Absolutely! But in my view the main job of a GM is not performing. It's establishing compelling situations, and helping resolve them (together with the other participants).having played with more than a few DM's who have decent experience in story telling, as in the vocal art, I can honestly say that evoking emotions is part and parcel of a performance.
I was thinking more about exhibiting emotional responses themselves, than evoking them in other participants. But that can happen too, eg when the whole table is on edge wondering whether a player will make a certain call, or how some declared action will turn out; or when the players are debating something among themselves, trying to decide what it is that they want to do.Relying on the players to evoke emotional responses, is, IMO, an exercise in frustration. They're far, far more likely to go with a dick joke than dive deep into trying to evoke feelings.
So here, too, I'm not seeing the players' role as one of performance: it's about inhabiting their characters in the fiction.
When I play a RPG I am not going to experience fear because of the referee's narration. That's a response appropriate to a book or film, perhaps, but not a RPG.
In a RPG, my emotional responses are generated by the context for, and consequences of, the actions I declare for my character.
When I'm watching a film or reading a book (or being read a book) I'm experiencing a performance or someone else's composition. That work evokes a response in me (assuming it's any good).WAT, this comment makes zero sense. In fact it makes negative sense.
I don't know how you managed to figure out how to emote backwards, but somehow you did. I'm not interested in arguing with you, you emote however you want man. I will say that this sounds like the kind of thing someone would write on the internet to argue a point while not actually acting that way in reality.
Again, you're sort of promoting this weird "I don't emote in response to situations, I emote after situations" or something, honestly it's terribly confusing and I have no idea how you're doing that.
When I'm playing a RPG, I'm being my character. I'm making choices in the context of a situation that the referee has established. As in real life, the emotion comes not from appreciating a performance or a composition, but from having to choose and facing the (imagined) consequences of that choice. That's what makes it imaginative play.
To put it another way: in a film, the lighting of the set, the framing of the shot of the farmstead, the soundtrack (or it's absence0 are all crucial. But in a RPG, the narration is secondary - it's role is to estabnlish an imagined choice sitution. It's the choosing, for my character, and having to (in the ficiton) wear the consequences of that, which produce the emotional weight of the epxerience.
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