After that bombshell of a title, at least someone's going to be curious about this thread, so I'll try not to disappoint.

So, starting off, as you may notice if you, cher lecteur, have decided to delve into my profile before reading this topic, you may notice that I haven't been all that active here, that is to say, not active at all. This is due to numerous reasons, but I shall leave it at two; life and love, two things that humanity has been desperate to define for most if not all of its existence, though I'm not going to rant about that today, as it'd get rather hard to comprehend at some point and I may start randomly using terms in French because that's what happens when I rant about deep things.

Ahem, anyway, returning to the subject at hand, during my absence, aside from falling in love, as a new pastime, I began reading realist novels, which have quite easily become one of my favorite literary forms; spending my free hours reading the words of excellent French authors such as Guy de Maupassant (of whom I especially enjoyed Boule de Suif, highly recommended), Gustave Flaubert (whose Un cœur simple may be one of the greatest pieces of literature I have ever read and whose L'Éducation sentimentale has also been highly enjoyable) and, at the moment, Honoré de Balzac, an author who by his writing such as Le Père Goriot, has given me the goal of one day reading all of the published, finished works in his La Comédie humaine and, for the future, I recently ordered the Japanese author Haruki Murakami's newest work Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, yet another realist work, but hailing from a whole other side of the world, which has me very excited.

Well, in short, I've been busy.

However, I didn't start this topic so I could brag about the things I've been reading, instead, I wanted to talk about how these novels brought to my attention a possible mistake I had making for a VERY long time in my writing, without a doubt since the very beginning when I wrote about dragons when I was seven years old. You see, a central theme to realism, at least in its manifestation in French writing is description. Allow me to show you a short line from Wikipedia on realism and its sister-form, naturalism.

Wikipedia said
Realism (or naturalism) in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.

Needless to say, without description, realist writers cannot succeed in accomplishing their goal of depicting everyday life and the things that go on in it without resorting to lots and lots of pretty pictures. It goes without saying that descriptions are essential in any realist work, or any writing at all. But do they go any further than that? Allow me to share a few words from my own French teacher, in a lesson we had about a week or two ago (on this note, if I refer to 'French', I basically mean the class anyone in English countries call 'English', that is to say, literary studies, poetry, et cetera, not French language studies as a second language. Hello from rainy Normandy, by the way~)

Monsieur Stiegler said
Whether these descriptions are found in the incipit of a work or the heart of the action, they subliminally tell the story to come. As such, a discerning reader can deduce the course of the story.

With this in mind, we now know that the descriptions in realist works foreshadow the story, whether it be by describing a lawyer's study in a way that it seems infernal (as in Le Colonel Chabert, of Honoré de Balzac), by describing a Corsican town as symmetrical but depicting a rivalry (the town of Pietranera in Colomba by Prosper Mérimée) or by describing the room of a character whose name means "happiness" as dark with a single light (from the aforementioned Un cœur simple by Flaubert). In all of the works I've read in these last few weeks and months, there has never been a description without meaning and therein lays the problem I believe was making with my own writing.

As an example, when I described a room, it was only to describe a room and make it more visible to the reader, not to give a meaning to it, making it superficial and almost unnecessary that I describe said room. What was the point? Was I writing just for the sake of writing? Was it just to fill up space and make myself believe I was writing "advanced" stuff? When I decided that my character would wear a black dress, did it have a meaning?

To answer all of those questions; there is a point and there isn't, yes I was, yep and nope, it didn't. About there being a point, well, for the sake of roleplaying, there definitely was, as it did help other players write their own situation and the character's thoughts, but at the same time, by pointlessly describing, I was dooming them to the same fate. When they picked up the scene, they too would be describing a pointless room, which is blue because blue is pretty, had a chair because it needed a chair and had a single, large window because those things are just awesome. After putting a lot of thought into it, I came to the conclusion that pointless description and exhibition was something I had to stop doing, even in roleplaying. If I was going to describe a room now, would it still be blue, considering the story, my character and my possible role as a GM? Maybe, maybe not!

So, here's where you come in. What is your thoughts on descriptions in writing and roleplaying? How and why do you do it and do you concern yourself with there being a point or not? I eagerly look forward to hearing your thoughts and I hope I didn't bore you with these blocks of text! Above all, I hope you enjoyed reading this! ;D

That is a good extraction to take from those works.

I'd say especially in work that you can spend the time and effort, your descriptions should have a purpose beyond fodder. In terms of roleplaying, I would say that it is also true, to some extent, for roleplaying. It is easier to pull this kind of description off in writing by yourself, as you have control over the progress. Description as a means to foreshadow becomes difficult in a roleplay to pull off given the mass amount of variables.

I don't necessarily agree that there isn't a point in creating a visual aide for the reader to ensure the scene is properly set - it does create a real aspect to the scene. However, this should probably be done to a more limited basis than it now is. A lot of my friends, who 'write' (I hate to use it like this, but if you knew them you'd know why), fail to appropriately balance description for the sake of setting up a scene and description with a purpose of furthering the story or creating some element of foreshadowing. In roleplaying it is a bit different in that the balance shifts towards description for the sake of scene setting, especially so in early posts of a scene.

Description should be to help set atmosphere and ambience within an rp, as well as to provide players about important aspects of a scene that can be interacted with for whatever reason. Lengthy prose written about describing something without much meaning to it other then building up the length and fluff of a post is completely pointless and the quickest way to lose my interest.

Rafale said I recently ordered the Japanese author Haruki Murakami's newest work Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, yet another realist work, but hailing from a whole other side of the world, which has me very excited.

As a fan of Haruki Murakami, I didn't really think too much on his latest novel. It was still pretty good, but if you're interested in sampling some of his work I found The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norweigian Wood to be far, faaaar better, and I cannot recommend them enough.

Descriptions in writing and roleplaying, from my perspective, can be used not only to set the scene, but to determine the tone of the work. Are you trying to use the "background" as a commentary... in other words, are the dark skies, pouring rain, cold, rocks and mud all to set a somber mood, your character caught in this storm depressed and sad, perhaps simply "desperate" to get somewhere warm and dry? Or are you setting a contrast? Is your character cheerfully splashing in the puddles, ignoring the cold and mud?

Well, this tends to be the way I look at it. No, I'm not always concerned with the point, because sometimes a "cigar" is just a cigar. But there are times when "Realism" in describing a setting can indeed fit into the intended tone, or the "theme" of your story. Heh... in roleplaying, however, quite frequently you have to deal with the pre-made setting, so, you have the choice to ignore "meaning" or to take what's presented and, through your character descriptions and interactions, turning that meaningless background into something with significance to your desired theme.

Want to use a "serious" description seriously? Have at it. Want to take that and flip the tone? Take that serious description and find the contrast or humor in it... make your character dance with the thunder and lightning. Or simply drop a "banana peel" on the ground. And have your character slip on it. So to speak. Though to be truly honest, personally, I don't stress it. I simply write in a way that pleases me, be that Realism or Surrealism or... who knows?

Everything doesn't always need to make a point, because "pointlessness" could very well be your point, right? Variety is the "spice of life." And all that.

I think description in a role play is particularly important. You don't know other peoples' characters, yeah? So I think it's important to give plenty of description to allow that character to interact with whatever they want.

Example, character A is tall and thin and has long hair.

Character B reacts to character A like a normal person would react to anyone.

BUT THEN character A has red hair.

Character B, holy shit, has the biggest fucking fetish for red heads. Suddenly, character B is going to have to react differently to this new information even though this already should've been known to the characters. Kinda breaks the realism of RP if a character has a delayed reaction to something he should already know about.

It's not usually details as basic as hair color that is skipped out on, however, but I think I make a point. Something pointless to your or your character might be important to another player and/or their character. Like, I have a female character I repeatedly use who looks like a boy. If I skip out on details that emphasize this, characters will interact with her as if she's just another woman. However, many, many characters react (positively and negatively) to a character that doesn't necessarily look like its assigned gender. So if I don't include these details that even I find trivial, I miss out on potential relationship (again, positive or negative) building.

Role playing isn't just putting up your work to be read like writing often is. It's writing for interaction.

Details in writing, however...Well there's far too much variation in possibilities here in my opinion. It's hard to decide on good/bad rules of writing 'cause many an author can break these "rules" and still make a great story or poem or whatever.

My rule of thumb with description is that it should be enough for the reader to work with but not too much that it crushes their imagination. As a GM, I like to explain what's in a scene that player characters will be able to see and interact with as well as setting the mood or describing things enough that everyone's on a similar page when it comes to imagining what's going on. As was pointed out, sometimes you need to add a bit more detail because context matters. For example, say you describe a man sitting on the street who has a heavy cough. You would probably assume he had a cold or something. If you describe the same man with a heavy cough with open wounds on his face and spittle of blood on his shirt then people are going to react to the situation quite a bit differently.

Likewise, it doesn't hurt to describe a character's appearance and describe their apparel because it helps the players visualize this person. The thing with roleplaying is it as a creative medium works a bit differently than say reading a book because it's a multi-person endeavor and you have to be able to facilitate each of the player's needs and wants for it to go smoothly. The less you omit in a post, the better, because otherwise everyone else has to fill in the details on their own and can end up with wildly different conclusions from the very limited information presented.

For instance, let's say you're GMing a game and you say "A ghost enters the room" without context, player 1 envisions a Grim Reaper look alike with hostile intentions and reacts accordingly. However, player 2 imagines a benign lost child who may be able to help and can't understand why player 1 is being a shithead. Player 3, meanwhile, is picturing an intangible white sheet that cannot see the characters and is wandering aimlessly. All the players voice their disagreements in the OOC after they realize all 3 of them had entirely different things in mind when they posted and you as the GM has to spend time rectifying the situation needlessly when an extra sentence or two could have clarified things nicely without causing confusion.

Hell, I still run into situations where I think I've been very descriptive and covered my bases but still managed to omit something that prompted a player to seek clarification.

This doesn't mean write a description of food for 7 pages like GRRM or anything because you don't want to bore players to death with needless exposition, but if you provide enough fuel for the fire, it'll sustain itself nicely. Just don't smother it or it'll die and don't skimp out or it won't ever catch.