In all three examples the character simply moves from A to B. Content wise there is virtually no difference. There is no action declaration other than moving.
This is highly contingent on (i) system and (ii) ingame situation. To give one example, based on Burning Wheel:
I stride down the hall sounds like a Conspicuous test, while
I move cautiously down the hall looking carefully for anything out of place looks like a Perception check, perhaps also Stealth and/or Inconspicuous.
In Prince Valiant the first might be a check on Presence, the second on Brawn.
The consequences for failure on either check is also likely to be quite different. It's certainly not a given that
all that matters is that the PC moves from A to B. And if that's
all that is at stake, ie if nothing turns on the description of how the character moves, if it's mere colour, then maybe we're getting a bit of establishment of character. That can be done whether the character is said to stride down the hall, walk purposefully down it, or walk down it at a steady pace with an imposing look.
for me, what you claim you don't need from the GM is one of the few things that differentiates roleplaying games from other interactive media, his ability through prose and delivery to engage me at a level a videogame can't.
Whereas what I see as central to RPGing is the capacity of the referee to respond to the players, and frame situations in response, that engage with a focus, specificity and degree of particularity that non-human interactions can't deliver.
If the group isn't interested in engaging with the situations presented because your presentation/performance doesn't make it interesting to them... well there's no game.
My take on this is the same as [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION]'s - it sounds to me like the situation is not interesting enough! As I've already posted in this thread, my advice to that GM would be to work on situation, not to work on voice modulation.
People have equated literary and performance with "flowery language". That is not what's meant and has never been meant.
I'm probably qualified to say what
I meant by
literary in the OP:
RPGing requires narration: GMs describe situations, and players declare actions for their PCs that respond to those situations. But I don't think the literary quality of that narration is important.
of the narration means - as [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] posted at post 19 -
quality of form:
There seems to be a fair bit of wrangling going on in this thread over the definition of the word literary. I think it's pretty clear, however, from the context of the OP, that what is meant accords well with the standard definition found in Google dictionary, for example, "concerning the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form." I think the OP intends to put some emphasis on the "quality of form" part of this sort of formulation of what makes something a literary endeavor.
Literary or performance simply means HOW the material is presented in the game, either in written form or in oral during a session. Literary carries additional connotations of utilizing various literary devices. Did you use pathetic fallacy during the session? Did you use foreshadowing? Did you engage various tropes of the genre? Then you are using literary devices.
The notion of
how is too expansive. Speaking with sufficient volume to be heard, sufficient crispness of enunciation to be understood - these all go to
how, but don't show that we're engaged in a literary endeavour.
I made some comments on literary devices in post 40, replying to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] :
dramatic pacing (probably) can't be completely divorced from the words - the form - whereby the content is conveyed.
In the context of a RPG, though, where the pacing concerns - at least the sort that you refer to - are more at the "scene" level than the line-by-line level, I think the dependence of pacing on words becomes pretty lose. A GM who can't control his/her words at all is going to have troube wrapping up a scene, or cutting to the next situation, in a smooth way; but I think the threshold of skill to be able to do this falls well short of being able to write an evocative opening or closing line.
I'll finish this post by saying that, in denying that RPGing is a *literary* endeavour I'm not denying that it has an important aesthetic component. But I think that the aesthetic component is much more connected to a sense of motion and drama in human affairs, than to a sense of beauty in composition or performance.
As far as the use of tropes is concerned - that's typically not about quality of form or beauty in composition at all.
Essentially this argument is as old as gaming. Which is more important, fluff or crunch? Some folks think that crunch (@Pemerton refers to task resolution) as all important and fluff (or flavor, or performance, or whatever you want to call it), while perhaps interesting, is largely unimportant. Others, like myself and I believe [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION], think that flavor and crunch are both equally important and equally needed in an RPG.
This has absolutely zero to do with what I'm talking about. For instance, you seem to be the only poster in this thread who has said anything to imply that
action resolution = "crunch", because you seem to think that additional fictional context in action declaration - such as striding vs walking cautiously - makes no difference to resolution.
The role of the fiction in framing, declaration and resolution is one of the fundamental differences between RPGing and boardgaming and much wargamin. The distinctive first-person protagonist role of most of the participants is the other. And obviously the OP in this thread takes these features of RPGing for granted, as not even needing to be stated.
It's precisely because of these features of RPGing that it is possible for it to be an activity which (to quote again from the OP) is based on
the players feeling the significance of the situations the GM describes - feeling the pull to action, and the threats of inaction. That has nothing to do with "fluff vs crunch".
That Evard is a demon-summoner; that he might be my grandfather; that my family's claim to honour might rest on such poor foundations; that my fidelity to the Lord of Battle might be so fundamentally compromised: how would anyone think that those things are about "crunch"?
