Know What It Smells Like

A Game Using Our Imagination
”Listening at the door, you hear a faint shuffling sound from the other side. Opening the door, your candle flickers dimly revealing what appears to be an empty room. You sense the air is cool, almost frosty on your skin, and there may be the faintest odor of decay. What happens next?”
The referee in a role-playing game acts as the senses for the player characters in that what they see, hear, feel, smell and even taste is described by the referee. In order to bring the setting alive for the players it is necessary for the referee to have a good sense of what their world is like. Whether the action is set in a dark underground or a rugged wilderness, the ability of the players to imagine, and to engage with, the setting depends heavily on the language clues they receive from their referee. Too much information can be worse than not enough for it may matter little whether the grain of the wooden planks making up the iron-bound door suggests they were milled from old growth timber. Paragraphs of text read aloud by the referee seldom enhance the game experience for players, unless the object is to lull them into inattention.
In order to describe what the players see, hear, smell, etc. it helps to imagine these things yourself. I like to spend some time thinking about the location, drawing from memories and making a few notes to myself about those imaginings. Just a few well chosen descriptive words can usually do the job of suggesting a mental image. I try to avoid comparisons such as “It’s just like in the movie...” Rather I spend just a few moments thinking about the most salient aspects of the image I am going for and using those words to convey the idea I am going for. It’s okay if everyone at the table imagines a slightly different thing. The important thing is that they all draw a mental image which helps bring the game to life for them.
Enthusiasm for the game, mastery of the rules and an intimate familiarity with the setting are the traits I look for most in a referee. It is easy to answer questions about a setting we can imagine in detail. It is easy to improvise when we are comfortable with our understanding of the world. By doing this, we allow our players the freedom to try new things and to even explore beyond where the maps end, which can be as much fun for us as referees as it is for our players.
It has been my experience that most people who play role-playing games have a pretty active imagination. They readily imagine their character, the companions alongside their character and the situations, creatures and environments suggested by the referee’s narrative. By knowing our world well, by giving some advance thought to our choice of words and by keeping our referee descriptions brief, we can let those player imaginations do their share of the work in bringing our game world to life.