I do not know how we can meaningfully analyze play without taking a critical look at what's actually happening between the very real people sitting around a very real table having an actual conversation. Part of that includes their motives. That also includes the unspoken cultural expectations that inform play. Is the player trying to get something in particular done, perhaps building some relationships with the locals they can use later? Are they trying to get the lay of the land? Are they just trying to make a statement about their character? Are they giving the GM an opportunity to share some of their world building? Are they biting a plot hook? Looking for general opportunities to exercise some protagonism? What sort of response are they expecting from the GM? This sort of stuff absolutely impacts play.
Unsurprisingly I agree with all of this.
My general approach to this sort of thing will depend on the game and how I am running it.
I tend to have a "default" approach - my own GMing habits and practices, formalised to some extent by the systems I'm running.
More coming up on how system affects my approach.
I do not generally make the same distinctions that pemerton does between mere color, framing, and action declaration.
Just for clarity (probably unnecessary): these aren't formal categories that I use at the table (subject to system considerations coming up [-]shortly[/-] below). They are analytic categories I use to help explain what I'm doing when posting, and occasionally they will inform my judgement calls as GM (but generally I am following intuitions, which have been developed over many years of using a roughly similar approach).
(And my sense of these as analytic categories has obviously been informed by other RPG writers, especially Luke Crane and Ron Edwards.)
For me, colour is stuff that is established in the fiction, but isn't actually at stake in, or contributing to, the crunch of play. In my games, setting maps generally have this status; so do a lot of setting details. On the other hand, by "framing" I am trying to get at those elements of the fictional situation that the GM is deliberately using to push the players - forcing some sort of decision - or perhaps through them a bone.
Eg in a session I GMed yesterday (following on from the OP), a PC was in prison. The PC can shapechange into a falcon, and - as I can tell even before he mentions it - the player is thinking that his PC will change shape and fly out through the bars. I explain that timber is cheaper than metal, and that the door is a heavy timber one. That the door is
timber is colour (part of establishing verisimilitudinous fiction, immersion in the setting, etc); that the door has no opening a falcon might fly through, though is
framing. As a GM I'm developing the consequences of the failed checks around dealing with the watch, and pushing the player harder if he wants his PC to escape.
The player declared a Circles check - it seemed possible that his clerical acquaintance, who sees it as her holy mission to heal the sick, might do the rounds of the watch house - but the check failed. So no clerical friend came buy, and instead the magistrate decided that the PC can rot in their for some indeterminate amount of time. The fact that it is the magistrate who decides this is, at this point, colour - it's just establishing a fictional element to make sense (in the fiction) of the consequence of the failed check, which is that no friend is coming, and no one else is going to open the door any time soon (so the PC can't easily sneak out invisibly). The magistrate's reasons were that this PC is a known troublemaker, a member of the sorcerous cabal who was banished from the city by the cabal's leader (ie the mage who owns the tower) over a year ago (this was the first session of play, following another failed Circles check), but seems to have made his way back into the city and caused more trouble! This is partly colour - it's reinforcing established elements of the fiction, and keeping a key NPC (the leader of the cabal,who is betrothed to marry the Gynarch of Hardby) at the forefront of everyone's minds - but also sowing the seeds of future framing, involving perhaps that NPC or the magistrate or the government of Hardby more generally (which includes the Gynarch, an important NPC who so far has always been completely off-screen - so to date she's just colour, but almost certainly framing-in-waiting).
Another example: when the PC (and player) learns that the magistrate is leaving him there to rot, I mention that bread is being passed into the cell every couple of days. (I hadn't mentioned a hatch, but the player didn't query this so I think we're both roughly on the same page in what we're imaging here.) Now in the cell with him is the assassin of the brother, consciousness regained. Given that the PC has a Belief about the assassin helping him summon his brother's dead spirit, her presence in the cell is not just colour but
framing. An interaction ensues - it looked like it might be a social conflict over a bargain, but it went in a different direction: she said that she would help him only if he told here where he had hidden Thelon's Orb, a cursed elven gem that enhances both the management of estates and the summoning of demons, which she had found among the wedding gifts (to be explained in the post below) but which the other PC had then taken from her and hidden in the altar of Hardby's cathedral. Because of the curse, it requires an extremely difficult will-based check to relinquish the Orb - so by having the assassin respond to the request for help in this way, I turned a bit of player-introduced colour ("I hide the orb in the altar") into framing. The player then devoted a LOT of player-side resources into the resulting will check to renounce the Orb, and succeeded, and so was able to sincerely make the promise the assassin wanted, in return for her promise to help with summoning. But the summoning requires drawing a circle; and they have nothing to draw with - and I made a point of having the assassin say that she would
not try to work with a circle drawn in bread crumbs - they needed to escape and the PC then supply her with proper chalks and other pigments for drawing summoning circles. This turned the bread into a potential element of framing - the PC could have pushed for social conflict on this point - but the player (and therefore the PC) accepted the assassin's request and so instead they came up with a plan to escape, and he promised to find her proper equipment for drawing circles.
Unfortunately, the escape check failed and so, just as the assassin is trying to pick the lock with nothing but the buckles from her armour
something bad happens (to be established and resolved next session).
Anyway, that's a somewhat lengthy series of examples to try and show how the distinction between
colour and
framing plays out in my GMing. In
his account of "the standard narrativistic model" - which is basically scene-framing - Eero Tuovinen talks about the role of the GM being "to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments . . . by introducing complications." I would say that my categories of "colour" and "framing" are ways of thinking about this. The backstory includes colour and past framing elements - but it is by changing stuff from mere colour to framing that
complications are introduced that will
provoke thematic moments.
As far as a game being player-driven or GM-driven - which relates also to my current discussion with [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] - what matters to me is the basis on which content is introduced as part of framing, or moves from being mere colour to framing. If that's all being determined by the GM more-or-less unilaterally I would see the game as GM-driven. If the GM is riffing off themes, concerns, and/or story elements that the players have brought into the game then I see the game as player-driven. In the examples above, the framing and hence the game is a player-driven one (eg
No, the door isn't one you can fly through as a falcon;
No, because you failed a check you're stuck in this prison indefinitely, and I'm making it true in the fiction that that is because of your past shenanigans involving NPCs and social dynamics that you've made central to our shared fiction;
To get the help you want from the assassin, you have to relinquish the Orb that you chose to take from her and that you hid in the cathedral altar;
You've accepted the assassin's insistence that she won't summon without proper circle-drawing equipment, and so you've made yourself hostage to her ability to pick the lock and get you both out of prison; etc).
As I said, a long example - but I hope for Campbell and for other participants in the thread it offers something concrete as an example of the sort of thing I'm trying to get at in the OP, and also in light of the way the thread has developed from that.
And to finish this post: the promised comment on system. Marvel Heroic/Cortex Plus has the notion of a
distinction. All (or nearly all) characters have distinctions - features or attributes that can be strengths or flaws (a bit like Fate aspects) - and part of what is involved in building a dice pool is including a dice for the relevant distinction that informs the action being declared. (If the distinction is helping - eg when the berserker in my
viking game is Touched by the Spirit of Battle while fighting goblins - it gives a big die in the pool; when it is hindering - eg when the berserker is so Angry! that he can't think straight - then it gives a small die but also a "plot point" (=, very roughly, a fate point). The player is the one who gets to choose helping vs hindering, based on his/her sense of what fits the fiction.)
There are also Scene Distinctions. These are established by the GM when framing a scene (normally three of them). Both GM and players can incorporate these, too, into their dice pools in various ways. In my session yesterday, at one point most of the PCs were deep in a dungeon surrounded by Darkness, and Webs; and The Dungeon Itself was Against Them.
These Scene Distinctions in a very real and mechanically significant way separate "framing" from mere colour. Here's an example.
While most of the PCs were dealing with the (web-creating) giant spiders, a fourth PC was in a different part of the dungeon on his own. He had earlier been run off by the berserker after refusing to treat the latter's wounds (at the table, this was the result of the players making a series of plays for XP - the healer player got XP for following his greedy instincts (to not heal for free) even though that placed a fellow party member at risk; and the berserker player then got XP for threatening an ally with violence - plus stuff on the GM side: after confirming that the threat of violence had genuinely been made I spent a GM-side resource to split the party, in the fiction describing this as the healer PC having been run off). That PC stumbled into a chamber with an Eeerie Phosphorescence, a Strange Mist, and a Charnell Smell. And I described various niches in the wall, about 2' wide by 1' high, and a body length or so deep.
The niches are part of the fiction, but - because not a Scene Distinction - they are mere colour. To actually leverage them, the player would have to succeed at a check to establish an asset (eg High Above the Floor, Having Climbed up the Niches; or, as in the session yesterday, a Realisation that the Niches are Full of Bodies Apt to be Necromantically Animated).
I've never run or played Fate, so I don't know quite how close this is to how Fate works. But as a feature of the system it's still something I'm getting used to. It gives the GM a different sort of influence over the situation from (eg) Burning Wheel or even 4e. It tends to make the game less about
the struggles and concerns of the PCs, and more about
what happens to the PCs in these dramatic environments they find themselves in. It's certainly less demanding on the players, I think, and less intense.
I'm going to do another post which responds to other aspects of [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s post above, and also elaborates a bit more about "intense" RPGing.
