Interesting video from Joseph R. Lewis. I’m in agreement that good read aloud text makes things easier for me as a GM. Although, I would have liked to hear more about how to craft it. Especially in regards to rooms with multiple entrances. How do you write read aloud text when the perspective may differ depending on where you are in the room?
Curious to hear others’ thoughts on the subject. I know it can be a polarizing topic.
I didn’t watch the video. (I don’t waste my time with videos. If somebody has something interesting to say, they can offer a printed version so I can read it more quickly than they can ever hope to say it. I’m not going to waste time on waiting for them to speak.) With that disclaimer out of the way…
I hate most read-aloud text. Very rarely is it ever well-written. A part of my prep when using published modules has always been reading the room descriptions so I can describe the first impressions on my own. I’ve become a fan of the new approach of highlighting key descriptors only, so the GM can describe using their own words.
And the material I’m working on to share will also only offer keyword descriptions.
Thanks for sharing, it’s a very clear video and worth watching for examples on what makes for a usable GM resource at the table.
I really like Joseph’s example of how he does read-aloud text. To me it doesn’t look anything like what I picture when I think of read-aloud text, usually I think of something like the text in the D&D module examples.
I also appreciate his consideration of what extra work is put onto the GM by the different methods of room descriptions. For me read-aloud text helps at the table by having something I know I can read out that won’t accidentally reveal something that isn’t immediately knowable to the PCs. Good read-aloud text should make the scene clear to both the players and the GM, with the formatting showing the GM what is important. Even if they don’t read the text verbatim all of the important points of interest are made very clear.
With rooms that have multiple entrances in mind, my first thought is to establish the position of points of interest by cardinal directions. e.g. a statue in the center of the northern wall, a stream of water running east to west, etc. The GM then might want to convert those to relative descriptions on the fly.
I grabbed the YouTube transcript of the video and tidied it up a bit so that those of us who don’t like videos can also engage:
Hi, I’m Joseph R. Lewis and I write adventures. And my adventures include readaloud text. Now, read aloud text is something that a lot of people have thoughts and feelings about. It’s been around for a while. Some people use it, some people don’t. So, I wanted to take a moment to talk about what it is and why I choose to use it the way I do.
So, first off, what am I saying when I say readaloud text? And it is literally what it sounds like. It is text that the GM reads aloud to the players at the table. so some people like this, some people value this, some people hate this.
Why do we have so many feelings? Well, read aloud text comes to us from the beginning of the hobby 40 plus years ago and it takes a couple of different forms. I think a lot of folks have certain feelings about it because in the earlier times read aloud text was fairly long fairly verbose somewhat artistic and flowery purple prosy if you will and it took time to read. It was kind of slow and boring and it felt a little bit like the adventure writer was trying to be a novel writer in the middle of the adventure. So a lot of folks didn’t like that and don’t like that to this day.
from earlier and today and talk about how they are used and what they’re for and why I feel the way I do about readaloud text.
So here we have an example from the village of Hommlet. This is an example of the introductory text which the GM is meant to read aloud to the players. As we can see it is three very dense paragraphs. It’s at least 300 words if not more. Which is going to take the GM probably anywhere from one to two solid minutes of just continuous talking to put out there.
And of course, all GMs at the beginning of an adventure probably set the scene and they do a lot of talking on their own. But this is a lot of what the writer thought the tone should be, which is okay, but this is a lot of talking for the GM to do right up front. And if this was to be repeated throughout the adventure every time there was a set piece or a special location or even for every room, I think we can all see why this would bog things down, be a little bit tiresome, and why people would sort of tune out and start looking at their phones if they had phones 40 years ago. waiting for their time to actually start playing.
So, this is where it comes from. This is the beginning of readaloud text. very dense, not as helpful as it could be. good at setting a tone and a and a feeling, but maybe not the the best use of everyone’s time at the table. Here we have an example of text from later in that same adventure, Village of Hommlet. these are several room descriptions, and here we can see we do not have readaloud text. What we have is just text for the GM. it’s just a description of what’s going on in the room.
Now, this sort of swings in the opposite direction from having all that readaloud text. This is just for the GM. So when the players come to say room 9, the littered room, the GM needs to pause and say, “Okay, one sec. Let me see what’s in this room.” And then I need to read this whole paragraph to myself quietly because this is not readaloud. and I need to parse. Okay, it’s empty. It’s dirty. there’s no signs of the occupant. There’s a rat. it used to be a conference room. I don’t need that. there’s nothing of value here except there’s a sword. It’s behind a wallcase whose contents are empty. Okay. Wait, wait. At first it said the room was empty. Now it says there’s a wall case. I’m not I don’t know if that means a bookcase or something else. But now there’s a sword behind a wallcase.
So that is what’s important. It was right at the end. So now I need to get a picture in my head. There’s a room. It’s mostly empty. There’s a rat. There is a wall case, whatever that is. And there’s a sword behind it. So now I need to say to my players, okay, there’s an empty room and you see a wall case. And they say, “Oh, what’s in the wall case?” And I say, “Nothing.” Then they say, “Oh, I want to investigate more.” And then they find the broadsword.
All that took time and energy on my part, the GM’s part, to parse this text, get a picture in my head, and then convey something to the players and then we can start interacting and actually playing. And we we can also see here in this example, this text is in no way structured. It’s just a paragraph of flat text. So nothing is bolded or italics. There’s no bullet points. So I I need to read all of it to figure out what’s important structured in my mind. so this is another example of the way text can be presented and the work that it puts on the GM to read and manage that text at the table.
Still looking at village of Hommlet. This is text of a house, one of the first locations that the players will see when they come to the village. And we can see this is a huge paragraph of information. And again, this is not readaloud. So this is something that the GM needs to pause when the players walk up to location number one and read all of this text, parse it in some fashion. Again, nothing is called out. The first half is not bullet bolded and the second half is bolded. so I know that the first half is more upfront information. The second half is more after the fact stuff that they will find out through exploration and interaction.
But again, I need to sit and I need to read all of these lines. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 lines of text of dense information tracking on what these buildings are, what the people are, what the animals are, what is it the players can see when they first walk up and then I need to say that out loud to my players hopefully in a useful and interesting manner and then they’ll start asking me questions and then I need to go back to this text and I need to find what it is they’re asking about and interact with the text and my players back and forth. So I think again this is putting a lot of work on the GM at the table to parse the text and be an interesting you know moderator of the events.
So let’s jump forward in time and we’ll take a look at this guy. This is from Lost Mine of Phandelver. This is a more modern this is a 5e game. and here we have the introductory read aloud text. and we can see right here in the little description to the GM it says read the box text when you’re ready to start. So once again, the GM is going to just read this introduction. and again, at the beginning of an adventure, that’s not terrible. It’s helping to set the scene and set the tone and get everyone started and get everyone to settle in and pay attention to the adventure and start playing together. That’s okay.
But this style of presenting a lot of text to be read aloud is going to be repeated all throughout the adventure. So, are they going to do it in a way that’s helpful to the GM or not so helpful? Let’s see.
So we come to one of the first locations. This is number three. There’s a kennel. so we have a title says kennel. Then there’s a piece of text which is not readaloud which says the Cragmaws keep a kennel. Well that seems somewhat obvious where they’re keeping wolves. Then I have the readaloud text which is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 lines of of a fairly wide block of text. It’s got to be at least 50 words if not more. and it’s a description of everything that we’re seeing and smelling and hearing in this room with the kennels, with the wolves, which is nice for setting the scene. but it’s a lot of stuff going on.
And then we have more text in paragraph form under that I, the GM, are am going to need to take on board and then parse in order to interact with the players. So, once they go into this room, they start interacting with wolves. I need to read out, “do the goblins care about the sounds of the wolves?”, “How do the wolves react?” And I’m parsing and I’m parsing. How do the characters do an animal handling check? I’m parsing. I’m parsing.
Then we come down at the very bottom. You can see the word fissure is bolded and italicized. It’s called out because that’s an important feature in the room. What is that referring to? Well, if we look back up in this block of readaloud text, the word fissure is in there. It’s in the third line, the middle of the line. It’s not bolded or underlined or anything. So, if I was reading this out loud to my players during play, I probably am not paying attention to the word fissure. I’m probably focusing on these wolves. That seems important.
But now, I’m hoping that the players are going to ask about, “Hey, what was that fissure you mentioned?” I might not remember. I was reading all this stuff. I was trying to keep track of all the wolves because that seemed like like it’s the most important thing. It hasn’t been called out to me, the GM, that the fissure is going to be important. So, if I miss down here that the fissure is important, this is an access to another part of the of the location of the dungeon.
So a lot of information is being presented. it’s not highly structured. I’m being given a lot of work as the GM of what to read, but also what I need to parse internally so I can function and interact with my players. So again, I think this is a similar problem of giving the GM a lot of information that’s not well structured. I need to do a lot of thinking and reading and parsing at the table in order to interact with the players and keep the game going.
So let’s keep jumping forward in time and looking at some more examples. This is from Winter’s Daughter, Old School Essentials. And here we have an entirely different presentation of information. it’s highly structured. almost nothing here is written in a complete sentence. so let’s see how interactive this is.
So I come to a room called the Hall of Hounds. And the first thing I see are high level. I see there are pillars, two stone hounds and double doors. Under that I have bolded text. So things like the relief carvings or the the hounds are chained, the double doors are massive and stone. And then under that I have the parenthetical text which is not bolded. So I have scenes of holy war which are on the carvings which are on the pillars. the chains are at the base of the door connected to the stone hounds.
So, I have much more structured information. What I don’t have here, though, is something that ties it together in a more coherent way. So, when my players walk into the room, once again, I need to read all of this structured text, get a picture in my head, and then figure out how do I present that to my players? What do they see first versus what are they going to discover through exploration and interaction?
So this is more helpful in some ways, I think, than the huge wall of text of of paragraphs that we saw earlier. But I think it presents a similar challenge because the GM still has to sit with this text, parse it, and then figure out what do I say now versus what do I say later when they interact. and I think all of those pauses is stressful to a GM. I get anxiety at the table when I’m trying to do a good job and be fun and entertaining and not make a mistake within the the text of the adventure. So, there are a lot of challenges here.
I think this is an improvement in some ways, but I think it introduces another aspect of the same challenge of the work the GM has to do at the table.
Here’s our next example. This is from Shadowdark’s Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. this is room number one. and once again we see highly structured information which I think is very good. we have at the very top information about walls and red pillars. it’s not quite full sentences but closer to full clauses maybe. so that’s very helpful. And then all the information is called out in greater detail in the bullets below. I love that. but once again we we don’t have something that ties it together neatly.
So, similar to the OSE text, I need to as the GM at the table read all of this, decide what I’m going to present up front, what I’m going to have the players discover in secondary fashion, and then what is actually going to come out of my mouth. How do I how am I going to say these words in an interesting manner to try to be engaging.
So, again, well structured, which is fantastic, I think. I love bullets. I love bolding. anything that helps the eye to move around the page and figure out how the text is connected and what is important versus what is less important.
I just want to interrupt my own video real quick wearing a completely different shirt because it’s been brought to my attention since I made this video that the Arcane Library and Kelsey have updated the way they write their adventure text.
So we’re looking at the Minotaur. That’s from an earlier adventure. So take a look at this. This is from Cursed Scrolls 3. this is Horde of the Seawolf King adventure. and you can look right here at this first location and we have complete sentences that describe the setting and where things are in relation to each other.
Kelsey was very clear with me that this is not box text. but this is player-facing text which I think you pretty much just read to the players like it’s read aloud. so I think this is great. It’s a great update. I like it very much. and now back to the real video.
Here’s an example from my upcoming adventure, the lovely Jade Necropolis. and here we have a simple location, the shallow cave. This is outside the necropolis proper. and there is a small block of readaloud text. I try to keep mine under 30 words if I can because I think it should be short. No one wants to be bored listening to a bunch of talk. but as you can see, it is a bit structured. There’s stuff that is bolded and underlined. So, the GM knows at the table what they’re going to have to care about and what is provided more information at the bottom.
But again, I’m giving the GM something to say right off the cuff. they don’t need to read and parse and then figure out what to say and then say it. I’m giving them what to say. so they and the players can immediately move into interacting with the scene.
So if the players say we want to go to the shallow cave, the GM can then very easily turn the page and say, “Okay, you see a rocky cave. It extends into a dusty hillside. there’s some crushed bones carpeting the floor. There’s two hyenas lying in the back and they’re nursing their cubs and you see a bloody human head in between them. What do you do?”. And that way all of the information that should be presented up front is the GM doesn’t have to do any extra work. They can just start reading it. And again, I didn’t read it verbatim. I was just calling out what seems to be important in the sequence that was presented in the text.
So, it doesn’t take away my ability as a GM to give it my flavor and my flare or whatever it may be, to give pauses and be dramatic or do funny voices. But what it does is it tells me what I need to focus on. and it gives me an outline or it just gives me the literal thing. I can just read it verbatim if I need to. So, I can do a little bit less work up front. I’m presenting the scene. I’m making sure that the GM isn’t going to leave anything out because I’ve called out everything that’s important.
And then when the players start to interact and explore with the scene, then we can jump down into the bullet points. and I, the GM, can say, "Oh, you care about the hyenas. Well, the hyenas are they’re awake. Oh, yeah. They can see you. They’re and they’re hungry. They’re starting to growl. They’re interacting. oh, that head. Oh, yeah. Pick it up. Oh, it’s a it’s a woman’s head. Has dark hair. Oh, I’m sorry. You wanted to cast talk with dead. Oh, sure. this woman, her eyes open. Her name is Tissa. and she explains that she was on her way to the Jade Palace to explore its many shrines. we could interact with that.
So I think my takeaway from my thoughts and exploration of readaloud text is that there are some extremes and people have extreme feelings about that. You can have tons of text which is not structured which gives the GM work to parse all the text, figure out what’s important or not create basically bullet points in their head, figure out what to say first what to say second, what is important what is not important which I think is more burden on the GM it’s giving them work to do I’m sure a lot of the times folks are sitting with their text before the game with a highlighter looking for what’s important trying to figure out before they on their game, which is not fun. That’s more work.
Versus swinging the other way to highly structured text, which has lots of bullets and bolding and underline, but that doesn’t tie it together in a narrative way. So, once again, the GM needs to read all that structured text, figure out what’s important, what isn’t, what to present, and how to present it.
And where I’ve landed with my last example here of how I write my adventure text is to provide a very small amount of readaloud text which structures what’s important and what’s not and then allows everyone to proceed and interact without trying to give the GM extra information or extra work at the table or extra work away from the table prepping for the adventure. I’m trying very hard to give you guys adventure text that you can just sit down and run without having seen it, without having prepped as much as possible.
So, that’s the information that I’ve been thinking about in developing my style. and obviously, there’s no right answer here. There’s no one true way. you may like a huge amount of text. You may like having a lot of great prose that presents the information. You may like highly structured text that doesn’t have any of that. where you can just look through for things that you find important or interesting. or you could find a middle way sort of like mine.
But I think it’s important to understand what your options are and why people feel the way they feel about those different options. and it’s always important to make a choice that is conscious and informed. So when you sit down to do your writing, plan your adventure. Think about what your options are for readaloud text or non-readalow text. and make the choice that you feel is right for you, for your adventure, for your style of play. I think that’s all that’s really important. I think you’ll do a great job if you think it through and work hard. So, that’s all my advice for right now for read aloud text. So, good luck out there.
To be fair this is the “Videos” section of the forum. It’s odd that the first response was “I didn’t watch the video and I don’t like videos”.
Agreed, especially because the commentary that follows is wildly off base because it fails to take any nuance into account.
I share a similar opinion to you as well, I’ve dissected Joseph’s adventures in the past because of just how great his approach to read aloud is. His work changed my opinion about read aloud in general, where now I prefer it if it is handled like he does where it is highly optimized for play first. My analysis of his approach is that he is trying to do the following things:
Compare that to a TSR module, or something like DCC and you understand how wildly different of an approach it is. It’s all the things I like about the bulleted approach with the first step of an easily grab-able description added on top. I can run his adventures with almost no pre-work and feel comfortable doing it. When I am well prepared, it jogs my memory and helps me improvise on top if necessary.
I’ve said it before, but after reading and running Joseph’s work, it has changed the way I produce my own. I highly suggest people take what he is saying seriously.
Thanks for that.
So, somehow readaloud text is something different than readaloud text. And somehow the info in that readaloud text is easier to digest and use than bullet points or the like, despite involving more words and reading. I’m quite happy to see that he does express it as an individual style choice.
As for criticism about it being a video category post and me complaining about such: mea culpa. I don’t pay much attention to the categories and respond to post titles; I’ll work on fixing that in the future.
Shawn Merwin wrote a great article on this. It’s got clear tips with excellent examples. I’d highly recommend checking it out.
I really like this style of room descriptions, Yochai’s Cairn adventures use this style, too. It’s easy to read at the table and extend with detail and flavour.
Writing in this way passively encourages the author to design interactive and gameable rooms. They have to consider how GMs highlight important elements and how players ultimately interact with those elements to uncover hidden information.
Yes, Village of Hommlet readaloud is very different than Lovely Jade Necroplis readaloud. His approach is about putting less load on the GM than both old style readaloud and a bullet list do. His goal is to be able to run the adventure with little-to-no prep.
After running Gradient Descent where I’m having to interpret some things on-the-fly, this looks like a breath of fresh air in my opinion.
I am a big fan of read-a-loud, both in designing adventures and running them. I find bullet point style room descriptions hard to GM (pushes me to read like Frankenstein, “Room smell vinegar, door north, floor wood”). Plus it makes reading the adventures unrewarding. As for sitting down and writing bullet point style? Feels so powerpoint-y and anti-fun. Gross.
MAIN THING I WANT TO ADD: read-a-loud is a way for the author to bleed into the game space, and I think that greatly enhances the experience (even if the writing is bad, then its like playing in a B movie!). Helps immersion, because the author is creating something “in world” that you send directly to the players. I love that it’s not my voice, it’s a message from the great beyond.
So I am generally a fan of Joseph and his work. I also agree with much of what he says in this video about keying generally … but I disagree with his conclusions on read aloud.
That is I don’t like read aloud text, I think it most often leads to bad results, precisely because of some of the things that Joseph believes are an issue with referee text.
Generally read-aloud text leads to a lack of “parsing” by the referee. The referee doesn’t come to the game with an understanding of the space - they are often getting it at the same time as the players and likely in a less useful order (because the read aloud text usually aims to be fun to read). The main issue is that the referee won’t be as engaged with the room.
Second when presented the read aloud text is not presented in the referee’s voice - it isn’t going to match what the referee understands of the room. The referee may miss things they have described making them ill prepared for player questions. While a referee may also miss things in a referee text key … but in that case the element will simply be missing. That may cause problems, but usually it doesn’t.
All that said - I am generally not a huge fan of the way bullet points are often used today, they are minimalism and while that works for some environments - it tends to breakdown with more complex environments.
So in the end my keys tend to look a lot like Joseph’s read aloud. Structured with bolded key elements and follow up paragraphs. I also aim to provide phrases and descriptions that include a few lush details the referee can use in their descriptions.
Otherwise there’s good keying advice here.
I see that as a feature. The players and GM kinda do a mini collab interrogating the text, which I think helps immersion. Like everyone in the room is grasping at the same imaginative space.
When it is straight GM to players, sometimes, it kinda pops me out of immersion. Like, instead of it coming from a shared imagined world, its just… BOB. Oh, BOB is describing the room this way to trick us, or BOB wants us to find this one clue.
In terms of missing things… yea, that’s true. But with minimalist keying, the GM can accidentally add details that mess with the room intent, which I think is worse. Like you are parsing this text, and trying to make it sound human, trying to get the players involved, and you are already decorating the text to try to convert it into verbal language, and whoops, you add a detail that ruins the trap.
I see that as a feature. The players and GM kinda do a mini collab interrogating the text, which I think helps immersion. Like everyone in the room is grasping at the same imaginative space.
There’s no situation when everyone at the table isn’t though. The location exists as described by the referee. My point is that when the referee is describing it in their own words (including borrowing pithy or evocative phrases they like from the description) they are likely to have a better grasp of the space. A read aloud is easy to gloss through, to not really understand and to be unprepared for. I also just generally think that referee control is superior to designer control at a given table - if the table and the referee work well together then the referee’s voice is the one that will best capture the story of the game. This is I suspect where we have our “disagreement” (quotes because I don’t think it’s an objective issue - more one of choice).
But with minimalist keying, the GM can accidentally add details that mess with the room intent, which I think is worse.
Here I think there’s more to be said but the basic distinction here to me is the issue of “minimalist keying” - generally I find minimalist keying insufficient in most situation. I think Joseph agrees here from the video. The concern here appears to be a more general one of poor key design - minimalism will always require the referee to make additions. A key that says “Room 1. Orc Hole - 3 Orcs, trapped box of toys” is going to be an issue that the referee must solve … what does the hole look like (dripping dirt walls? dry and sandy etc?) more important - what kind of trap and how? what sort of toys. A good designer will add more of course … but a good designer will also balance that, because too much description is confusing. Good keying (read aloud or not) depends on providing description where it’s useful to the referee (generally where it provide wonder or involves interactive aspect of the location).
I’m not the biggest fan of read-aloud text either. Just because it always feels wrong to have someone’s else words in my mouth. Everybody stops paying attention immediately. You need to be alive, have eye contact, hand motion, etc to keep connected to the people at the table.
However, I like what these texts offer you. Elements to describe and paint in details. The format is the problem. I much prefer a list of bullet points that let me easily jam to my style.
Haven’t watched the video, but will tonight. I love this series.
I suspect that the difference is how much a GM enjoys reading aloud.
I like having someone else’s words in my mouth. And I don’t find that I miss a detail while reading aloud, as opposed to the situation where I am faced with the added cognitive load of creating sentences out of bullet points and hints.
For reference, I have been reading aloud to my kids now for 17 years. My youngest is 13 and I still read aloud for a half hour every night, we just moved onto adult material (reading Phillip K Dick right now, we even did House of Leaves as a bit we committed to). So maybe I am more of an exception… but in a way, my thinking here is that if that is the case, I would just encourage everyone to read aloud more because its great! We also just did all of Earthsea, which is most likely better aloud than in brain.
Rooms with different entrances?! Well, most of my rooms would be described the same way regardless of how you entered: “There are interesting walls, and three interactive objects, and a creature gnawing a bone in the corner.” I think it would have to be an unusually complex room for the direction of entrance to really impact the description.