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lowkey13
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(1) As the OP says, this thread is a response to multiple threads.I’m not. Usually, when I create a thread based on another one, I refer to it.
[MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] - I'm glad at least one poster found my OP clear enough!
To elaborate - and I see what I'm saying in this post as consistent with the OP, and hopefully you will also - I don't see RPGing as primarily performance (in the artistic sense). Not for the GM - of course a melifluous GM can provide entertainment, but I don't see that as core. And likewise on the player side - thespianism is (in my view) secondary, whereas engaging the fiction from the position/perspective of the character is absolutely central.
Literary work and artistic performance have something in common - the goal to evoke a response at least in part through the quality of form. (The two can overlap when the performance is, say, a play.)Performance is also absent from literary works, so I don't see how your viewpoint makes RPGs un-literary. Engaging with the fiction is precisely the response that a literary writer is hoping to evoke in the reader, after all.
The writer's purpose is to lure the reader into the work and compel him/her to read on. I think both REH and EM Forster have successful openings in this regard. Moreso than my retellings.Engaging with the fiction is precisely the response that a literary writer is hoping to evoke in the reader, after all.
In RPGing, the fiction is engaged with qua fiction, not qua work.if there's a fiction there in the first place to be engaged with, it's because the GM and players crafted it through playing - which, again, doesn't feel like the opposite of literary.
My answer to the question in the thread title is a firm No.
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.
Literary work and artistic performance have something in common - the goal to evoke a response at least in part through the quality of form. (The two can overlap when the performance is, say, a play.)
Word choice, and meter, and assonance, and sentence length, and the like, are formal features of language that affect how a work evokes a response. Here are two opening sentences, by two different authors (REH and EM Forster). Each has a certain "something" to it:One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night.
Some recent threads have discussed aspects of GM and player narration in RPGing. Which hase prompted me to start this thread.
My answer to the question in the thread title is a firm No.
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.
What matters to me is that the players feel the significance of the situations the GM describes - that they feel the pull to action, and the threats of inaction. That is, that the situation engage and motivate the players as players, not as an audience to a performance. And player narration should, in my view, engage with and build on this fiction in ways that display the player's view of the fiction, perhaps challenge other players (and even the GM), that make the other pariticpants go "I didn't see that coming!"
This is how I see RPGs, with their emphasis on participation in the creation of a fiction that is structured through distinct player an d GM roles, working. And it's how I see them differening from more directly narrative mediums such as books and films.
What you describe here is certainly what I have in mind by referring to a "literary endeavour" or a "performance in the artistic sense".As a PC or a DM I can and do make up, on the fly, prose of a quality closer to those opening lines you quoted than your later examples, as well as other dialogue and descriptions which sound more like something you'd read in a novel. So yes, I freestyle novel quality prose to my table, which I realize puts me in the minority if not outright marks me as a freak.
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For what it's worth, I also usually make an effort to ensure that my dialogue when portraying a character is delivered as well as it would be by a professional actor, including body language, accents, etcetera. Of course I'm a retired veteran LARPer and LARP, at least any one worth playing, is a theatrical endeavor.
I think (1) and (2) are - at their core - about extrapolating from established to new fiction by reference to theme/interest. That fits well with my description, in my post not far upthread of your post, of the GM's narration inviting the players to engage as a protagonist. What stirs the player, what rouses emotion, is not the fluency of the GM's narration but the power of that invitation.Good OP for discussion!
If you broadly distilled TTRPGing down to its absolute minimum constituent parts, I think, as you've said, the answer has to be a firm "no."
However, I think there is going to be some overlap in specific moments of play that may not be possible to divorce entirely from an investment in quality of form.
For instance, a few things come to mind.
1) When I'm deriving a dungeon/adventuring site in Torchbearer, I'm using the content generation methodology expressed in the book. However, when I'm filling in blanks of theme and sorting out a unique Twists table, I'm referencing (a) PC build components (Beliefs, Nature et al) and (b) prior play resolution.
2) When I'm running a first session of Dungeon World, that Earthdeep Prison Colony that was cleaved in two by the Lightning Borne Cleft one of my players added to the map, and their subsequent ideas of what that may entail is central for setting and situation to come. It may also hook into the Druid's Defeat and Unnatural Threat.
When a Discern Realities requires a response from me and I ask a question about the familiar NPC chain-gang they encounter crawling from the cleft in the opening scene of play, I discover that the Fighter did hard time here and made enemies everywhere. I'm using that.
When we review the End of Session questions, resolve Bonds and Alignment and write down our answers about how they know this NPC that is running, the answers to these questions has relevance to future Front (merely because I know what they're interested in or how they see the fiction that just emerged from the last session).
3) I think understanding how pacing and a dramatic arc compels emotion and investment in content (even if you aren't scripting them to railroad a set of players through) are extremely important aspects of both GMing and writing a game (particularly a game like My Life With Master where you're running through a pre-conceived, but not pre-rendered, thematic arc with a diversity of ultimate outcomes).
How do you think the 3 above intersect (or not) with your premise?