the Campaign Manager manages the people and the logistics to keep the game running for as many weeks, months, or years as it needs. But there’s more to this than just the skills. Each skill set also demands a different set of motivations and priorities. What matters to the Game Master is different from what matters to the Campaign Manager.

The Game Master’s number one motive is to keep the game moving and keep everyone invested, right? The Campaign Manager, meanwhile, has to maintain peaceful coexistence so the group doesn’t break up. So when a dispute breaks out, or a behavioral issue develops, the Game Master doesn’t try to solve it in play. Instead, the Game Master either tries to get past it in the moment so the Campaign Manager can deal with it later or else puts the game on hold and taps the Campaign Manager in.

I know it’s weird to think of those roles as completely different people, especially when you’re filling all three, but if you don’t, you always end up in trouble. That’s why I told you never to wear more than one hat at a time.

The Scenario Designer has enough shit to worry about when it comes to designing or preparing the gameplay and narrative experience. He’s not a narrator, and he shouldn’t be writing prose. Instead, he should pass the right details to the Game Master. “These details,” he says, “are important for gameplay and narrative reasons, and these details can be included to add context. That should let you build the narration at the table.”

That’s why the best thing a Scenario Designer can do for the Game Master is to provide a list of easy-to-parse details and game statistics and a few bullet-point contextual notes that the Game Master can skim at the table to construct narration off the cuff by speaking to the players instead of reading at them.

The Game Master knows how to narrate. That’s his job. The Scenario Designer knows information management.

But what’s the harm in letting the Game Master have the notes early, right? Why not let the Game Master take a few minutes after the Scenario Designer is done making or preparing the game to come up with pre-written scene-setting text. As long as you’re not wearing two hats at once, can’t the Game Master write his speeches in advance?

Well, he can. You can. I guess. If you really want to. But I sure wouldn’t.

Pacing, Adaptation, and Versatility

In theory, the scene-setting narration is the one bit of narration that doesn’t change, right? It happens before any gameplay, so you can fix it in stone and forget it, right? If you write it to your players, and you write it in your voice, why not write it in advance?

Because it means you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Remember what I said above about speaking to your players being more important than reading at them? Remember what I said about energy, earnestness, and delivery mattering more than the specific words you choose? Remember what I said about the Game Master’s job being about maintaining the pace and flow of the game?

You can’t do any of that shit from a script. That’s one of the reasons why the Game Master is the best game mechanic ever, and people trying to find ways to run games without Game Masters are mouthbreathing fuckwits.

Maybe the first scene in the first session of your game is going to start the same no matter what. There’s no gameplay before it. But is the second scene guaranteed to start with the tone, energy, or tension that you planned? Think about it. If scene one is a disaster and leaves the players demoralized and their characters broken and battered, scene two is going to start tense even if it’s just some rats in a cellar.

Pace, tone, and energy are things that carry from one gameplay moment to the next. They emerge and evolve through play. If the players are so tense that you could shove coal up their butts and get diamonds, do you really want to start the next encounter with a bland read like, “The twenty-foot tunnel is guarded by a reptilian humanoid with a spear?” If the players are riding high and getting a little cocky because they’ve had some victories, would you maybe want to present the dragon a little differently than if they were already beaten down?

Game Masters are at their absolute worst when you give them a script. Some stuff has to be scripted because it’s objectively worse when you try to improvise it. Gameplay challenges, for example, are always best when planned and designed in advance, whether they’re combat challenges, navigational challenges, social challenges, or whatever. Good gameplay isn’t the sort of thing you can pull out of your ass.

Energy management, pacing, performance, and direct interaction between the players and the Game Master? Those things are better when you let the expert work in the moment. And if you don’t feel like you’re enough of an expert to work the moment, there’s only one way to get there.

And it ain’t writing a script.