Rob, when you first proposed this topic, my immedi...

Rob, when you first proposed this topic, my immediate thought was of old-school text adventures. Back when verbose descriptions could make your program to large to fit in the 64k of available memory.

There was a format there:

Name of Room
Brief Description
List of obvious exits
List of obvioius objects
Description of what any animate objects, if any, are doing.

Text had to be evocative. Details were enfolded in the descriptions that you only got if you examined the things mentioned.

I suspect that if I'd tried to evolve that into something better suited for tabletop play, I'd have come up with something that looked like this.