Photo : 21 Laps Entertainment

Running a game of Dungeons & Dragons, or any tabletop role-playing game, involves telling your players what they see. Players rely on you to give a sense of tone and ambience, but also to point out anything interesting or relevant to their quest. But they also need you to leave them room to ask and explore. A good game master learns how to describe a scene in enough, but not too much, detail. One way to learn that skill, says redditor non_player on r/RPG, is to turn audio descriptions on when watching movies and TV shows.


Audio description is a feature for people with impaired vision. A narrator describes what’s happening onscreen, carefully avoiding any overlap with the dialog. With the audio description turned on, you can listen to a whole movie, not even looking at the screen, and know what’s going on. And it’s very close to how a game master describes a scene. (It’s a lot more specific than a radio drama or screenplay, neither of which have such detailed, in-the-moment narration.)

Audio description is available with many (but not all) movies on DVD, download, or streaming. Here’s a list of Netflix titles with audio description, and a list of Amazon titles with audio description. Most Netflix originals include the feature.


To turn on audio description in most services, start watching a title, and go to the audio and subtitle settings (where you would change the language) . Netflix has instructions for all your devices. On an Apple device, you can enable audio description by default in Settings > General > Accessibility .

“I’ve turned it on by default, and now everything I watch uses it when available,” says u/non_player, and it’s made them a better game master:

It has really expanded my ability to describe scenes and events in-game, and I highly encourage anyone who wants to step up their GMing game to give it a shot. The way the narrators describe things is pretty interesting, and has even expanded my regular vocabulary.

u/Non_player first heard the tip on a behind-the-scenes episode of Dice for Brains, an “actual play” podcast where the hosts play a Star Wars RPG (and sometimes a Harry Potter RPG) on microphone, then add sound effects to heighten the storytelling. Listening to actual play podcasts is another great way to learn GM skills.