DMing in Full Color (TCG)

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OK by now the DM should know how to speed things up, slow things down, and what NOT to tell his players. Unfortunately, he also may have decided to quit telling his players anything about what they see, hear, or experience in an adventure (some DMs do this as second nature, but more on that later). This is where we reverse the trend. The DM is certainly encouraged to misinform the players if it suits the needs of the game, but misinformation is no excuse for running a game in black and white. Since the players cannot actually see the areas that their adventurers explore (unless the DM is running a lavish audio-visual presentation), most, if not all of their perceptions of their world come from the DM's descriptions.
So don't be stingy with descriptive material. Tell the players the important things that their characters see, hear, smell, and taste in their world, and then add in enough extra detail so that the players have to decide for themselves what's important and what's not.
==Set the Scene==
Establishing the setting for encounters, whether they take place in a wind-whipped mountain pass or a dimly-lit underground chamber, is an important part of the DM's responsibilities. When all a DM does is to draw room dimensions on a battle map and says "This is what you see," chances are, that is all the players (and their characters) will see: outlines on paper. The effective DM will take his descriptions of an area beyond mere room dimensions and make it live for the players. The following are examples of ineffective and effective descriptions of encounter areas:
Ineffective Setting
: The room is 20 by 20 feet and has a couple cots and a table in it.
Effective Setting
: The door sticks and opens only with effort, scraping the mold and moss that carpets the floor beyond Even the beds and table are encrusted with the stuff The walls remind you of leprous sores, with gangrenous wounds where scabs of plaster have fallen away. Even as you stand here, a mottled chunk falls silently to the padded HOOT.
Ineffective Setting
: You come to a clearing in the woods with some ruins near the center. It's getting dark.
Effective Setting
: The path through the forest abruptly opens onto a grassy clearing. Tumbledown remnants of an ancient building hulk in the center of the glade. Rows of fallen columns, like broken teeth, mark a path to the gaping entrance of the ruin. Even from here, you can see numerous statues filling wall niches and unpleasant sculptures looming gargoyle-like near the collapsed roof Several leaning towers thrust up out of the ruins as if to catch the last light of the day. Even now, long shadows from the surrounding trees darken the glade, almost visibly creeping forward to make the darkness complete.
In each of these situations, the DM's effective description (even though a bit heavy on the prose) both describes what the characters see and establishes a mood. A once-generic part of the DM's world has taken on specific and even menacing form. Will the characters enter the area as it is described, now knowing, or at least feeling, that potential danger lies therein? Without motivation, probably not.
==Presenting NPCs==
It never hurts to re-emphasize the importance of NPCs to an adventure game setting. If the DM does a good job making his NPCs colorful, his players eventually may forget the 30-1evel dungeon they explored, or the corrupt political system they exposed, or even the nifty magical toys they were constantly uncovering, but they will never forget the time that Hilgo Bandylegs bowed low and offered his battle axe in the service of the player characters, only to trip on his flame-orange beard and go tumbling into the wine vat.