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Pemertonian Scene Framing and 4e DMing Restarted
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<blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 6091727" data-attributes="member: 99817"><p>To add to what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] said, and to reiterate something I posted maybe earlier in this thread or the other one: At the start of the game, you could have the players build the city. Brainstorm it. Let everyone imagine this place, and build on each other's ideas.</p><p></p><p>I tend to start this process rolling with a vague statement like: "So I see this place as kinda like Gotham, dark, with tall baroque spires and a chaotic patchwork of rooftops. What else?"</p><p></p><p>Usually after that, I ask questions to nail down ideas. So if someone says "It's built on the ruins of a much older city" I say "Why was that old city reduced to ruins?" and after we build that I ask "So, do we know anything about what's beneath the city now?" and so on.</p><p></p><p>Character ideas will link naturally to the setting as the setting becomes a reality, and then NPC ideas and associations can come from that. Maybe you have to re-write and re-purpose a lot of the NPCs, but at the end you have a living city which the players feel is home.</p><p></p><p>I've not ready any Paizo stuff, so I don't know the AP. But if there's lots of 'side quests' to make the player feel part of the city, well, you can now ditch those. But the players will (or at least, should) have ideas for stuff they wanted to do in this city as they created it. Stuff they were excited about. Stuff they deliberately left unknown, or mysterious, or at a point of conflict or tension. Run with those ideas instead.</p><p></p><p>One neat tool that Apocalypse World has is the idea of Fronts and Threats. A Front is a collection of inter-related threats. Threats are individual things that threaten and conflict with what a PC or group wants. AW uses a countdown clock (in AW it has 6 sections) to show the progress of the front.</p><p></p><p>Now in Apocalypse World, what PCs generally want is - in some sort of order - food, clean water, clothing, shelter, ammunition, electricity, companionship. And all those things are generally reliant on the presence of some sort of society around them. In other words, no man is an island. AW works on identifying these weaknesses, these basic needs, and pressuring them.</p><p></p><p>So, if I really wanted to run a game where the players cared about defending a city I would focus my efforts on stressing how the slow collapse of the city is depriving them of these essentials - be it arrows or axes or food, clean water, friendship. Dishonored achieves a similar effect (less sophisticated, but it's a single player video game) by adding in more rat swarms and plague victims as the chaos grows.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="chaochou, post: 6091727, member: 99817"] To add to what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] said, and to reiterate something I posted maybe earlier in this thread or the other one: At the start of the game, you could have the players build the city. Brainstorm it. Let everyone imagine this place, and build on each other's ideas. I tend to start this process rolling with a vague statement like: "So I see this place as kinda like Gotham, dark, with tall baroque spires and a chaotic patchwork of rooftops. What else?" Usually after that, I ask questions to nail down ideas. So if someone says "It's built on the ruins of a much older city" I say "Why was that old city reduced to ruins?" and after we build that I ask "So, do we know anything about what's beneath the city now?" and so on. Character ideas will link naturally to the setting as the setting becomes a reality, and then NPC ideas and associations can come from that. Maybe you have to re-write and re-purpose a lot of the NPCs, but at the end you have a living city which the players feel is home. I've not ready any Paizo stuff, so I don't know the AP. But if there's lots of 'side quests' to make the player feel part of the city, well, you can now ditch those. But the players will (or at least, should) have ideas for stuff they wanted to do in this city as they created it. Stuff they were excited about. Stuff they deliberately left unknown, or mysterious, or at a point of conflict or tension. Run with those ideas instead. One neat tool that Apocalypse World has is the idea of Fronts and Threats. A Front is a collection of inter-related threats. Threats are individual things that threaten and conflict with what a PC or group wants. AW uses a countdown clock (in AW it has 6 sections) to show the progress of the front. Now in Apocalypse World, what PCs generally want is - in some sort of order - food, clean water, clothing, shelter, ammunition, electricity, companionship. And all those things are generally reliant on the presence of some sort of society around them. In other words, no man is an island. AW works on identifying these weaknesses, these basic needs, and pressuring them. So, if I really wanted to run a game where the players cared about defending a city I would focus my efforts on stressing how the slow collapse of the city is depriving them of these essentials - be it arrows or axes or food, clean water, friendship. Dishonored achieves a similar effect (less sophisticated, but it's a single player video game) by adding in more rat swarms and plague victims as the chaos grows. [/QUOTE]
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