Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?

One thing that occurred to me via seeing a few posts a couple of pages back is this:

One thing a description or narration should strive for, however else it's delivered or phrased, is to answer any obvious questions before they need to be asked.

The example given was, I think, something like "You enter a room. Passages exit to the north and west. There's a staff." in its simplified form. This leaves a boatload of unanswered obvious questions and thus fails as a useful description. Some of the numeric dimensions can be left out of the verbal description if you're using a grid and map and just draw it out (which I often do) but noting the location of the staff, what it's made of, and whether there's anything else in the room; also noting anything special or unusual about the environment here e.g. the north passage has some water on the floor and there's an unusual amount of lichen on the west wall of the room - all of these seem like no-brainers to just describe up front as they'd be fairly obvious to the PCs.

Aldarc said:

I appreciate the defense, Maxperson. As I explain above though, I didn't clarify in my original statement who the mechanic was speaking to. But later I do say that they will likely alter their language based upon who they are talking to, which may include another mechanic, but I like to believe that mechanics will likely speak to people in their lives other than other mechanics and customers.

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Hrm. I thought I started the mechanics thing with two mechanics talking to one another.

Hussar said:

Having run The World's Largest Dungeon, I would love to say that all my descriptions were there first type

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First, thanks for a direct answer, to a question about an example! Positions explained in reference to examples are more helpful to me, than positions argued in reference to dictionary definitions, which is why I included Maxperson's carved staff in version #1.

That said: I mean #1 and #2 as points on a spectrum, not as the endpoints of the spectrum. Aldarc evaluated #1 as "Your description here honestly seems incredibly conversational." Would you prefer *more* florid text than #1? Always, or situationally, or never? Should the narration foreshadow the wielding of Checkov's Intricately Carved Feywood Staff?

Hussar said:

And it works both ways. I just recently parted ways with a player who absolutely refused to engage in the game at any level higher than basic conversation.

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I was at first baffled at the thread's emphasis on GM narration and apparent disregard of player narration. Either one can be literary. The emphasis makes sense only insofar as the GM has a task, informing player agency and resolving action declarations, which the GM can *neglect* if the GM excessively allocates limited resources towards florid narration.

I thought of the game ZORK from the 1980s, and similar games. The narration ranges from spare to florid, from "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door", to the description of the grue as a "sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth". The game's interactive parser can only understand simple, spare player action declarations, such as (GO) NORTH, SEARCH MAILBOX or HIT TROLL WITH SWORD.

When humans sit at a table with each other, I prefer a player whose responses include "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead!", over a player whose responses are limited to the spareness of GO NORTH or HIT TROLL WITH SWORD. Going out on a limb: when the literary aspect of a TRPG session reaches excellence, player contributions are often - always? - part of that excellence..

Though not *only* with florid language, since florid vocabulary is not the *only* literary device, it's just an easy device for us to vary in this thread for the purpose of quickly demonstrating different points on the spectrum of literary versus conversational.

Maxperson said:

Hrm. I thought I started the mechanics thing with two mechanics talking to one another.

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Auto mechanics... or game mechanics?

Riley37 said:

Auto mechanics... or game mechanics?

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Auto mechanics. If my game mechanics start talking, I'm checking myself into a 72 hour hold.

Hussar said:

A qallupilluit is an absolutely terrifying monster from Inuit folklore - a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice. If you drop that into your horror game for the first time, I don't think "a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice" is going to engage your players, do you?

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Why not?

This take me, at least, back to some of the points [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] was making fairly early in this thread. If I'm going to use a qallupilluit in my game, I will want to establish a situation which gives it some sort of heft or significance. There are very many ways of doing that (and obviously RPG system will have a significant impact, on top of system-independent techniques). In my experience, an elaborate or literary description isn't one of them.

If the sudden appearance of a terrifying hag from under the pack ice isn't - for whatever of innumerable possible reasons - going to engage the players, why would, or should, piling on the evocative words make a difference?

Hussar said:

But, that's the point. All the "literary" work has already been done for you so you can shorthand "zombie". But, as soon as you get outside of common genre stuff, you're back to having to describe it. A qallupilluit is an absolutely terrifying monster from Inuit folklore - a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice. If you drop that into your horror game for the first time, I don't think "a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice" is going to engage your players, do you?

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Yes, description is necessary. But as I’ve said, I don’t think that description generally qualifies, unless it’s very wrought.


Describing the qallupilluit one way or another may or may not engage the players. What I have the qallupilluit do is likely going to be the bigger factor in that regard.

Hussar said:

But, that's the point. All the "literary" work has already been done for you so you can shorthand "zombie". But, as soon as you get outside of common genre stuff, you're back to having to describe it. A qallupilluit is an absolutely terrifying monster from Inuit folklore - a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice. If you drop that into your horror game for the first time, I don't think "a kind of hag that lives under the pack ice" is going to engage your players, do you?

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It's not necessarily the literary work that has been done, but, rather, the cognitive ques are likely already present for "zombie" as part of the player's Euro-American culture. Zombie films, IME, probably have a greater mass cultural impact than zombies in literature.

You are correct that a "qallupilluit" will likely be unfamiliar to those same players. Where I think you are mistaken, however, is that you make an argumentative leap between this unfamiliarity to "ergo you must then supply literary-esque narration to engage the players about the creature" (paraphrasing). You will likely give some description of the physical appearance, but I suspect that the important part will be when you say, "it grabs the child and drags it back into the water" or "it appears to be lying in wait for the child by the hole in the ice." I don't think that you have to go to literary language to communicate a monster or why they should care.

If I told the players, "You see a githyanki. It sees you and the githyanki charges at you with a knife," I suspect that in that moment the players would understand the critical part with that fictional framing of that scene without either knowing or caring what a githyanki is or its associated literature: i.e., "This damn thing is changing at me with a knife. F*ck that crap. I pull out my bow and shoot it."

Lanefan said:

One thing a description or narration should strive for, however else it's delivered or phrased, is to answer any obvious questions before they need to be asked.

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Indeed. A narration which fails to anticipate and address obvious questions, is (in general) a narration which fails to establish situation as an opportunity for player agency and PC initiative. (Aldarc used a more precise formula, which I cannot recall verbatim, but please take my phrasing as an approximation of his.)

A narration could fail at this task by excessive spareness, as with my example. The original says "exits", without clarifying whether those exits are passages, doors, or some other exit. (There's actually one passage and one door. Perhaps as a veteran DM you *habitually* improve on such a spare description.) I almost quoted _Thy Dungeonman_: "Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS."

The narration of Orc and Pie can fail, if it merely establishes the presence of an orc and a pie; the orc is *guarding* the pie, rather than, say, baking the pie, or actively looking for a customer so that the orc can sell the pie. (A player might *initiate* an attempt to purchase the pie, but the GM should leave that to the player.)

Could a narration also fail at this task by excessively florid or otherwise ambitious language? Could literary pretensions, poorly executed, leave the players without a clear prompt, needing to ask clarifying questions before they can proceed with action declarations? I can imagine important details getting lost in the shuffle, if the DM is going into Lovecraftian style regarding the exits, without corresponding emphasis on the unspeakably eldritch runes carved onto the staff ("you find yourself wondering: carved by human hands, or by some intelligence more ancient than mankind?").

Aldarc said:

If I told the players, "You see a githyanki. It sees you and the githyanki charges at you with a knife," I suspect that in that moment the players would understand the critical part with that fictional framing of that scene without either knowing or caring what a githyanki is or its associated literature: i.e., "This damn thing is changing at me with a knife. F*ck that crap. I pull out my bow and shoot it."

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On another hand, Eric the Paladin died, when he responded to a gazebo, by pulling out his bow and shooting it, without making sure he understood what the DM meant by "gazebo".

Eric the Paladin lived and died by "anything other than scenery is a level-appropriate monster for me to fight". If a githyanki sees my low-level character and charges with a knife, then attempting to surrender or talk it out of fighting has higher odds of survival than a fight-or-flight response.