Make Everyone's Lives Easier by Rewriting Descriptions in 5e

Lately, I have been finding myself rewriting a lot of item and spell descriptions and it has made my life a lot easier.

"What do you mean, Jack," I hear your voices crying from across the digital ocean. "Is that not a ton more work?"

My answer: Kind of. But the extra work has made my sessions run much smoother and removed one of the biggest headaches of running a game: time spent looking up and trying to understand mechanics.

We have all been there, right? A player has an item from ten sessions ago that no one remembers how to use and we have to stop the game to listen to the description.

It sucks. Not a fan...

This is where my newest habit comes in: Rewriting the descriptions (and excuse me if I am the last person to realize how helpful this is). Well, maybe re-format is a better word. Here is what I mean:

Rewriting Descriptions in 5e as Bullets

I have made no secret of my dislike for the wordiness of 5e (even if I am frequently guilty of it myself). Item and spell descriptions, keyed rooms, adventures, you name it. Everything is so chock-full of text that my eyes glaze over and I have to read everything twice. But not so with bullet points. Bullets are the silver bullet (sorry) that slay blocks of text. They convey the mechanics in an easy-to-write and, importantly, easy-to-read way!

Here is an Example:

Have you ever had a player pull out an Eversmoking Bottle mid-combat? Here is the item description:

​Smoke leaks from the lead-stoppered mouth of this brass bottle, which weighs 1 pound. When you use an action to remove the stopper, a cloud of thick smoke pours out in a 60-foot radius from the bottle. The cloud's area is heavily obscured. Each minute the bottle remains open and within the cloud, the radius increases by 10 feet until it reaches its maximum radius of 120 feet.

The cloud persists as long as the bottle is open. Closing the bottle requires you to speak its command word as an action. Once the bottle is closed, the cloud disperses after 10 minutes. A moderate wind (11 to 20 miles per hour) can also disperse the smoke after 1 minute, and a strong wind (21 or more miles per hour) can do so after 1 round.

I don't know about you but I find that to be a pretty mealy description. There are rules about how obscured the area becomes, how heavy the bottle is, the rate of smoke coming out of the bottle, the rate of smoke dispersal, and how to close the bottle. It's a lot. So here is my fix. Cut out the text that does not affect anything (we don't need to know how much the bottle weighs) and bullet the rest.

As an action, you can remove the stopper from this bottle to cause the following effects:

• A thick cloud of smoke pours from the bottle in a 60ft. radius.

• The area inside the cloud is heavily obscured.

• For each minute that the bottle is open, the cloud's radius increases by 10ft.

• The cloud's max radius is 120ft.

The cloud persists as long as the bottle is open. Closing the bottle requires you to speak its command word as an action. Once the bottle is closed:

• The cloud disperses after ten minutes;

• or after 1 minute of moderate wind (10-20mph);

• or after 1 round of strong wind (21Mph+)

And voila! With a few bullet points, some judicious bolding, and a few minutes we have made a dense block of text into an easy-to-decipher magic item.

Next time you are prepping for a game, give rewriting descriptions in 5e a try! It will make things run just a little bit smoother and save you and your players a bit of a headache.

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