The DM barely describes the surrounding environment

>The DM barely describes the surrounding environment

>Player rolls the dice, after checking the result declares the action.

I might suffer from this problem. What would you say is needed?

More description. Duh.

Environment helps to: create atmosphere, incentive creative thinking and help immersion.

Is also vital for spacial fighting. Knowing the location of everyone in respect to one another is a very necessary narrative need, even in things like movies and books.

Regarding descriptions more is always better and things don't come from nothing, detail adds to the history of the place, so players can infer a lot of information from them

>"There's a table, looks old and the wood is cheap. Is cover by the corpses of countless cigarettes, some of them, half finished"

>>Player rolls the dice, after checking the result declares the action.
I always say what I'm going to do, roll dice, and then expand a bit more based on the result.

That's fine...
...Rollin' and waiting for a good result to say what are you supposedly rollin' for is not.

Did you ask for more detail and explain why it would be beneficial to have it?

-how it helps with planning
-how it helps with immersion which makes it easier to role play
-how it can help you feel more invested in the setting and the thing and people in it?

That usually works for me.

>Player still doesn't know what his character can do after a few sessions

>"There's a table, looks old and the wood is cheap. Is cover by the corpses of countless cigarettes, some of them, half finished"

I'd argue that this is just pointless unless your players are just craving a narrative voice for some reason. The table is old and flimsy. Done.

My players constantly gripe about me explaining too much stuff. The best approach, I've found, is to just give minimal info on any given place and make them ask for details. Then you can expand upon what's there and how it can be a hindrance or useful to them. That way, you don't describe a room full of life and your players end up leaving ten seconds in because they stepped into the wrong bar, making your narration a waste of time or a wankfest depending on if you said your DM waifu was in the corner.

>Not using it to know the place is in state of disrepair and think what kind of person who inhabits it

You can learn a lot from those kinds of details.

>what is asking questions to collaborate with the gm
you're probably the type of player who wants to know how likely you are to succeed at doing something your special snowflake way before declaring your action
yuck

You are probably the kind of shithead who thinks narrating is just bringing stats to the table

>>what is asking questions to collaborate with the gm
Annoying if you have to do it too much. It's like pulling teeth.

>gm
>narrating
>stars
what are you talking about nigga?

fair. assumes a gm who knows how to seed a description and can run with it eloquently

Outside D&D many ttrpgs are a collaborative storytelling, with dice to settle creative differences, so , you know, the DM narrates many of the scenes and the players respond to that

k. so what about the part where the gm just brings stats to the table

Without flavor and narration the Dm is reduce to the guy with the stats for the monsters, traps, NPC, the maps, etc.

He might as well be a machine making randomly generated dungeons.

>DM puts work into the story and all your attempts at dialogue with npcs are sidelined by a player who's impatient and always rushing you to the next encounter like it's a video game.

>You can learn a lot from those types of details

Are you playing a detective game? Because otherwise, these things are completely irrelevant past their immediate use to the players. I have never in my life met a player who was so autistic that they tried to deduce what kind of person would live in a place by the stuff in a room from the minutest of details rather than waiting for the GM to reveal said character.

>NPC don't have personalities

>Player doesn't know what their character can do before coming

You might not realized but inferring thing by details of our environments is something that we humans are really good at doing, since you don't have visual input in a game you need to compensate that with description,.

Or use images so the players can see what you are picturing in your head, that works too.

That is exactly what your GM is

No, my actually likes descriptions and fluff.

*mine

The whole point is to not do it unless you're asked to because otherwise you are wasting the time of the entire group with shit they don't want/need to know. If it's not the important thing, then why describe it to them. If they don't ask, then they didn't care enough in character to commit it to memory.

It's not uncommon to just ignore things that don't matter to you in real life. Not asking what's around you in a TTRPG is the same thing; your character just didn't care enough to commit anything to memory or pay attention.

It's a valuable time-saving technique.

Use at least 3 senses to describe each scene.
It’s not just about what is seen but add in sound and smell for a lot of benefit.

>describe room
>players try to MacGyver any possible way to trivialize an encouter
>throw shitfits when it does not work perfectly or just does not succeed
What do?

That's called having criteria, and balancing description with time efficiency.
This, of course, is subjective as every DM and every gaming group is different, and have different needs.
The original complain was BARELY describing environments, not about describing itself. When someone says "You enter a room" and stops there is a problem, and at the same magnitude as the one you expose.

Fantasy storytelling is fine; I'm actually for it. Your GM is literally an encounter-producing machine though, when boiled down to his/her basest components. They're the setting with a voice and prod you in the right direction most times. All storytelling and stuff like that is just flavor; admittedly necessary for a good, engaging game, but not necessary itself.

Punish them repeatedly with failure until they realize that they're not going to get their way and need to adapt to situations as they arise. Having a group of dumb ninjas is like trying to babysit cats; it's not fun and nobody wins.

Did the not succeeded because you didn't let them do it? Stop being so close-minded and enjoy the thinking outside the box, don't make them insta fail if they try something new.

Did they not succeeded because of shitty dice rolling? Tell them to worship a better God.

I guess I play with a group that wants more game and less story, then. We have a great time now that I only tell them things when they ask, so we found our medium.

There's games that don't have encounters, sometimes a DM is just an arbitrator.

Do you mean games with no combat?

And not NPCs either. The world of indie games is big and strange.

>Your GM is literally an encounter-producing machine though
Eh, I mean, sure... in some sense a DM is just a machine that throws ninjas at the party, rolls for NPC's attacks, and resolves rules disputes.

In some sense you could also say that a human being is a machine that eats, sleeps and shits. You wouldn't be WRONG, exactly... it just feels like you've maybe missed something essential to the whole experience, y'know?

>Start describing environment
>Player interrupts midway through asking about something I've mentioned but haven't finished describing

the more you can tell me about my surroundings, the more clever i can be when i inevitably have to macguyver my way through a situation.

it isn't my fault nobody has bothered to take the time to explain how the fuck my spells work

i do it all the time because if i don't then i'm gonna get a very unpleasnat surprise when the guy suddenly appears and shots my party in the face.

shit, first one was quoting the wrong post, sorry

Oh my fuck I want to choke my one player for this. Jesus Christ. He's a great guy, but I swear I'm going to get an airsoft gun to shoot into his thigh whenever he does this to me.

>GM describes the environment
>players spend 30 IRL minutes poking whatever has been described and making checks to see if they see/know/feel anything

This is the shit I hate, as a GM.

It does nothing for anyone. You just waste time. And as hard it is to wrangle you people into the same room for more than half an hour, it makes me want to shoot myself between the eyes.

It's how you can tell who's had shit DMs who trapped everything and used some version of the death room/

>Players already have their optimized Pissis(Pcs) TM already made.
>None has food rations
>None has survival skills
>None knows how to hunt or preserve food
>No spells to create food or water, only psion can gather humidity with custom power.
>It's a fucking wasteland campaign, we've been warned multiple tiems.

>Fuckers starve to death or suffer food poisoning from eating weird monsters without going dungeon meshi about it
>DM laughs his ass off
>I share all the food and supplies that I can afford
>Ditch niggas once I feel I would no longer be able to feed myself reliably.
>My alignment is TN
>Be called a traitor
>Only the DM gives me pizza, the rest try to stop me somewhat from grabbing a slice.
>DM gives the party fighter the overmodule
>Says that they'll figure it out in two weeks
>It's been two months.

I don't have any rude words to describe my feels.

"GM what's the setting"
>You're in a keep
"What type of architechture?"
>Idk, like...a Keep. you see stone and wood
"Okay..I would like to ask the nearest person where the mess hall is"
>You're in it
"What's it look like?"
>A mess hall

>player gets mad at something you do in character
>alright I'm casting (spell) targeting (person antagonising him)
>What's the save? what's your roll to hit?
>-says number-
>player picks up eraser
>LOL I was just kidding bro learn to take a joke bro

Every single session, 2 or 3 times.

>I always say what I'm going to do, roll dice
You roll when I fucking tell you to.

Tell them that no, you’re not meant to interact with the world, this is a tactical boardgame we are playing and you will play each of my precious perfectly balanced encounters in a bare white room. What do they think you are, flexible? Creative?

>player complains about DM describing environment

They have every right to try, and you should let them try if they want to. That doesn't mean that they should be expected to succeed. The result could be too trivial of a bonus to have been worth the effort, or it could even have been counterproductive and end up hurting them. If they expect an auto-win that's just as bad as the GM not letting them try.

I would just describe an old and flimsy table.

If someone were to inspect to investigate the table closer, I would then go into detail about the cigarette butts and the quality of the wood etc.

>DM gives out premade characters for an unfamiliar system. Wont let players read up on what their character's skills do as that is 'rule lawyering'.

>DM NEVER mentions surroundings.
>Suddenly describes in great detail a giant statue in the treasure room we are raiding.
>When we nuke the statue from a distance, he asks, "How did you know it was a golem?"

>DM sits on the rule books like a goblin and refuses to let the players see them, as only the DM should know the rules.

I'm guilty of this, I can't into rich, colourful descriptions, especially on the fly, and I consider it one of my biggest GM flaws

>Player rolls the dice without anyone asking him to roll for anything and expects the result he made up completely by himself to be what's actually happening

>Level 1, first "dungeon"
>My character comes from non-magical background, knowing very little about magic other than it exists and can preform miracles
>Castle setting in which EVERY statue/suit of armor we encounter springs to life
>My character becomes wary of statues from here on out, in an adventure setting he will take precautions occaisonally like tying up the legs of one or removing a weapon from its grasp
>DM asks me OOC "Why do you keep doing that"

I declare the action
>I attack x target
Then I roll the dice and wait for the dm to tell me hit or miss
Hit
>I lunge at the foe, knocking aside his jagged axe with a savage strike and slashing him across the top of his leg with my sword, where he has no armor
Miss
>I try to batter aside the brutal looking axe to find a chance to strike at the foe, but his strength is great and no matter how many times our weapons clash, neither can gain the upper hand
Critical is up to the DM
I don't play crit fails they are fucking stupid

What am I? A trained cat?
Do my actions require your consent massa? O lawdy lawd thanksya fo' lettin' me be a part of yo' story suh

Nah it's more that half the time rolling is unnecessary. Half the time one of my player rolls it's for stuff I wouldn't make him roll for in the first place.

ᵒʰ
That's weird. I overreacted. Sorry senpai

>tfw want to do heaps of autistic worldbuilding and shit but don't know how to actually play dnd

You should really only be rolling in situations where there's a margin for error or some kind of narrative result from ambiguity. In situations where things are fast/grow dire then more rolls would increase the tension, but in less stressful scenarios without much at stake, assuming the players take 10 or 20 is fine. It's typically more that if you want to use your skills, speak up, but it's up to the DM to decide if it's needed.

>That's weird. I overreacted.
Like 50% of conflicts on Veeky Forums stems from posters assuming the worst possible intent in everything they read and replying accordingly. So no, not weird.

You don't really need to be all that rich and colorful, as long as you go a bit beyond "a forest", "some houses" "a tunnel", etc. Just take a moment to think about what specific kind of environment it is; Are the houses big or small? What are they made of? How many floors?

>what type of architecture?
>is the mess hall open concept?
this ain't HGTV nigga

Actions are not the same as rolls, idiot.

So good of you to contribute your opinion to a matter that has already been resolved.

I feel like more description is warranted besides "it's a mess hall" or "it's a keep".

That's when the Macho Man comes to visit. 'Cause you never knOW WHERE THE MACHO MAYUN IS COMIN' FROOOOMMM!!!

>"You're suddenly hit from behind by a massive elbow drop 'cause you rushed in and didn't check those corners, nigga."

>it isn't my fault nobody has bothered to take the time to explain how the fuck my spells work
There's a book that tells you. Fucking read it.

The hall has very widely spaced archways separating long wooden feast tables with attached benches. On the left-hand side of the room you see a serving area with a row of wood-fired ovens filled with black cauldrons that continuously simmer and produce an aroma rich with leek and mushroom. There is probably also beef. Several soldiers are seated at the tables, each attending to the noon day meal, only one is paying any attention to you. You see he has an emblem denoting a higher rank on his pauldron.

>Try to describe something to players, it quickly becomes a 'negotiation' as with all things, as the players try to make the situation even more favorable to themselves
>Punish PCs until players learn
Never works. Never ever. I don't know why, but the basics of reinforcement learning fall apart at the table.
Wash your hands and get your best moisturizer out, your players need some handies.