D&D 4E Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e

[Libramarian]

My experience is just mine, but for me, playing an RPG is a lot closer to playing other games than it is to writing. My goal when playing an RPG isn't to delight people with my creativity (though that happens, too, it's not really something I try hard to accomplish), it is to guide an avatar into overcoming an objective challenge by manipulating the tools at that avatar's disposal. If the tools and the goals aren't objective and present, then the point is moot. I might as well drop the facade and just write a story with these people. That's fun, too, but it's not the fun I'm looking for when I play an RPG.

I guess I've always felt that if I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie, and if I want a game about pretending to be another being, I'll play an RPG. Still, I imagine for many players, it's a trade-off very worth making.

Yeah I'm basically here as well.

I played PrimeTime Adventures once and it was one of the worst experiences I have ever had with an RPG. We probably weren't playing it correctly, or approaching with the correct mindset...but still.

 

[S'mon]

There is this self-conscious, self-aware, definition-heavy, meta-game, leftward trend in a whole slew of indie games (and in D&D4e)...

You really don't have to be a dirty commie pinko hippy lefty Indie type to enjoy 4e. I definitely am not.

I did quite enjoy my one time playing an Indie Nar game at the London Indie Games Meetup, once the hippies quit hazing me. In RPG terms I'm much more of an Okie from Muskogee, though.

 

[pemerton]

the concept of scenes not being able to impact each other being strange to me

I don't understand what makes you say this. Of course scenes impact one another - that's why (as [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has emphasised) you can't frame scene 2 until scene 1 is resolved.

In the limiting case, though, this impact is not mediated via the action resolution mechanics. It's mediated by the GM's encounter-building guidelines (dealing with both story and encounter sides of encounter-building).

So the PCs are essentially ta'veren?

A very quick Google tells me that this is some sort of Wheel of Time, destiny thing. In which case the answer is "no". Scene framing play doesn't rely on any particular plot elements being part of the game.

If I understand you correctly, in a regular game, the world exists, and the PCs interact with it. In a scene-framing game, the PC's actions create the world. Or perhaps a variant of Chekhov's gun. If the PCs choose to interact with something, it is important.

Your way of putting it makes scene-framing play pretty hard to explain, because it doesn't distinguish the players from their PCs, nor the GM's deliberate acts of creation from the fiction that results.

In any RPG, the gameworld doesn't exist. It's a fiction. The question is, what considerations guide (i) world creation and (ii) adjudication of unexpected calls/queries by the players? In what you are calling "regular" play, the GM creates the world independently of the players creating their PCs; and the GM adjudicates unexpected calls and queries based primarily on extrapolation from other pre-established details of the gameworld. In scene-framing play, the GM creates the world keeping in mind the PCs that the players have created, and adjudicates unexpected calls and queries in a way that will drive the game forward.

Part of the nature of a game is that it provides criteria for success and failure within rules that are imposed equally on all. If Orcus only shows up because I ask about it -- if he has no objective existence, but is rather a sort of Shrodinger's Cat -- that element of gameplay is severely weakened, because there's no objective challenge with regards to that question.

Huh? What "element of gamplay" do you have in mind? In Moldvay Basic, the PCs automatically find their way to the dungeon entrance without having to engage the action resolution mechanics. I never heard it suggested that that weakens - let alone "severely weakens" - gameplay in that game. It's simply a question of what the game takes as the "starting point" of play. Look at [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s first post upthread for really strong examples of an "in media res" approach to play. It's not like that undermines gameplay - it just makes the focus of play defeating the rattlesnake (in chaochou's example) or Orcus (in my example) rather than finding your way to the confrontation. Just as in Moldvay Basic the action is about exploring the dungeon, rather than finding it.

There's also limited exploratory fun to be had: there's not a strong sense of discovery, and instead it's a sense of invention.

Invention by whom? The players are still engaged in discovery. In chaochou's example, they discover the rattlesnake. And the gameworld is always being invented by the GM.

There certainly are games that, either formally or informally, give players some degree of authority over backstory, but that's basically orthogonal to scene-framing considerations.

I want my game to be a structured experience, because I want it to be a game that I can flow through without thinking about the structure of it.

<snip>

If the tools and the goals aren't objective and present, then the point is moot. I might as well drop the facade and just write a story with these people. That's fun, too, but it's not the fun I'm looking for when I play an RPG.

<snip>

I want to be a character, not define one.

<snip>

There's a lot of useful things that kind of perspective can add, but thinking like the character is weakened by them.

This seems to be making the same unwarranted equation, of scene-framing play with player co-authorship.

The player whose PC wonders if Orcus is present is playing his/her PC. S/he is not co-authoring a story to any greater extent than by building a PC whose nemesis is Orcus.

I guess some people prefer games in which, if a player builds a PC with a nemesis that nemesis never comes into play.

Part of the nature of performing a role is a belief in the reality of the world you're performing in for the character you're performing as. If Orcus only shows up because I ask about it -- if his existence only depends on my play -- then the world asserts its artificiality at every turn and the performance ends up being awkwardly self-aware and meta.

Speak for yourself. I posted on another current thread - the "4e fantastic game that everyone hated" thread - that it's frustrating, as a 4e GM, being told repeatedly that one's game is weak on RP, is a series of tactical skirmishes without depth, etc.

It also doesn't help that your gloss runs together situation (Orcus shows up) and backstory (Orcus exists). In my example the backstory that Orcus exists is already established, and the players' play hasn't brought that about.

Anyway, from the point of view of the player, in a game like 4e in which backstory and situational authority ultimately lies with the GM, it is always the case that whatever you encounter is determined by the GM. Does it make any difference if the GM makes the decision in advance or - as is inevitably required from time-to-time - on the fly? And does it make any difference if the on-the-fly decisions are made by consulting a random table, or by choosing what will be most interesting? Not in my experience.

In an RM game I ran 20-odd years ago, one of the PCs had a mentor - who had been introduced into the gameworld by the player, as part of that PC's backstory. On one occasion when the PCs went to the mentor's home, they found it disturbed and the mentor missing. That scene was initiated by me, as GM, not based on a random table but because it seemed interesting at the time (I can't remember the details anymore, but the mentor's connection to various political conflicts had been gradually revealed over the course of play). So that's a case of a story element existing only because of a player choice (at character creation) and of something happening to that story element because the players chose to investigate it. It didn't spoil the game in any way. Rather, the player of the PC whose mentor it was was concerned about what had happened to his mentor and started investigating. And I would expect that to be a pretty common response from any RPGer.

It seems like it trades these things for directorial authority and storytelling strength and the power of the narrative arc, but I guess I've always felt that if I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie, and if I want a game about pretending to be another being, I'll play an RPG.

These comments again seem to be about something completely orthogonal to scene-framing. Here you seem to be envisaging the players establishing their own adversity via exercise of situational and backstory authority. Whereas 4e presupposes a default in which the GM has both of these.

A player whose PC tries to sense the presence of Orcus isn't exercising situational authority. And isn't making a skill check in order to declare some aspect of backstory (contrast use of a Wise skill in Burning Wheel). In the example I gave it is the GM who frames the scene and controls the backstory.

And even in [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s example of using a History check in the same sort of way as a BW Wise, it is not being used to frame adversity. It is being used as a resource, in something that functionally resembles buying equipment in standard D&D play. In both cases the player is using one resource (a skill, a gp total) to add another resource (a bit of gameworld backstory, a bit of equipment in the PC's possession). There's no reason for one to pose any more threat to the unfolding of the game than the other. Of course the game will break if players can add unlimited rings of wishes to their PCs' equipment lists - we have both rules and GMing techniques to preclude that. Likewise I'm pretty sure [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has rules and techniques that preclude using History to learn that an ancient sage once discovered that all enemies will be destroyed if ony the PC says the magic world in this particular place on this particular occasion.

The concern I would have is keeping the story consistent

<snip>

In a scene-framing game, how do you ensure that the plot makes logical sense?

By not contradicting yourself! A little bit of note-taking can go a long way in that respect.

*****************

Here is a pretty succinct account of scene-framing play as I understand it:

1. One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications.

2. The rest of the players each have their own characters to play. They play their characters according to the advocacy role: the important part is that they naturally allow the character’s interests to come through based on what they imagine of the character’s nature and background. Then they let the other players know in certain terms what the character thinks and wants.

3. The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.

4.The player’s task in these games is simple advocacy, which is not difficult once you have a firm character. (Chargen is a key consideration in these games, compare them to see how different approaches work.) The GM might have more difficulty, as he needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences).

. . .

Character advocacy: When a player is an advocate for a character in a roleplaying game, this means that his task in playing the game is to express his character’s personality, interests and agenda for the benefit of himself and other players. This means that the player tells the others what his character does, thinks and feels, and he’s doing his job well if the picture he paints of the character is clear and powerful, easy to relate to.​

The player's job is to build an interesting PC, and to play that character in the way described as "advocacy" - giving voice to that PC's personality, interests and agenda. The GM is the one who has story and structure in mind, framing scenes that "go where the action is" - which will include Orcus, if Orcus is one of the PCs' nemeses.

No one is out to create a story. The whole point of this approach is that story emerges organically out of the intersectin of the choices made by the GM in scene framing and the players in engaging those scenes via their PCs.

 

[S'mon]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] - thanks for the above, I can't XP but you're helping me to get an (even) better grasp on Pemertonian Scene Framing, just as I hoped would happen when I made this thread!

 

[Balesir]

From what I've seen, these feel way too meta for me. I'm not interested in creating a TV show or defining traits (FATE and even FIASCO feels similarly). I want to be a character, not define one.

I've got a few articles on this topic, too.

There is this self-conscious, self-aware, definition-heavy, meta-game, leftward trend in a whole slew of indie games (and in D&D4e) that absolutely murders the fun I personally look for in RPGs. There's a lot of useful things that kind of perspective can add, but thinking like the character is weakened by them.

Not that you need to do that to make a fun game, o'course.

If you are going to limit your definition of "roleplaying" to mean "character immersion", then, yes, there are a lot of play styles that you will see as "not roleplaying" and a lot of rules structures that you will see as "not useful for roleplaying". But character immersion is not the entirety of "roleplaying". I think that's the simple issue, here; asking "what do you guys see in this method of play" is going to be pretty pointless if your response to every explanation is "but that doesn't support character immersion as I do it, so that can't be right". The answer is no, those techniques don't support character immersion as you do it - but that is not what the people playing this way want to support (in this particular game).

I think minor differences between the participants' imagination of the scene occur all the time, so it's not a terrible thing, but it never occurred to me that anyone would consider this a good thing that rules should actually be designed to accomodate. I have to say that agreeing to imagine things differently, rather than these differences occurring accidentally and allowed only for the sake of expediency, feels like stepping outside the bounds of what RPGing is, IMO. I can't see how that technique would support any of the creative agendas of which I am aware.

I would say that this feature is important - maybe even crucial - for giving the players full agency with their character. If a player with a fighter character uses "Come and Get It!" (to coin a well-worn example), they can only do so with full confidence that it will work as they intend if it isn't open to other(s) to say "oh, no, that doesn't fit with the game world as I understand it" (or, far worse and more common, "oh, that's not "Realistic(TM)"...") or "I'm gonna declare an exception in this case, because I don't like that as a possibility".

In any system where the (fictional) world is held to have some sort of independent existence that the rules are only there to model, this sort of thing is inevitable. The "world follows the rules" paradigm allows us to get away from this. It's not useful for all styles of play, but it's critical if the players are going to have full and un-compromisable understanding of how the (fictional) game world works.

To put it another way, if we are to play a game set in a fictional (made-up) world, we need some way to communicate consistently between all the players how that world works. For some play styles, one individual having complete control over how the world works and imparting that knowledge on an "as needed" basis to the other players works well. But for other styles, having that understanding encapsulated as fully as possible in the ruleset works far, far better. It allows players to have their characters act confidently, as heroes, in the full knowledge of what the outcome of the character's actions are likely to be at all times. If my fighter (hypothetically - I haven't actually played a fighter in 4e, yet) used CaGI, then there is a fair chance that the things targetted will come. The "how" of it doesn't matter in this respect - it's up to each player present to imagine it in a way that they find believable and fitting. However it is envisioned to be done, though, my guy is capable of doing that sort of thing; the rules say he is.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I tried to give a bit of a Scene-Framing adventure example in my initial post there. Maybe you could read that right quick and ask a clarifying question about some aspect of it? I'll try me best attempt at a Feynman Diagram version but first; Are you talking about "design-side" or an actual short "play example"? Here are a couple of bolded, orange statements. Maybe that is the "simple" you're looking for. The rest is tldr context that you can ignore if you like.

Open World Sandboxing is straight-forward. I believe S'mon uses the "You are here. What do you do?" way of conveying it. This could be in the market, in a dungeon, in a tavern, etc. This would be followed up by more color, introduction of hooks, and arcs and more PC exploration of the nooks and crannies of the built world. The DMs job is not to set adversity or pressure against the PCs. It is to set the scene, the color and play the relevant parts and adjudicate outcomes as the PCs explore. The PCs job is to explore, not to respond to the DM pressure in-kind as is their role as protagonists in the story. They may do that and the PCs may ultimately be protagonists. But that isn't the first order of business. It may just be a happenstance or an off-shoot.

The Framed-Scene analog might be something like "This thematic, genre-specific by-product of past scenes and their narrative implications is in your face right now forcing you to do one of a few things. Here are the stakes and here is pressure to focus your options. You have to resolve this conflict/scene now."

For instance: "You arrive from your day long sprint, exhausted and sore, the courtiers message from the High Huntsman stained with your sweat. His stark tone advised the that the barbarians were on the march and would be arriving tomorrow morning. His plea to the Lodge for all the Rangers of the North fell on deaf ears. You've come to talk him into exodus, but the grim face of the High Huntsman says that he won't budge and the unified faces of the settlers behind him appear to confirm your suspicions. It seems likely he has convinced his people that the only honorable path for them is to die a warrior's death tomorrow morning when the barbarian raiders strike at dawn, defending their well-earned home below the oak boughs. Reinforcing the place and turning it into a deathtrap may give a fighting chance...or at least the opportunity to claim enough raiders' lives to die satisfied. You could leave right now...no doubt, dooming them to their choice, their chosen fate. Children are at play in the background...oblivious to the finality of these moments. The High Huntsmen looks at you squarely; 'I knew they wouldn't heed my call. Well, they will see the fires of the wildmen on their own borders soon enough.' He looks at his men-at-arms manning the gate and says 'Open it, they have a short time to leave before the horde encloses us. This is not their cause to die for.'

The stakes have been made clear and they would have further context within preceding events of the game and possibly thematic ties to one or more of the characters. Do the PCs enter into a Social Conflict Scene to convince the High Huntsman of exodus? Do they commit to a Scene of Preparing the Battlements of the small settlement in effort to repel the horde? They may try both. They may try the "Convince of Exodus" scene in attempt to resolve the conflict (which success would then result in another scene - "Exodus" - with new pressures). What if "Convince of Exodus" results in failure? If so, it will have narrative and mechanical consequences for going the route of "Preparing the Battlements." Perhaps something immediate happens like a load of pitch somehow catches fire and starts a conflagration that must be handled immediately (leading to another scene). Perhaps more benign, they now have less time to Prepare the Battlements which would mean a more difficult challenge from possible multiple vectors (DCs, less failures required to lose, potential limited outcome, etc) when engaging that scene. Failure on Prepare the Battlements might trigger an early raid (for example), before Dawn, when the settlers are even less prepared (which would have mechanical consequences alongside the narrative implications; eg worse stats for the defenders, less or worse activatable battlement features available to trigger for the upcoming Mass Combat Against the Horde Combat Encounter). Each scene's resolution will have intra-scene mechanical and narrative consequences and then the ultimate success or failure of the scene (and its narrative context) will have consequences to for the next Scene(s).

The game would progress like this always; move from scene to soft transition to scene, etc. Each a direct byproduct of the last or a byproduct of the aggregate narrative.

I think a lot of it CAN be presentation and tone. For instance a classic AD&D module might structure the above situation as a bunch of locations and a time constraint. The players would control how they experienced the structure of the story using an exploration paradigm, but they could accomplish something very similar. I'd say the original Castle Ravenloft module is a good example of this. It is laid out in most ways like a classic dungeon crawl and the activity is mostly couched in terms of exploration, but the real exploration is more different plot outcomes than rooms and secret passages and such (though I'm not sure the designers fully appreciated this when the module was written, it vacillates).

In any case my own use of 4e tends to fall into something that varies from simply framing scenes in purely dramatic terms to somewhat more concrete semi-exploratory play (and now and then I like to throw in a bone to pure exploration, like a mini-dungeon or something, the old days were FUN, just not what I want to endlessly re-experience every week). Still, in the long run the players are having a strong effect on how the setting falls together. The world is arranged to meet dramatic needs, not to present a sandboxed series of puzzle-challenges. That's the difference between Gygaxian play and say Leverage's 'story based play'. They're extremes, but 4e certainly is vastly better equipped to handle the later than even 3e was, and pre-3e versions of D&D were entirely devoid of support for it (though oddly 2e often talked about character motivation and rewards it didn't really provide rules that give you many ways to realize that).

To take this in another direction this is what I find so disappointing about DDN. 4e's pacing and some of its mechanics don't favor dungeon crawling type expeditions, but I don't think that was intentional. I think things like combat just slightly missed the mark. It wasn't supposed to feel slow or make it hard to have trivial fights, that was more an emergent thing that just popped out of the design. DDN should be fixing that stuff, not slaying the entire concept of D&D going forward with a more player-directed capability where you CAN do scene-framing and it is supported. What a wasted opportunity. How sad that all WotC's talent can imagine is removing any trace of anything that didn't exist in circa 1985 D&D. Very disappointing.

 

[I'm A Banana]

You really don't have to be a dirty commie pinko hippy lefty Indie type to enjoy 4e. I definitely am not.

Sure! Just noting that 4e shares the trend of metagame mechanics that a lot of indie games also share. Though to a much smaller degree in most cases!

If you are going to limit your definition of "roleplaying" to mean "character immersion", then, yes, there are a lot of play styles that you will see as "not roleplaying" and a lot of rules structures that you will see as "not useful for roleplaying". But character immersion is not the entirety of "roleplaying". I think that's the simple issue, here; asking "what do you guys see in this method of play" is going to be pretty pointless if your response to every explanation is "but that doesn't support character immersion as I do it, so that can't be right". The answer is no, those techniques don't support character immersion as you do it - but that is not what the people playing this way want to support (in this particular game).

I think it's important to note that I'm not trying to be a gatekeeper of anyone else's experiences, here. I get that playing like that can be a lot of fun for folks, and I wouldn't want to make them stop. It's just not a lot of fun for me (and likely I am not just an anomaly), and I was trying to get at what may be the difference, there.

The parsing of the "roleplaying = character immersion" thing was just to get our definitions aligned so that we could see the issue. Playing a role is performance, acting, immersive, immediate, and un-contextualized. Some of the things these role-playing games ask the players to do jars that. This doesn't make them not role-playing games (certainly THEY think they are!), it's just a useful distinction for thinking about why some folks might balk at these ideas in their own games - those folks value immersion highly in their RPGs, and aren't very interested in things that don't support that. Not because those things are bad, but because that's not the fun thing to them about playing an RPG.

It's a way of exploring why certain kinds of mechanics work for some players, and don't work for others, not an attempt to exclude a playstyle from "REAL role-playing."

Huh? What "element of gamplay" do you have in mind?

Fiero, specifically, there.

In Moldvay Basic, the PCs automatically find their way to the dungeon entrance without having to engage the action resolution mechanics. I never heard it suggested that that weakens - let alone "severely weakens" - gameplay in that game.

AFAICT, the Moldvay example is about glossing over the things that the game isn't going to be "about" -- things that aren't going to impact the outcome of the thing you're interested in playing through, and that aren't part of the challenge of the game. That's quite different from determining the challenge on the fly as in the Orcus example. In the Moldvay example it doesn't matter what happens on the way to the dungeon. In your example, it matters if Orcus is in the dungeon or not, and he's not, until someone asks if he is. That's a very important distinction I think this comparison glosses over.

Invention by whom? The players are still engaged in discovery. In chaochou's example, they discover the rattlesnake. And the gameworld is always being invented by the GM.

It's not "discovery" as I'm using the term if it doesn't have an independent existence. chaochou's example isn't about discovering a rattlesnake, it's about creating a complication for the scene -- it exists simply because it makes a tense scene. That doesn't fill the kind of need you're looking for if you're looking for a game that delivers "discovery." If what lays around the next corner is "whatever the DM thinks is interesting," you're not exploring anything other than the DM's current state of mind.

Which isn't to say that it's BAD, just that it's not going to work for some playstyles. Discovery-oriented play is about wonderment, not about excitement: different cognitive processes, different goals for the experience. It's the difference between, say, Katamari Damacy (BIG on the wonderment scale! Fair-to-middling on the excitement scale.) and Call of Duty (HUGE on the excitement scale! Barely registers on the wonderment scale.)

This seems to be making the same unwarranted equation, of scene-framing play with player co-authorship.

The post I'm responding to made that equation, and I was simply going forward with that statement and following where it lead.

Since you've said that's not the case, there's no real need to pursue that particular thread any farther.

 

[S'mon]

Re immersion - for me the biggest problem is when the rules mechanics don't let me play the character in my head or the character the game fluff says I'm playing. find pre-3e immersive enough, since I don't try playing Thieves (mid-level experienced Thief with a 35% chance to succeed at something Thiefly!), but I have a big problem with 3e: I play a high level Fighter, the fluff and my character image is of a tough, hard-minded guy, but the rules say I nearly always fail Will saves and get charmed,dominated, run away screaming like a little girl... it's so bad I recently started an RPGNet thread asking for advice on how to make a PF Fighter with a decent Will save. Best advice seems to be "Play a PF Paladin instead".

Anyway, this is definitely not a problem for me in 4e. I guess it might be a problem in 4e for 3e fans whose image of their Wizard PC is 'Demigod among the Grogs', but for action-hero level characters I find 4e crunch matches fluff very well.

 

[I'm A Banana]

find pre-3e immersive enough, since I don't try playing Thieves (mid-level experienced Thief with a 35% chance to succeed at something Thiefly!), but I have a big problem with 3e: I play a high level Fighter, the fluff and my character image is of a tough, hard-minded guy, but the rules say I nearly always fail Will saves and get charmed,dominated, run away screaming like a little girl... it's so bad I recently started an RPGNet thread asking for advice on how to make a PF Fighter with a decent Will save. Best advice seems to be "Play a PF Paladin instead".

We may be using "immersive" in slightly different ways.

I'm not referring to the ability of rules to model what I think my character should be like.

Rather, I'm referring to the ability of the player to think and act in-character.

Dictating the actions of others or events in the world automatically stops you from thinking in-character. Once you start thinking about how the world should react to your character, your immersion (as I'm using the term) is kind of blown -- you're not thinking about what your character does, you're thinking about the way other characters ought to behave and the way the world ought to work.

It's a problem if you want to play a tough-minded fighter and the rules don't back that up. But if you make decisions in-character, you wouldn't play a character with a low Will save as especially tough-minded (in comparison to the other heroes, anyway, though perhaps in comparison to the common folk) to begin with. If you wanted to play a tough-minded warrior, you'd use the rules to get a good Will save (though, again, it's a problem when the rules make that hard to do in a satisfying way). Or you'd play a fighter whose sense of their own stubbornness is greater than the reality of that stubbornness. And it's a problem when a system doesn't support a fairly common archetype like that, but it's not the same problem as a problem with immersive play.

If I am in a performance of Hamlet, playing the role of Guildenstern, I'm not going to play him as an action hero. That's not what the play or the script says he is, and his actions and dialog make no sense in that context. I'm going to try my best to play him as the loyal (if fairly incompetent) spy he is according to the material I'm performing from. If I wanted to play an action hero, I might play James Bond -- the script makes Bond an action hero, and it doesn't do that for Guildenstern.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I disagree.

There are other pieces already moving in the world. Those pieces have their own agendas. As such, I disagree that there wouldn't be complications and antagonism without a direct set up on behalf of the DM. In terms of D&D, I've had to learn some amount of framing because the 'encounter' as a design element is something which is tied to the system, and I'm require to make things more linear than I'd normally prefer.

I understand what you mean, but ULTIMATELY it is all the DM and/or the players. In my youth I believed that process sim sandbox style worlds taken to the extreme with an absolute neutral arbiter DM was some sort of monadic ideal. I think that was kind of a pretty commonly held misconception of the mid-late 70's. I've since evolved FAR past that... Its my world, it only exists as far as I bring it to life, and what I haven't brought onto the stage is provisional and advisory. IMHO what a lot of people are trying to insist on is that D&D remain stuck forever in that 70's stage of development of thinking about RPGs. Its arguable that some game should exist in that niche, but I'd be sad to see D&D relegated to that lingering undead state.

Still, I don't find that framing helped with the problems I had in 4E. In fact, the problems I had with 4E were that scenes I tried to create were too easily broken by the way the world worked in relation to how the PCs function. A previous example I used in a previous thread is an encounter in which the PCs were moving across a chasm in a gondola (the type suspended from a cable; not the boat.) A second gondola carrying enemies were moving toward them. I expected it to be a cool scene, but it quickly became anti-climactic because of how easily PCs were able to destroy not the enemies, but the gondola they were in.

I did fully expect that attacking either the gondola or the cable carrying it would be a tactic used. It's a tactic I did want to be valid, so I didn't say no when a PC asked if they could attack the craft and the cable. I simply didn't expect for it to be so easy so as to render the entire encounter; the entire scene moot and uneventful. I wasn't expecting a perfect model of physics either; I understand that D&D has always been abstract. As a DM new to 4E at the time, the numbers I found when I tried to reference what it should take to destroy the gondola (or the attached cable) were abysmally low in comparison to what the PCs were able to do even with at-will powers.

I don't see how more framing would help with that, but I'd be open to suggestions.

Well, certainly recasting the thing as a skill challenge would be ideal in that SCs have math that works (at least nowadays they do). That IMHO is one of their nice strengths. Whenever a situation like this comes up the scene can be composed as "PCs attempt to destroy enemy gondola before reaching platform" or whatever (substitute ship, ritual, etc in place of gondola, this mechanism is quite flexible as the pattern can recur often). Each time there's tension involved too.