Lofgeornost
Feeling Martian!
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
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One conundrum I've not really solved with describing smells in games is when to calibrate descriptions to what the player would be familiar with and when I should stick with what the character would find normal. They're likely to be very different things, in most premodern fantasy settings, at least.
You might think that the obvious answer is to describe things from the point-of-view of the character: if a smell is so expected or usual that they would not notice it, then there is no point in describing it. That's what I do most of the time.
But sometimes it makes more sense to approach things from the point of view of the player. Part of the experience, after all, is immersing yourself in this imaginary alternative world. I find that it can help with that if the descriptions sometimes point out sensory elements of that world that are quite unfamiliar to us in our lives nowadays. Descriptive works of social history tend to use that trick as well, pointing out the way that smells, sounds, and sights of the premodern world are vastly different than what we are used to, though they were unremarkable to people at the time.
Generally, I hew to the 'describe what the character would notice' approach for things that are in effect clues to what is going on and 'what the players would notice' for scene-setting, but that isn't always the case.
You might think that the obvious answer is to describe things from the point-of-view of the character: if a smell is so expected or usual that they would not notice it, then there is no point in describing it. That's what I do most of the time.
But sometimes it makes more sense to approach things from the point of view of the player. Part of the experience, after all, is immersing yourself in this imaginary alternative world. I find that it can help with that if the descriptions sometimes point out sensory elements of that world that are quite unfamiliar to us in our lives nowadays. Descriptive works of social history tend to use that trick as well, pointing out the way that smells, sounds, and sights of the premodern world are vastly different than what we are used to, though they were unremarkable to people at the time.
Generally, I hew to the 'describe what the character would notice' approach for things that are in effect clues to what is going on and 'what the players would notice' for scene-setting, but that isn't always the case.