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Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?
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<blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7610841" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>But I am just talking to my players and I run games without trying to advance some kind of plot of story on the party. I want to be surprised by the outcomes as much as my players. And I don't want my communication style to feel like words on a page. Obviously, I am not sitting there with a frown coldly issuing details. I am engaged in a conversation. I am just not thinking in the terms you appear to be thinking while I do so. Again, I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand. I don't see my game as high literature, but I also don't see it as emulating anything to do with novels either. It is a totally different medium.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: I want to give some specific examples here so it is more apparent what is going on in my game and move away from the generalizations and abstract principles we are fighting over. I just want to add for clarification here since emulating novels was mentioned. There are elements of other media that get borrowed of course. All of my campaigns presently are wuxia or horror. I like drawing on genre. But I just don't worry about the structures or techniques of the mediums involved. You can totally do that. And it is fine. It just isn't how I like emulating genre. I prefer to bake the physics of genre into the GM tools and mechanics, and I prefer to still view this as a game where the outcomes are not determined and where I can't really chart out plots in advance. So for example I have a tool I call the Grudge Table. Anytime players kill someone, cause trouble or violate the principles of the martial world in a way that causes someone to take exception, I add that person or their sect to the Grudge Encounter table (which is rolled on periodically). This ensures a genre element (the cycle of revenge and feuding clans of the martial world) recurs in the campaign. But I don't use it in a literary way. I will also occasionally throw in dramatically appropriate developments. But I am very careful when I do this because I have big concerns about the GM railroading or trying to force a story on the party. My way of handling that is to treat this aspect of the game as part of the setting cosmology (for example if players bump into an NPC at an oddly dramatically appropriate time, I treat that as a fated relationship---so you can expect in the future that character will come up). At the end of the day, what it is about for me is understanding this is a different medium than novels, and that things which are assumed to be necessarily tools or techniques in that medium, won't necessarily work in this one. You can still have the excitement you find in novels. You can still have lots of the things that go on. I just think it works better if they happen in a way that fits the medium. One thing I want to preserve is the fact that this is a game. And the biggest thing that needs respecting is the ability of players to try things and get results you were not planning or expecting. I want my players to feel like the scenario is unfolding fairly and they actions are adjudicated fairly. And I don't want to narrate story to them as much as facilitate the game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bedrockgames, post: 7610841, member: 85555"] But I am just talking to my players and I run games without trying to advance some kind of plot of story on the party. I want to be surprised by the outcomes as much as my players. And I don't want my communication style to feel like words on a page. Obviously, I am not sitting there with a frown coldly issuing details. I am engaged in a conversation. I am just not thinking in the terms you appear to be thinking while I do so. Again, I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand. I don't see my game as high literature, but I also don't see it as emulating anything to do with novels either. It is a totally different medium. EDIT: I want to give some specific examples here so it is more apparent what is going on in my game and move away from the generalizations and abstract principles we are fighting over. I just want to add for clarification here since emulating novels was mentioned. There are elements of other media that get borrowed of course. All of my campaigns presently are wuxia or horror. I like drawing on genre. But I just don't worry about the structures or techniques of the mediums involved. You can totally do that. And it is fine. It just isn't how I like emulating genre. I prefer to bake the physics of genre into the GM tools and mechanics, and I prefer to still view this as a game where the outcomes are not determined and where I can't really chart out plots in advance. So for example I have a tool I call the Grudge Table. Anytime players kill someone, cause trouble or violate the principles of the martial world in a way that causes someone to take exception, I add that person or their sect to the Grudge Encounter table (which is rolled on periodically). This ensures a genre element (the cycle of revenge and feuding clans of the martial world) recurs in the campaign. But I don't use it in a literary way. I will also occasionally throw in dramatically appropriate developments. But I am very careful when I do this because I have big concerns about the GM railroading or trying to force a story on the party. My way of handling that is to treat this aspect of the game as part of the setting cosmology (for example if players bump into an NPC at an oddly dramatically appropriate time, I treat that as a fated relationship---so you can expect in the future that character will come up). At the end of the day, what it is about for me is understanding this is a different medium than novels, and that things which are assumed to be necessarily tools or techniques in that medium, won't necessarily work in this one. You can still have the excitement you find in novels. You can still have lots of the things that go on. I just think it works better if they happen in a way that fits the medium. One thing I want to preserve is the fact that this is a game. And the biggest thing that needs respecting is the ability of players to try things and get results you were not planning or expecting. I want my players to feel like the scenario is unfolding fairly and they actions are adjudicated fairly. And I don't want to narrate story to them as much as facilitate the game. [/QUOTE]
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