Well tell me what you mean by performance, then.Ah. We’re back to performance = funny voices and everything else is apparently content.
Well if that’s the definition you’re insisting on working from then sure you’re 100% right.
What do you mean by the performance of a character revealing the character to be (say) a dwarf?
Who do you have conversations with?I reject the notion that rpgs are closer to conversations than performances. They just aren’t. The purpose of a conversation is to convey information. The purpose of performance is to elicit emotional response.
In the conversations I have, only rarely is the purpose to convey information (in the way that eg a newspaper or an encyclopedia does that). Typically the purpose is to generate emotional responses - to affirm friendships, to support someone who's upset, to share in someone else's happiness, etc.
When I ask someone "How're you doing?" or when I say "It's rainy outside, isn't it!" I'm not looking for information.
Again, this is very strange to me. It seems a completely distorted account of human interaction.There’s so much more to an rpg than just the transference of information. I would hope that players always have in mind that they are there to help the table have a good time, not just themselves.
One important reason I converse with people is because it is pleasant. But it's not pleasant because of any performance. I generally prefer sincerity to performance in conversation.
I cannot reconcile the idea that literary or performance are so much less important than the information being conveyed.
At this point I don't know what you mean by "presentation".See, I think we're talking past each other. Presentation is simply the manner in which you convey information from the DM to the players (or vice versa). Presentation can be full on thespianism or bare bones minimalism, but, in any case, it's still presentation. You and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], for some reason seem to be stuck on this idea that presentation needs to be speaking in funny voices. It's not. Presentation is the how, content is the what.
The most concrete examples you've given are of token design and map design - but those are exactly the sorts of things that I am denying are central to RPGing.
In the context of playing a PC, I don't know what you have in mind. I've referred to (what I regard as) the centrality of action declaration, but you've not engaged with that, nor said what you think is involved in presentation here.
What you're arguing here is that my claim is self-contradictory. I don't agree.Now, your preferred presentation style and my preferred presentation style might be different, sure, but, we both still HAVE a presentation style. The notion that you can convey content without any presentation style at all or that how you convey that information doesn't matter is proven false by your own statement that presenting one way will cause you to hate the game while presenting the exact same information another way will cause you to like the game.
If you were correct, then all conversation must involve presentation/performance. But self-evidently it doesn't: there's a real difference between conversation as performance or artifice (the salon) and ordinary, sincere conversation.
So, in the end, the content isn't the only reason you enjoy the game. The presentation matters just as much.
Why should the GM be trying to evoke the player's feeling by virtue of intonation?The players go into a tower and find a letter that claims that one PC might be the illegitimate child of Evard. Interesting content. But, presentated without any emotion, any attempt to evoke any sort of feeling or reaction, simply as bare bones description - You find a letter. It's to your mother. It says you are Evard's child. - is going to fall very, very flat in some groups and do well in others, as evidenced in this thread.
If I tell you - the real person - that I've discovered something about your ancestry, you're likely to be excited about it whether or not I have a drum-roll lead-up to my big reveal. It's exciting because it's something you care about, not because it's something in respect of which I'm evoking feelings via my performance.
If the only reason that RPG players care about a situation is because the GM has "sold" it to them like a film director, then I think that something is going wrong. As I said upthread, I would advise that GM to work on his/her situations, not on his/her soundtrack.
Well I think I might see a difference, but it may be a different one from what you're seeing.Does that explain sufficiently why the distinction is being made?