D&D 4E Pemertonian Scene Framing and 4e DMing Restarted

[MarkB]

I think my least favorite part of that AP, before we just stopped playing entirely, was the travel to the Isle of Dread. It was horribly boring. We arrived at the Isle, did some stuff and just called it quits.

That was the limit of our progress too, minus the "did some bits". We left off on arrival at the island, and never picked the campaign up again.

 

[S'mon]

the bad guys were no longer a sandboxy force of evil, they were just dramatic set dressing. If I needed 10 more wyvern-riding evil knights I just slapped them in there, never mind that the original concept said their were exactly 13 of these guys named this, that and the other.

Yeah... the weird thing is, I've been finding recently with running more PSF 4e, when building encounters as this-is-what-is-dramatically-appropriate (or Combat As Sport-y) rather than this-is-the-resources-the-badguys-have (or Combat as War-y), the fights actually seem to have greater versimilitude or feeling of 'truthiness' . I think this is because when running it process-sim there is such a great temptation to 'throw it all in there' - have all 300 orcs or all 24 Darksword Knight Dragonriders, attack the high level PCs, ignoring the Clausewitzian 'friction' that in reality makes it nearly impossible for a force to concentrate all their assets at a single point. Dramatist scene framing short-circuits the whole simulationist CAW system, but IME tends strongly to versimilitudinous encounters, at least the way I do it. I guess that's because versimilitude is a big part of 'dramatically appropriate', at least for me.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Discussing the Savage Tide AP got me thinking, and I had a nice big post typed up about it, but then the forum crapped out and ate it when I went to post, so I'll just give the short version. The gist of it was;

Do you think that if the players in a game don't know they're in a module or AP, that it would be indistinguishable from a scene-framed approach, as long as the outcome of a given scene flows logically according to the narrative?

 

[Storminator]

Yeah... the weird thing is, I've been finding recently with running more PSF 4e, when building encounters as this-is-what-is-dramatically-appropriate (or Combat As Sport-y) rather than this-is-the-resources-the-badguys-have (or Combat as War-y), the fights actually seem to have greater versimilitude or feeling of 'truthiness' .

I think with any process-sim there's so much that gets ignored or handwaved away that it's hard to get a good approximation of how CAW would really go. With scene framing, at least each individual scene feels right, so the whole doesn't feel too wrong. With a subtly wrong process the whole thing can careen out of control without it being clear what the real underlying problem is.

PS

 

[S'mon]

Discussing the Savage Tide AP got me thinking, and I had a nice big post typed up about it, but then the forum crapped out and ate it when I went to post, so I'll just give the short version. The gist of it was;

This is about what I'm hoping for when I run 'Curse of the Crimson Throne' some time in the next 6-12 months, hopefully - that it flows so well that the players never feel constrained, the way I felt playing Rise of the Runelords recently. No doubt I'll be asking for advice on how to achieve that, probably on ENW! Current thoughts include

- enmeshing the PCs in with major PCs right from the start, so it feels 'all about them' , all about the PCs.
- be willing to depart drastically from the 'script', treating it as a buffet to sample not a railtrack to follow, while looking for suitable points to resume scripted timeline.

Early days yet, but on the first point I'm thinking that I've seen stuff like this suggested by Perkins and other WoTC GMs; might have been in DMG2 they suggested offering specific backgrounds tailored to the campaign. I'm thinking that major NPCs could be old flames, old foes, old mentors and battle comrades etc. It looks like the AP should work best in a sort of 'Noir Batman' style, for which a relationship web like that could be ideal.

 

[Kurtomatic]

S'mon, there is a treasure-trove of shared GM wisdom for each AP on Paizo's forums, particularly CotCT. You would not be the first to attempt that kind of surgery.

I'm sure you knew that already!

One advantage of Paizo's APs is, despite whatever flaws they have, there is a very active collective of GMs sharing ideas and experiences about the content on Paizo's forums.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think Paizo is pretty well aware of the various ways an AP could be written or used. I mean Stolen Lands (at least the first part, I haven't seen the later parts, so Kingmaker) is just a pure old-school hexcrawl with a bit of plot. The PCs are given an overall mission and set loose. There are some things they're going to do, one way or another, like conflict with the Stag Lord's bandits. I don't know how tough the encounters were, but reading through it they didn't seem horribly nasty, doable but maybe hard. Still, I'd assume straight up difficulty wasn't the main point. Mostly the party will probably find ways around problems or just avoid some of the less useful encounters.

I'd think the DM could also pretty easily run the whole thing as a basic railroad if he wanted (IE just be a bit vague about the geography and have the PCs stumble into each major encounter area serially). It COULD also be more pro-active with the bad guys being more active, as-written they just show up at the start to get a conflict going pretty much. Finally you could both make the geography vague AND push the dynamic aspect of the bad guys, create some additional plot tension (say having the people at the trading post be kidnapped), maybe make the Stag Lord a relative of one of the PCs, etc.

There was a lot of background on the NPCs, so they had reasonably clear personalities and motives. How or if you would use that dimension was kind of left open, but certainly it allows for a few different ways to run the thing. Clearly AS WRITTEN its a hex crawl, but not a really naive one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah... the weird thing is, I've been finding recently with running more PSF 4e, when building encounters as this-is-what-is-dramatically-appropriate (or Combat As Sport-y) rather than this-is-the-resources-the-badguys-have (or Combat as War-y), the fights actually seem to have greater versimilitude or feeling of 'truthiness' . I think this is because when running it process-sim there is such a great temptation to 'throw it all in there' - have all 300 orcs or all 24 Darksword Knight Dragonriders, attack the high level PCs, ignoring the Clausewitzian 'friction' that in reality makes it nearly impossible for a force to concentrate all their assets at a single point. Dramatist scene framing short-circuits the whole simulationist CAW system, but IME tends strongly to versimilitudinous encounters, at least the way I do it. I guess that's because versimilitude is a big part of 'dramatically appropriate', at least for me.

Agreed. I've never been convinced by the whole 'CAW' concept. I mean, sure, there are different tones you can have to an encounter, I think at that level the idea has SOME validity, but in terms of some sort of 'operational' level of play where PCs plans interact with NPCs plans you're exactly right, there's no way it is humanly possible to entirely simulate that Clausewitzian friction. Generally we're not even aware of those kinds of considerations and the DM can effectively choose to use or ignore them with enough plausibility to allow for whatever to happen, usually for his vision of things to be brought to fruition. I noticed this a LOT when I just broke down and started to ad-lib my big military invasion campaign. All of a sudden the encounters dramatically portrayed what I wanted them to about the enemy instead of being sort of weirdly a mixture of drama and simulation that wasn't totally satisfying in either direction. The players seemed to sense the difference and really grabbed hold of the plot. It turned out to be a great campaign, just not the one that I'd written! Honestly the results were within the realm of what I'd imagined, mostly, so it still felt authentic in a sort of simulationy way, but the numbers didn't all add up exactly. Heck, some new knights got knighted somewhere in there, who's to say? lol.

 

[Storminator]

Discussing the Savage Tide AP got me thinking, and I had a nice big post typed up about it, but then the forum crapped out and ate it when I went to post, so I'll just give the short version. The gist of it was;

Do you think that if the players in a game don't know they're in a module or AP, that it would be indistinguishable from a scene-framed approach, as long as the outcome of a given scene flows logically according to the narrative?

I think the problem is that no matter what your PCs did last adventure, this adventure is already written, with some assumptions about how the last one went.

That's pretty unavoidable, tho ST certainly had a couple branches of PC choice mapped out. There's only so much one can anticipate. I know there were scenes in my ST game that were just jarring, and we shrugged and said "it's an adventure path, roll with it". No other option was there for the investment we were willing to put in.

The city in the first couple adventures was pretty cool tho. I was pretty sad to see the game go away from that.

PS

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the problem is that no matter what your PCs did last adventure, this adventure is already written, with some assumptions about how the last one went.

That's pretty unavoidable, tho ST certainly had a couple branches of PC choice mapped out. There's only so much one can anticipate. I know there were scenes in my ST game that were just jarring, and we shrugged and said "it's an adventure path, roll with it". No other option was there for the investment we were willing to put in.

The city in the first couple adventures was pretty cool tho. I was pretty sad to see the game go away from that.

PS

Yeah, that's a big issue with any sort of plotted adventure, and the bigger the adventure gets the larger it looms. The authors can only put in so many different alternative pieces of content that not every DM will use. The ratio really needs to be something like 70% or more, so any digressions or alternate paths have to be fairly brief or at least shallow. I think perhaps deeper presentations could be possible, say maybe as structured wiki text or something, but obviously it is a whole other physical medium and even then if you're paying for it you probably want to feel like you didn't pay for a lot of stuff you'll never use. Maybe the answer is a mixture of purchased content embellished with user provided add ons. Curating it then becomes the task. I guess we'll see how that ultimately plays out. Certainly Paizo's boards are one manifestation, but probably not the ultimate one.