To Improve Your D&D Game, Turn on This Netflix Feature
Launching Dungeons & Dragons or any RPG game involves telling your players what they see. Players rely on you to give a sense of tone and atmosphere, and to point out anything interesting or relevant to their quest. But they also need you to leave room for them to ask questions and research. A good gamer learns to describe a scene in sufficient detail, but not in too much detail. One way to master this skill, says the redditor editor non_player in r / RPG , is to enable audio descriptions when watching movies and TV shows.
Audio Description is a function for visually impaired people. The narrator describes what is happening on the screen, trying not to obscure the dialogue. With audio description turned on, you can listen to the entire movie without even looking at the screen and know what’s going on. And this is very similar to how the game master describes the scene. (This is much more specific than a radio drama or screenplay, neither of which has such a detailed, immediate narrative.)
Audio Description is available for many (but not all) DVD movies, downloadable or streaming. Here is a list of Netflix titles with audio description and a list of Amazon titles with audio description . Most Netflix originals include this feature.
To enable audio description in most services, start browsing the title and navigate to the audio and subtitle settings (where you would change the language). Netflix has instructions for all of your devices . On your Apple device, you can turn on audio description by default in Settings> General> Accessibility.
“I turned it on by default and now everything I watch uses it when available,” says u / non_player, making them the best masters of the game:
It really expanded my ability to describe scenes and events in the game, and I highly recommend anyone looking to improve their GMing game to give it a try. The storytellers describe things in a pretty interesting way and have even expanded my usual vocabulary.
u / Non_player first heard the hint about a behind-the-scenes episode of Dice for Brains , a “real game” podcast where hosts play a Star Wars role-playing game (and sometimes a Harry Potter RPG) through a microphone, then add sound effects to amplify narration. Listening to real-life gaming podcasts is another great way to master your GM skills.