CandyLaser
Adventurer
I do find it useful to talk about framing scenes explicitly from time to time. I'm currently running a game of Fellowship, which is a PbtA game designed to emulate heroic fiction, most notably Lord of the Rings as well as a lot of JRPGs and cartoons like Avatar and She-Ra. One thing that makes Fellowship somewhat unique is that the GM has a playbook of their own; the 'default' GM playbook is called the Overlord, and it represents the GM's character, who fills the Sauron role in the heroic story being told. You can't have your big villain on screen all the time, so it's helpful to cut away from the PCs every now and then to show what the Overlord is up to. In our last session, for instance, while the PCs were busy helping a village of slime people escape from the Overlord's armies, the Overlord was busy elsewhere in the world, so I provided a little scene that started something like this: "We see a sweeping view of a large city on a hill. The city is mostly built of marble and stone, but brightly colored banners, flags, and lights are everywhere. Even in the middle of the day, there are fireworks going off over the skyline. And outside the city, overlooking it from a nearby ridge, we see [the Overlord]..." But this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.As someone who does think about story beats and narrative flow and stuff like that…yeah I don’t think anyone talks like that?
We just drop into character headspace or not as fits the mood, and pretend to be heroic fantasy weirdos, instead of mundane real life weirdos.
Edited to add: there are also games like Fiasco that, in my experience, encourage people to engage in a little bit of meta-talk about scenes, beats, etc. I don't know of any PbtA games that are that overt about it, though.
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