Way back in Empiricism I talked about pictures of monsters; I said then (among other things) that those of us who couldn’t render the images in our imaginations to paper would have to make due with a thousand words.  Returning to that thought, it occurs to me that it’s worth considering those times when a picture can be very useful, as well as those times when not having one might be better.

  Decades ago when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, I was the only person in our group who had a copy of the Monster Manual, and thus the person most familiar with its contents.  My wife read it, and sometimes other players browsed it, but they didn’t have the kind of familiarity with the contents which enabled them to recognize a monster from the picture the instant it appeared.  This made the pictures in the book quite useful, from my perspective.  If their characters saw a creature, I could try to describe it, but sometimes I would just cover up as much of the page as necessary and let them see the drawing that appeared in the book.  “You see something that looks like this,” I would say, and that saved a lot of game time, because I didn’t have to go into my thousand words, once they saw the picture.  It is such a useful technique that I recommend having pictures to show to your players of things–not monsters only, but all kinds of objects they are likely to encounter during play, so that one look will give them all the information their characters could acquire with one look.

  There will be times, however, when you don’t want to show them the picture.

  Obviously, as I may just have implied, if your players know all the pictures and you think their characters wouldn’t recognize them, showing the pictures might be the last thing you want to do.  If you can do your own drawings, and do them such that they are reasonably accurate without being too revealing (or too like those in the book), that might work for you.  If, though, you want them to guess what it is, a picture that they will immediately recognize doesn’t do the job terribly well–or rather, it does it too well.

  Similarly, in the kinds of adventure situations our characters have, it’s often the case that they can’t see what they see so very well.  There is a creature lurking in the dark; it seems to be about this size, roughly this sort of shape, maybe this kind of coloring, but difficult to make out in any detail.  You could try drawing pictures of creatures that are hard to see, but that requires a particularly skilled artist to accomplish.  Similarly, what do you do with fleeting glimpses?  Do you say, “It looks like this,” flash the book to the right page and close it, and hope that the players were paying as much attention as the characters?  Again, in this situation, a description of what the characters saw, and what they thought they might have seen, works much better than a picture of what they didn’t see. 

For another example of situations in which the picture tells too much, sometimes the angle from which the character views the creature is less than revealing.  If you’ve ever seen those drawings from odd angles, such as the Mexican in the sombrero riding a bicycle as seen from above, you’ve got some idea of this.  Can you tell one humanoid from another, an alien from a human, a dwarf from a giant, if you’re looking down from a hundred yards in the air?  A lot of creatures are harder to distinguish if you’re looking at their backsides than their faces; probably horse, mule, donkey, hippogriff, pegasus, and unicorn all look pretty similar from that angle, but which it is might be important.  In all these situations, a picture tells too much.

  There is another way in which a picture tells too much.  It is often what we don’t know or can’t see that inspires the strongest emotional reactions in us.  One of the strengths of role playing games is that they trigger our imaginations, as we see in our minds things we could not see with our eyes.  Descriptions often manage to stimulate these ideas without providing uniform images.

  The movie Alien understood this.  Every effort was made to keep H. R. Giger’s monster design under wraps before the debut; in the film, we get glimpses of something moving too rapidly to see, impressions of something hiding in the dark, fragments of something that has just escaped our view–we don’t see the monster for a very long time, precisely because through not seeing it we are more frightened than we ever would be by seeing it.  We filled in the blanks with our own fears; those were far more frightening than any picture could be.

  Similarly, in another movie, the young boy Bastion is finally persuaded to give a name to the princess of The Never-Ending Story.  He has chosen the name; it is the name of his deceased mother.  He has told us that she had a beautiful name.  He opens the window and shouts the name into the howling storm–and we never hear it.  We know that his mother had the most beautiful name, and that he gave this name to the princess, and that is enough for us.  If the name was Melissa, or Jennifer, or Laurelyn, some would think that the most beautiful name, others that it was pretty enough, and others that it was a common dirty name.  That we never know the name means we never have to consider whether we think it was all that pretty.

  So in describing that which the characters encounter in their game worlds, we can use the lack of pictures to our advantage.  We can talk about the most beautiful woman in the world, and each of our players will have a different image of what that means, but all will see a very beautiful woman.  The terrifying monster will be terrifying to each person who imagines it as terrifying, even if it has a very different appearance in the details.  These are times when pictures get in the way.  You may be old enough to remember when Christie Brinkley was the world’s first supermodel, and you might still see in her the beauty that she was; to the sixteen-year-old girlfriend of one of my sons, she’s a funny looking old lady who couldn’t possibly have ever been of any interest to anyone.  I can’t say I blame her; I could never understand why anyone thought Elizabeth Taylor at all attractive until I saw her in National Velvet, and although Audrey Hepburn managed to stay pretty well into her career that was a lot easier to appreciate in films like Sabrina and My Fair Lady.  We all have a concept of beauty, but if you want your players to imagine something or someone beautiful, the more you leave to the imagination the more successful your efforts will be.

  The same applies to so many ideas which describe our reactions and responses more than the thing itself.  Sexy and seductive; repulsive and revolting; terrifying; hysterical; disfigured; mad; dim-witted–these are all about our emotional reactions, not about the things or people themselves, and thus descriptions which sketch an outline to be filled in by the hearer work better than pictures.

  This is also quite useful in capturing the reactions of the characters when they wouldn’t fit those of the player.  What is the appearance of a beautiful dwarf maiden?  Is her beard neatly trimmed and braided?  I once played a Yazirian, a sort of six-foot-something monkey/flying squirrel cross, who was a cadet in a space academy falling in love with a member of his own people.  I’m sure that drawings of the girl of his dreams would not have appealed to me in the least; but descriptions of her as lovely, demure, coy, intelligent, sweet, and beautiful certainly did.  The same thing works with our fears and hatreds.  With the right description of the horrifying, drooling fanged furred beast I can probably make you feel fear for a bunny.  I probably couldn’t get a picture that would do the same thing.  I’ll mention Multiverser’s popular gather world, NagaWorld for this.  Along one horizon is something which is always called “the industrial complex” to any player who doesn’t know what it is.  It looks like an industrial complex, with lots of machines, flashing lights, and other high-tech equipment.  It’s actually a battlefield; but from fifty miles away, you can’t tell that.  Thus the description is both accurate and misleading, as it should be.  A picture of this always proves difficult–it either looks too much like an industrial complex, or too much like a battlefield, or not enough like either.

  Yet I’ve stated that pictures are valuable, and I maintain that they are.  They really can save a great deal of time during play, as players can see in an instant that which might take several minutes to describe.  Sometimes the picture can convey what really matters:  this is dangerous, and for these reasons; this has this shape and probably these functions.  If you have pictures, you should use them when there’s no reason not to do so.

  There is yet another use for pictures, one that is near and dear to my heart.  Pictures can be a wonderful tool for misdirection.  In this regard, there is a supplement that has been in this hobby longer than I have which did this marvelously well.  It is an old Dungeons & Dragons module entitled Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and in the middle of it was a gallery of pictures, drawings of everything from small devices to entire rooms, intended as visual aids to the players.  Some of these pictures were completely informative; if you looked at the picture, you could guess what it was quite reliably.  However, many of the images were of a sort designed to mislead the modern gamer into thinking he knew what the thing was, such that he would have his character do things with it that were very dangerous.  I recall specifically that one of the objects which looked most like a handgun was actually a translator, and that one of the most dangerous weapons fired a flash of destructive heat from the part that looked like a small view screen.  Since this particular adventure was about swords and sorcery characters exploring a crashed spaceship, it was an ideal way of maintaining high levels of uncertainty:  even with your advanced understanding of technology, the drawings of these things would mislead you; consequently, even when you knew exactly what it was your character saw, you couldn’t give him technical knowledge that he didn’t have.  The module did this with devices, and also with creatures, in which many that looked dangerous were benign and some that looked benign were quite dangerous.  Of course, such pictures cannot always be completely misleading, or players will quickly fall into disregarding them.  There have to be some pictures for which the gut reaction is correct, or the idea ceases to work.

  Another aspect of the use of pictures which this module illustrates is that it’s very difficult sometimes to describe something without suggesting a conclusion.  That’s fine if you can suggest a conclusion the character would and should reach; it’s not fine if you’re caught between telling the player what it is and giving him completely wrong information.  That aforementioned weapon is an excellent example.  Do you tell the player that part of it looks like a small video screen, thus in essence giving him false information about it, or do you elaborately describe it in a way that lets him know it’s not a video screen at all, thus providing him with important information unavailable to his character?  At times problems can be avoided by showing pictures.  If you describe part of an object as “a handle”, you’ve defined its function, not its appearance; but there are many times in which the temptation is to describe things by their functions, and the challenge of describing them by their appearance may be daunting.  Try describing a raygun without referring to the barrel, stock, or trigger, and you’ll see the problem.  It is difficult to be adequately descriptive without being definitive.  Enough information for the player to visualize the object often contains details related more to function than to form, as it is difficult to completely describe how something appears without telling what it is.  A picture can solve this quite readily.

  Thus we have pictures, something to use when they are useful, and not to use when they are problematic.  Hopefully we have some idea of when for each case.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.