The above quotation from The Boy Lard is my group's typical reaction to someone trying to use evocative language in a game. The trouble is that it is far too easy to take such language literally in a world where a character who looks "skeletal" might be an animated skeleton or where "spidery writing" could have been written by spiders.
Sometimes the literal interpretation is the right one. In the D&D scenario "Castle Amber", I know I was not the only player to have misunderstood the DM when he said "The eyes follow you out of the room", only to later discover that the eyes had floated down the corridor after us.
