Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Candians - from Candyland, maybe?
Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?
- Thread starter pemerton
- Start date
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
The scenario was a conversation between two mechanics, though.
hawkeyefan
Legend
That’s understandable. I’m trying not to assume that there are only two views or that anyone is speaking for anyone else because I think that’s led to a lot of confusion throughout.
That’s a good question. Honestly, I think it depends on the situation and what you’re trying to do. I think that some variation of word choice is certain, as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I have recently discussed.
I think with any of those examples, I’d likely try to establish the tone early on. I think the genre or content will do a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard, but I’d likely try to describe things in a way that would reinforce the desired tone. But I think that would be very front-loaded for me. Probably at each level of the game....campaign level, and then again at the session or scene level.
But I think that my goal as a GM is to convey the ideas as quickly and clearly as possible. I’m not going to spend 25 words to describe the monster approaching the party when “zombie” will do. So I want to get to that place where it all happens quickly and we proceed. I will be descriptive as needed, but I don’t really want to linger on narration once we’re past the scene-setting point.
If the village in the Marvel game is a small, remote, sinister mountain village in (say) Latveria, then probably yes.
I use the words I need to describe the situation. These will depend on mood, whim, what has previously been said, what seems to matter in the current situation, etc, as well as (obviously) upon what I want to describe. That is to say, the words I use will depend on all the normal determinants of spontaneous human communication.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Situationally dependent.
As far as possible I try to have enough prep done well ahead of time (as in, even as far back as setting design) that a session can largely run itself if it has to; meaning that if they're either in mid-adventure (meaning the adventure's already as prepped as it's going to be) or in town during downtime I can largely wing it all. But, if I have to prep something and I'm crunched for time I'll prep content, and trust to my (sometimes limited!) ability to narrate/describe that content in an interesting enough manner to keep people engaged.
That said, wordcraft isn't foreign to me: I'm a (so-so) poet and (reasonably good, or so I've been told) lyricist when I'm outside the RPG realm...so winging the descriptions etc. isn't as hard for me as it might be for some.
Hussar
Legend
Ah, oops. Missed that part. Then fair enough, the jargon would be perfectly understandable. Like I said, two baseball fans can slide into incomprehensibility pretty quickly.
OTOH, though, those two mechanics are not going to use other language (excluding jargon) to talk about the cars when plain conversation language will do. It's doubtful that "scintillating" will be used instead of "nice paint job", for example. The language choice (again, excluding the jargon) will not really shift into lower frequency words. Really, that 2-5% of language that is outside of the 5000 most frequent words that is typical for most conversation, will likely consist mostly of the jargon words.
Aldarc
Legend
The thing is, Hussar, you're assuming a lot about the nature of the conversation and inserting things into my text that was not necessarily there, aren't you? In literature, we refer to that as "eisegesis," and that is fairly typically frowned upon. Nowhere did I establish, for example, that the automechanic is talking to a customer. The automechanic may be talking to a friend, a family member, or even their barber, but I did not establish that the automechanic was providing a diagnosis or explanation to a customer. I only established that the automechanic's conversational vocabulary will be unique due to their own contextual experiences.
So how exactly have you actually shown that the word "wield," for example, would not appear in regular conversation or that it's being purposefully chosen to evoke reactions?
And I think you are also making (again) the error of equating vocabulary size as a benchmark for what is or isn't considered "conversational vocabulary," which I spoke against earlier.
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.
Last edited:
The thread doesn't ask does, or can, RPGing have a literary aspect? It asks whether it is a literary endeavour. That is: does RPGing aim at possessing the virtues and exhibitng the qualities of literature? (Note that - because in this thread it seems to need to be repeated - something can have an aim that it does not maximally achieve. For instance, when high school students write stories they often aim at possessing the virtues and exhibiting the qualities of literature, but this doesn't mean that the stories they've written are good literature or "high art".)
Suppose we ask whether running for a bus is a sporting endeavour. Clearly it shares some aspects with sport - exertion, running, sweating - but nevertheless seems to me not to be a sporting endeavour. It is not competitive, it doesn't really have a notion of personal best or excellence, etc. Unlike sport, it is a primiarlliy instrumental actitivy. And it has some virtues that don't look relevant to sport at all, like not colliding with other pedestrians.
Now we can set up borderline cases. Maybe somene asserts that parkour is, or can be, a sport, and that one of the virtues in parkour is not colliding with other people. And then they point to some cinematic depiction of running for a bus - I'm thining of some variant of Matthew Broderick's run home at the end of Ferris Bueller - and argue that it's really parkour. That would be interesting, and might take the conversation in a new direction, but as someone who has run for a lot of buses in his life it wouldn't change my mind that those were not sporting endeavouors!
Now RPGing is not purely or primarily instrumental - like literary endeavours it has an aesthetic purpose (at least outside of its original dungeoncrawling form). The OP asserts that that purpose, and hence the means to realise it, are different from the literary case.
In my own experience, when this occurs it's very often due to weak situation, weak framing, little or no call to action.
Hussar
Legend
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?
Similar Threads
AD6_gamerati_skyscraper
Recent & Upcoming Releases
-
April 16 2024 -
May 31 2024 -
June 3 2024 -
June 4 2024 -
June 18 2024 -
July 16 2024 -
September 17 2024 -
October 1 2024 -
November 12 2024 -
February 18 2025
