I don't entirely follow this. How is "Having gone to sleep in the tavern, you all wake up manacled in the dungeon" the GM playing the PCs or narrating their actions to them?
Because between the two events, something dramatic and important must have happened. The wizard locks, alarm spells, locks, jury rigged noice traps, bottles balanced on the door handle, and so forth that the party takes precautions with when resting in a strange environment didn't go off. No one heard the dogs in the courtyard, and the guy with the Light Sleeper feat and lots of ranks in hearing slept like a babe even when someone bundled him in sheet. No one got a saving throw versus whatever poison we must have ingested, and no one made their skill check to notice it in their food, no one had a chance to wake up, the villains didn't flub any action, the players having woken up apparantly had no oppurtunity to do anything, a long transport occurred in which the players slept soundly and safely drugged and trussed. In short, lots of things happened but we don't know what they are. Only the DM knows what they are, and now the DM will have to tell us what happened to us and how we reacted (or didn't).
That's ridiculous. Either the villains are so powerful and compotent that we had no chance at all, in which case, we are likely stuck here forever unless this is a nonsensical forcing trope for the sake of creating the story you want, or else the events between now and then didn't actually happen in which case this is DM fiat carried to its worst degree - obliviating all choice and options and telling us what is and has happened. So either you have decided you have the right as a DM to play my character for me, or else you are hitting me with some overwhelmingly compotent foe who could clearly have destroyed me in a blink who will then mysteriously turn incompotent at exactly the point that we are most in their power and mercy. Either way, that's ceased to be a game I can believe in or enjoy. Now, if the DM wants to have some NPC's
"You all board the ship, and sail without incident for a week" is the GM narrating to the player, but I think there are a lot of groups who don't find this per se objectionable.
Well, mine don't either, but normally such hand waving only occurs by the mutual consent of both the players and DM. Only if everyone at the table agrees to speed up time do we actually speed up time. The DM only hand waves actions that no one is interested in, and I don't attempt to hand wave time passing until receiving an answer to a question like, "Is there anything anyone wants to do?"
It's not dissimilar to a GM narrating a shopping expedition - "You want to buy some herbs - OK, you wander around the streets until you find an apothecary". Anytime the continuous flow of ingame time is compressed or skipped over, the GM is exercising some scene-framing power and, at many tables, is going to narrate some actions of the PCs.
Everything is scene framing. It's important to note that every style, even hard core simulationism uses scene framing. However, that fact shouldn't be used to disguise the great differences between different scene framing techniques. Hand waving trivial details of the player's proposition to search the town for an apothecary is very different thing than hand waving the capture and transport of the party to some dungeon. The first one involves no use of GM force. The second is nothing but.
How hard the GM is allowed to be is a different matter, but even D&D isn't hostile to all forms of hard scene framing. Look at Moldvay Basic, for example, which gives the GM the power to frame the scene of arriving at the dungeon (and we see something similar in the famous example of play in the 1st ed DMG).
Players: "We'd like to go to the dungeon now."
DM: "Ok, you are at the dungeon."
Is very different from.
Players: "We'd like to spend the night in the tavern now."
DM: "Ok, you find yourself chained up in the dungeon."
Call them all 'hard scene framing', while technically correct, is to obfuscate the problem at hand with technical bullshyte.
The OP has posted something which seems to me to express a genuine concern. Your reply is, in effect, to attack the OP's attempt to exercise power as GM. I don't think that's the only coherent response...
I think its worth asking his players whether I gave a coherent response. The OP has said he's approached the players with this idea out of character and had it thrown back in his face. I think maybe I'm more on the trail of what's wrong with his group dynamics than you are. I think if he follows your suggestions then he's likely to find his game over.
I think our experiences in RPGing must be quite different.
Obviously. Ask yourself, does his players sound like their attitude is more like mine, or more like yours?
What I like about Edwards's Forge essays is that they articulate, in a coherent and analytically fruitful way, many aspects of my own experience as an RPGer. They don't create that experience, but they do help me make sense of it.
I find Ron Edwards to be openly sneering, insulting, and arrogant. I find him dismissive of anything Ron Edwards doesn't like. Therefore, I feel justified to reply in kind. I find his description utterly incoherent and undescriptive of my own gaming. While he is obviously extremely intelligent and does open up for conversation a lot of useful ideas, I find that much of the core of what he holds to be absolutely true is absolutely not true. For example, its my opinion that most good and enduring RPG designs are what he calls 'incoherent', and that that trait is precisely what makes them good and enduring. But anyway, enough Forge bashing because its beside the point.
As to whether proposition/resolution mechanics can create story - of course they can. But if the claim is that they can do so without any scene-framing then in my view it's a different matter.
They can certainly do so without hard scene-framing, or indeed anything that your average person on Forge would recognize as scene framing. While, "You turn left and walk carefully down the corridor for 40'" is scene framing, its not at all what your average Forge reader would recognize as scene framing (and in fact many would argue at first that it isn't scene framing) because generally 'scene framing' in Forge-speak refers to the hard sort. Likewise, you can do so without GM force, at least in the sense of the sort of GM force on display when you go to sleep in a tavern and wake up in a dungeon.
And this way of playing does undermine story - it leads to sessions bogging down in needless detail resolving actions that are in fact not the least bit contentious and of no interest to anyone at the table (eg 10th level PCs making haggling rolls to resolve the purchase of 50' of rope).
Yeah, whatever. Not haggling to resolve the purchase of 50' of rope that a PC wants to buy is still quite different than going to sleep in a tavern and waking up in a dungeon.
What is needed is a framework that tells us how to skip over this sort of stuff
No we don't. We don't need that at all. All we need is the implicit or explicit consent of the whole table, which involves no exercise of GM force at all. Effectively, the DM is consenting to a player proposition - "Can we wait here doing X action without interruption for Y time."
This is a hard call in Rolemaster, because so many starting states for action resolution are dependent upon the outcomes of prior action resolution, with the result that skipping over things has the potential to produce starting states which are potentially arbitrary and unfair.
I'm not an expert in Rolemaster, but I think skipping from going to sleep in a tavern to waking up in the dungeon goes along way past potentially arbitrary and unfair, besides being totally not fun. Even losing is alot more fun than missing a dramatic scene. Of course, your opinion is apparantly that its worth it to miss a dramatic scene and obliviate all player choice if it just achieves the outcome you desire.
It's not the purpose of this post to argue that 4e...
I don't really see what 4e has to do with this at all. I'm giving system independent advice and frankly I just see this as an attempt to start an edition war, a red herring, and not worth responding too.
...without opening the door to arbitrary and unfair exercise of GM power in determining the starting states for encounters.
Still not seeing how 'you go to sleep in a tavern and you wake up chained to the wall in a dungeon' isn't an arbitary and unfair exercise of DM power in determining the starting states for encounters'.
I hope the previous few paragraphs have made it clearer why I see the phrase "say yes or roll the dice" as being relevant to scene-framing
Nope, not a bit.
it is to do with the interaction between action resolution mechanics from prior scenes and the starting-state of current scenes.
Which has nothing to do with either 'say yes' or 'throw the dice'.
I don't fully understand this. In a traditional RPG the GM is almost solely responsible for narrating the world to the players, and so the context of choice for the players is set almost entirely by the GM.
No, I reject that. The GM in a traditional RPG has vast control over the game world, but his ability to use force on the players is extremely limited. It's very hard for a GM to go from 'Going to sleep in the tavern' to 'Waking up chained to the wall in the dungeon' because players are hugely resourceful and traditional PCs have so many resources at there command. You can challenge the PC's, but capturing them without killing them is extremely difficult if you play it fair.
I'm not the only person who ever thought that a fun scenario to play might be the PCs' escape from capture. The A1-4 slave lords module has at least one, maybe two examples of it
They were also originally intended to be played as one shot tournment modules, and the A3 to A4 scenario hard framing has been since the beginning widely panned and criticized by a great many players and DMs. It works as a tournament scenario where you have disposable characters with little at stake other than 'winning'. I don't think it has been widely upheld as great DMing.
One way to frame a capture is for the GM to abuse...
One approach you don't suggest is to simply not decide that now is the 'capture scenario' time and simply let it happen. You play enough games, eventually capture and surrender and the like naturally arrise. It's happened to me as a player, and its happened to whole parties once when I was the DM and to individual players three or four times (at least).
It doesn't force them to make difficult choices ingame in the course of playing their PCs.
Oh geez. Far be it for that to ever happen.
Yeah, we don't have much in common at all. More importantly, I think its pretty clear that the sort of gaming dynamic you are describing here does not exist at the table in question and will take a long long time to foster even if the players are the sort who might eventually develop preferences akin to yours (which is by no means certain).
