Box Text

I am a wargamer by tradition, one of the reasons I first embraced the BattleTech franchise. Wargaming comes with a certain amount of baggage when you transition into RPG, though, and some of it I haven't entirely cleared. One of my biggest issues is creating evocative environments. I have an almost inoperable case of just simply pointing out tactically relevant features of the terrain and perhaps describing tactically relevant environmental effects, such as the weather discussed last week. I may give a color to certain things, but that's the extent of the non-mechanical attributes of an object I'm like to describe. I'm only marginally better about NPC's, for whom I may describe the clothes even if those clothes yield no appreciable BAR.

I recently had it suggested to me that I should take the time to write box text for my environments ahead of time. Now, I'm a huge fan of box text as a rule when I run pre-built modules for D&D or somesuch, but largely because I get to read it in the voice of the mission briefing narrator from Warcraft II, so I didn't put too much stock in this suggestion outright. On reflection, though, I think it might be something that could get me a bit more mileage and do a bit more for mood setting in a campaign that sometimes slips to the silly, and could help some of my players who are better at roleplaying get further into that part of the game.

This post is more an announcement of my intent to try this new method. Expect a follow-up post in several weeks about how I think I'm doing with it.