When I write I tend to use a much wider vocabulary when I talk. While I'm proud of my range and ability to describe things, I tend to forget that when I'm hanging out with the guys and running a game. If I were to write a dungeon crawl it might come away Gygaxian in its overly verbose descriptions, but if I ran it I'd paraphrase the vigorously flowery verbiage down to descriptive text.

What about you? Do your spoken and written vocabularies differ? What sorts of descriptive phrases do you use at the table?

Playing Call of Cthulhu just might be your only opportunity to use words like "cyclopean" and "eldritch" and "non-Euclidean" to describe a scene.

Yeah, I think everybody's written language is different from their speech. I mean, there's not really any way to write a lot of what we say in casual conversation.

My pre-game notes tend to briefly describe a scene and possible outcomes in terse, pithy, sometimes almost poetic language. In play, it never gets said quite like that, since I don't tend to read verbatim from the notes if I can help it. You have to go with the flow of things, and stopping to read can artificially break that flow. I never liked the "read the following to your players" text boxes in published adventures for that reason.

My actual vocabulary spoken and written, it's pretty much the same. It's just that written is more coherent. Spoken has more ums and aahs and stutters and repetitions and so on. Edit: there's no edit button in speech.

And when I describe things at the game table, trying to set the mood, players never hear beyond the first sentence because they're too busy thinking about how awesome their character is. I only keep it up because always afterwards they say, "What? How did this happen? You never mentioned that!" and I can reply honestly, "I actually did mention that, but..."

Quote from: JimBobOzAnd when I describe things at the game table, trying to set the mood, players never hear beyond the first sentence because they're too busy thinking about how awesome their character is. I only keep it up because always afterwards they say, "What? How did this happen? You never mentioned that!" and I can reply honestly, "I actually did mention that, but..."

Ah, the eternal problem, no? In my experience, when I'm trying to set a stunning scene, the players will want to jump the gun and do something immediately. I'm still trying to describe the setup, but they can't wait to act now, dammit! Of course, something I'm saying right then might very well affect their decisions in that regard, but they get so impatient. It's a compliment, in a way, since it suggests I've managed to spark their excitement somehow, but it's nonetheless irksome.

And between that and the fact that I'm not usually looking at my notes, I tend to forget a fair amount of what I've prepared--from descriptions to minor events & revelations, they just get dropped. I'll remember them sometime afterwards, like when I'm preparing for the next session. A shame, but I guess that's normal when one is trying to keep up with ornery players.

It's odd, but now that I think about it, my written vocabulary is very similar to my GMing vocabulary/speech patterns.  Unfortunately, unless I make an effort, my spoken vocabulary is horrible, full of ain'ts, gonnas, yeahs, whatchoos, and plenty of other slang words/bad English.  But, at least I never say irregardless.  

Pete