Trust me, the title is not as pretentious as it seems.

When you build a scene for the players as a DM, you're describing something, but you want to do more than just inform them of data. You want to evoke some emotional reaction from them. To an extent this is done with colorful dungeon tiles, as seen on many web pages. I've seen some beautifully colored pools of blood, waterfalls, traps, etc. Certainly miniatures help in this as well. But no matter how good your visual props are, DnD is primarily a mental game. The visual props help for figuring range, Attacks of Opportunity, etc, but they aren't the feel of the game. DnD is not, and never will be, a board game.

What do you describe to the players? The easiest thing to do is to hit the five senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. That's the first thing you teach grammar school kids to do when writing a descriptive paragraph. But that's a threshhold, not an accomplishment. You don't want every encounter area to have a five-point checklist. In many areas, one or more of the five senses may be pointless. What I'm driving at here is that the descriptions are a means to an end, and not an end in and of themselves.

Case is point: An outdoor adventure. There is certainly plenty to see and hear. What can those images evoke? Tell the PCs that they hear an eagle cry, then secretly roll a d20 for a knowledge nature check (perhaps DC 10, like my previous column?). Then you tell the druid (or whoever made the check) that there aren't any eagles within 100 miles of this place. What's the player's reaction to this? Sentries in the trees are using bird calls as a signal. Soemone is tracking us. Another example: Tell the PCs that the birds have abruptly stopped, and all they can hear is a babbling brook. Combine that with a dinosaur footprint found earlier, and perhaps a copy of Jurassic park left very conspicuously next to the gaming table, and all of the sudden the PCs are swearing and standing back-to-back while quickly yelling to the DM that they're making spot checks and casting divinations and releasing their hawk familiar to circle the area. Another extension fo this, describe a babbling brook sound in the distance, and then the sound of the brook ceases. Yeah, a white dragon just froze it over.

Here's another example, something that I love to do. You figure that you ahve your dungeon/encounter set up the way that you want, but there aren't enough challenges to push the players up a level. Do you simply throw in another room of bugbears? That's not creative play, that's dumping statistics. You make a secret door that the bad guys just found, but can't open for some reason. The door is made out of a strange metal and covered with odd, indecipherable runes.

Now what am I doing here? I'm adding to the dungeon without adding to the main part of the dungeon. In other words, I tacked on the the pre-existing backstory. The bugbears made a base (or inhabited a cave) that was on top of an older, more scientifically advanced hideout. That older hideout has been covered up for a very long time, perhaps centuries even. (Think Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, or half of the plotlines in the Hellboy comic books.) Once the PCs ahve wiped out the bugbears, they can rest to egt their spells back and heal themselves, then they can try to open the door. (Put plenty of warnings near that door, DC 10 or DC 5 clues. That way if they're dumb enough to go into that area without resting first then it's on their heads. Familiars that hiss at or shrink away from the doors are a good way to start.)

So they beat up the bugbears, disable the traps, free the hostages, consecrate the undead-producing cult altar, and mow the lawn. Now they're rested and ready to go into this strange area. What do you want them to feel when they walk in? What do you want them to FEEL? Not what do you want them to know, eg the color of the strange floor tiles, what do you want them to feel?

I want them to feel intimidated by the strange technology, fearful of getting in over their heads (and usually I have a CR that is the party level +2), and an awareness that this place is mysterious and dangerous. Three simple goals.

To fufill goal 1: I tell them that the walls and the floor are made out of some strange tiles, a metal that they cannot identify. Even the dwarf does not understand how it is made. [That sets the groundwork, but doesn't do the job. 'You don't know what it is' is a good place to start, but I haven't evoked the response that I want to yet.] I then tell them that the air feels warm, comfortably so, about 75 degrees, but that the tiles are slightly cold to touch. [Now they exchange looks. What does that mean. A ncie paradox. 'I dunno' was the first response, now emotionally they are thinking 'I do understand it, and I understand that it cannot be!'] Then a round or two later there is a sudden hum, and some lights in the ceiling flicker on. A round after that a voice is heard asking a question. In what language? That depends on who built the room. The most recent time that I did this the pre-recorded voice spoke in draconic, because some dragon had amde this place hundreds of years before. The voice asks for the security password. The PCs obviously don't know it. The voice says: "Incorrect response, security system activating." Then the PCs hear breaking glass down the corridor (as the first half-dragon monk wakes up and bursts free of its containment tank ala Marvel Comics' Weapon X program), and the paladin's detect evil is going off, or the ranger or druid makes a Wisdom check and intuitively realizes that its some sort of foreign, alien thing. (Then have another door slam shut behind the PCs if you really want to freak them out.)

To summarize: What does the description make you feel?

I'll close with a final, real-world example. I debated about doing this because DnD is just a game, and the events of September 11th are very, very real. But it is a good way to teach something, so I'll go ahead and do it. I went to hear a survivor on the terrorists attacks speak at a community center some time ago. This man had been on the 80-somethingth floor of one of the towers, and barely got out alive. I specifically remember him saying the following:

"When we walked down the stairwell, we had to grip the railing to avoid slipping. The floor was wet, not from the sprikler system, which hadn't cut in where we were, but fromt he sweat of everyone who had walked there. The sweat of their fear."

A stairwell made slippery by the sweat of the people who were walking down it. That's a description that evoked an understanding of fear in his audience. The hall where he was speaking was dead silent when he was talking, but only got more so when he finished that statement.