Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text

Great advice: describing things in order of importance.

Most people intuitively describe images from foreground to background or left to right, a bit like they are mentally completing a checklist of all the things to describe. As correctly noted by the author, describing by importance first has the added benefit of allowing screen reader users to skip irrelevant/uninteresting images early.

Compare:

Torn-up painting in a gallery, observers standing in front of the work.

vs.

Gallery interior, people standing in front of a painting with visible damage.

I grew up next to, and a couple years younger than, someone who is now a famous novelist and singer-songwriter. In our childhood, he was renowned in the neighborhood as a dungeon master. He rode the theater of the mind as far is it would take him.

The advice in the magazine reminds me of the inverted pyramid structure of classic reporting. Most important first, assume that the reader could stop reading after any sentence, so make the most of each phrase.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism...

This is actually important for all professional communication (maybe with an exception of marketing), if you want the best chance of getting what you want from the person you're communicating with, get to the point within the very first sentence, even if it's just a high-level summary, you then have the person's complete attention and can elaborate further.

If you don't get to the point quickly, people might think it doesn't really apply/matter to them and ignore it.

This became very obvious to me when my day job for a few years was responding to customer service requests over email for World of Warcraft. I would often find myself skimming all the useless (quite literally) pretext as quickly as possible scanning for what their actual problem was.

Stereotypical example of a poor email from a customer:

> Last night I finished the raid with my guild where we downed the Lich King. Then this morning I went to school where my friends and I also talked about WoW, then when I got home, everything seemed normal, I turned on my computer, logged on and entered my password, but it didn't work, then I went to the website and used the password reset, then I tried to log on and it said my account was locked, then I checked my email, and it said my account is locked and I need to contact Blizzard...

At which point I stop reading and I'm thinking "finally, I see why he's emailing us".

To be fair, these emails are often from adolescents who understandingly do not yet have the experience to do effective communication (which is actually an additional interesting aspect of customer service for a computer game compared to services which are only taken up by adults, but I digress).

I now work as a software developer for a startup and often have to interact directly with clients, and when I communicate with them, I always make sure to have my desired "call to action" (even if only summarised) within the first sentence.

Related, but for me it was Dwarf Fortress. The item descriptions aren't exceptionally good per se, they're auto-generated after all. But they employ particularly poignant verbs[1] over more adjective-heavy descriptions. Taking a cue from that style dramatically improved my alt text.

1. like encrusted, encircled, adorned

The author says in the first paragraph that he used to play a lot of D&D (dndbeyond.com) and now prefers Dungeon World (dungeon-world.com; PDF is $6). Does anyone know why he might prefer the latter? As context, I play D&D weekly, love it, and am always interested in learning more. Dungeon World is designed to focus on creativity and shared storytelling with simpler mechanics to make the game more fluid. However, there's nothing simpler than having a clear D&D rule for something like fall damage, instead of having the party debate if a player survived the fall. Dungeon World doesn't have fall damage calculator and instead relies in the narrative, presumably from the pre-written story or DM.

I've to write alt tags daily and I still suck at it, since I suck at describing things (which is weird, since I write documentation every day). I might start attending my friend's D&D sessions just to improve on that.

For now, I wrote a tool[1] that uses AI to do the job for me.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/allalt

I've been running D&D/TTPRGs for my group for 35 years at this point - with a few life breaks here and there - and its genuinely taught me so many skills that are usefully in life.

Its an heady mix of things that really will stretch your mind in many ways at once. I love them. All kids (of all ages) should try them a few times.

For the record I've nearly always run TotM except when for some very complicated things that really need that extra tactical oomf.

I have great trouble writing good descriptions of products I build at work (I’m in software). Often I find there are just too many possible ways for me to describe the thing that I get stuck… and inevitably end up with descriptions that simply aren’t very effective. It just seems really hard to flatten an inherently multifaceted or complex thing into a linear narrative.

This topic is slightly different than this post, but there seems to be some useful advice that is applicable to my particular problem. I can “see” what my product is, but can’t really describe it well. Next time I’ll try to focus on what’s important first… which of course sounds obvious, but isn’t how my brain seems to want to describe things.

Is there any other reading out there that people would recommend?

I have heard that a DM is a full-time job, and I agree full heartily after reading this.

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie starts with a fantastic inversion of this writing advice that sets you up for the tone of the entire series's humor, I highly recommend it!

Great advice. In my last homebrew campaign, the characters were insane and in a mental hospital. For box text, I purposely broke the bottom-line-up-front rule and had them, e.g., fixate on random irrelevant things as the danger built towards them. It was wonderfully effective at reinforcing the “you have trouble processing reality” aspect of the campaign. So unless you want your audience confused and disoriented, put the important part first!

I often print out my D&D maps (say, from a scan of one I've drawn), transcribe important features on to it using coloured pens and run the game from that. Whitespace and simplicity is a feature here... "photo-realistic" maps with stone textures and artistic doodles get in the way of usability.

I've recently been working on a web-based tool designed to make

character creation in DnD easier: https://tabletopy.com/fantasy-character-generator.html

Likewise, I've long encouraged people to compose the email first, then come back and summarize the most important part into the subject line. An email with a subject of "question" might just get deleted out of annoyance.

D&D can teach so many things.