Time deaf, space deaf, maybe just deaf deaf . . .So what?pemerton said:I know these questions are intended as rhetorical, but if I treat them as literal then the answer is I don't know.
The game seems to be 3e D&D (Scarred Lands), but who are the PCs? Who are the players? Do they have any reason to give a toss about the glutton Titan Gaurak?
You’re telling me that both answers would equally evoke a response? That neither one would make the slightest difference in tone or anything at the table?
You must have the most time deaf players in the world.
Anyway, here are the two options again:
1. You know that cockroach monster at the end of Men in Black? That's more or less what you see.
2. Born of the blood of the glutton Titan Gaurak, "this hideous horse sized creature appears to be a twisted hybrid of beetle, mantis and maggot. It stinks of carrion and blood"
My players aren't too tone deaf. They can tell that the second description paints more of a "word picture" than the first. But is RPGing about enjoying word pictures? On the player side, I think it's about doing - about playing your PC as protagonist in the imagined situation. Which description will establish a situation that the players' are moved to engage? Until I know who the players are, who their PCs are, why they would care about the glutton Titan, etc, how can I know?
If the idea on the GM side is to present a disgusting creature whom the PCs will be raring to fight, and we've all just come from a viewing of Men in Black, then maybe number 1 is the way to go!
But not into the realm of trying to craft a beautiful work. Children can express concerns about keeping in character when they play make believe together, but that doesn't make their play of make believe into a literary endeavour in the salient sense.as soon as you add in that criteria - what I say should be in keeping with the character that I'm playing - you have left the realm of conversation and gone into the literary.
Well as it happens we played a session of The Dying Earth a couple of months ago. Emulating Vance's dialogue, including in such a way as to make the other participants burst into laughter, isn't what I was thinking of when I posted the OP.since we're not limited to D&D here, what about games like The Dying Earth where being "literary" is part and parcel to play. Not only is it expected, it's rewarded by the mechanics. Or LARPing, unless we're insisting that LARP'er's aren't "true" gamers.
I'll come back to this below, but at this point will report that we had some funny dialogue and some laughter-inducing taglines, but I don't think what we produced would count as quality literature, and nor were we aiming for that.
To me this is at the heart of the discussion in this thread.That’s because imagining, exploring, and engaging with good content is what’s at the heart of RPGing. The literary quality with which that content is described runs orthogonally to that.
Contra [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s claim upthread, it's nothing about "fluff" vs "crunch". Rather, its RPGing as performance/entertainment as opposed to RPGing as shared inhabitation of the imagined world. Hussar is right, I think, to point to The Dying Earth RPG as a game which plays with this contrast, but from my own play experience I am still comfortable in saying that, for us, it was inhabitation of the Vancian world which drove our play - and the taglines and dialogue were part of that. Part of what I have in mind in saying this is that what made the taglines funny (when they were) wasn't the deftness of delivery or timing in the theatrical sense, but the way it reinforced the contrivance and absurdity that is at the heart of the in-fiction situation.
To me this seems to be the crunch point. And I don't think it's sad at all.perhaps a better question might be, "Should an RPG attempt to being a literary endevour". To which, I would answer a resounding yes. That I will try and fail doesn't bother me too much. But that we shouldn't try at all? That's just sad.
I've got nothing against literary endeavours. But why would RPGing be the place for that? As opposed to, say, writing and perhaps reciting literature? (And to relate this again to The Dying Earth RPG: I don't think our Dying Earth session is best analysed as an attempt to create Vancian fanfic. Whereas to my mind this is what you are saying we should have been aiming at.)
RPGing (once again bracketing a certain sort of classic dungeon crawlilng) is about a particular approach to shared fiction creation: one participant (broadly) in control of setting and situation, one or more others (broady) inhabiting protagonists within that setting and situation. What makes it go is when the setting/situation draw in those would-be protagonists. It's about imagination and the resulting "inhabitation" of the fiction.