The fundamental technique involves taking control of the PCs, railroading them through decision points "off-screen", and then continuing the action at the point where you've delivered them to a place of excitement/interest.
First, you might be confusing me with [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]. Various strengths of scene-framing were discussed upthread, starting with post 31 from chaochou. Compared to what chaochou describes in that post I'm pretty light-touch.
Second, I don't know what "railroad" is doing there. There are a lot of variables in play: what backstory do the players have access to (or the ability to create)? What is the table's aproach to takebacks or calls to rewind? Chaochou signalled his approach to this in post 41 - he allows the player to retcon in earlier decisions (in his example, buying a shotgun) but then brings the focus back to the framed scene. I gave an example of my own approach in posts 22 & 275, and I'd be interested to be told wherein the railroading is to be found.
Pemerton and S'mon seem to be advocating an open handling of the scene itself, but other practitioners will actually go even further and frame the scene so that its purpose is to reach a specific outcome.
Which practitioners do you have in mind? My approach is influnced by Ron Edwards and Paul Czege (posts on the Forge); by Maelstrom Storytelling (author's name escapes me), Burning Wheel (Luke Crane) and HeroWars/Quest (Robin Laws). None of them talks about reaching a specific outcome. I've also recently pickup up Marvel Hoeric, and Cam Banks doesn't talk about reaching a specific outcome either.
Pemerton confuses the issue significantly by also applying the term "scene-framing" to a number of completely unrelated techniques (particularly the "if a player asks if something is present, say yes" narrative sharing technique that dates back to Feng Shui).
Could you provide a quote that evinces this confusion? "Saying yes" in world creation is, as far as I can see, independent of scene-framing, although depends upon a certain abstraction in the GM's description of situations similar to that required for scene-framing play. And I'm pretty sure I noted upthread (or maybe in the "4e fantastic game" thread that has run in parallel) that 4e has no mechanics quite analogous to BW's "Wise" skills, Marvel Heroic's asset and resource mechanics, etc.
Scene-framing is really more of a continuum of pacing techniques coupled to motivation. So most people respond to discussions like this by saying, "Doesn't everybody do that?" Because, actually, everybody does it.
I don't agree with this. The essence of the scene-framing approach that S'mon described in his OP, and that I and others have discussed with him over the course of this thread, is (i) flexibiity as to backstory, reveals and future conflicts, and (ii) response to players' demonstrated interests/hooks in making choices about scene-framing (which also lock-in backstory, reveals and what hitherto
was the future). See post 73 upthread, which quotes Eero Tuovinen on "The standard narrativistic model" (and also post 13, where I quote a relevant passage from Paul Czege).
At one end of this continuum you have a pure, old school dungeoncrawl: There is no time-skipping. Essentially every single action is catalogued.
This isn't really true, though. For instance, the precise footsteps of each PC aren't catalogued - this is one source of such conflicts at the table as debates over who was stepping where with enough force to trigger the pit trap or the tripwire.
Also, there is the rule in classic D&D that every combat takes a turn, and hence triggers a certain progression along the "counter" for wandering monster checks.
All RPGs need formal or informal techniques for handling the passage of ingame time that is not played out, and for handling questions of narrative detail ('Was I stomping or tip-toeing?") that become relevant to action resolution but were not specified prior to becoming relevant for that purpose.
The harder you frame, the higher the level of required interest needs to be before we stop fast-forwarding, and the more decisions get skipped.
That's one way of looking at it, I guess.
Here's another way, though. How many taverns does the settlement have? GMs since gaming began have set up villages and towns with only one inn, so that the PCs will go there and hence the GM can trigger some interesting conflict that takes the inn, the innkeeper and/or some other customer as an element.
One feature of a scene-framing approach is that it treats the following two approaches to backstory and situation as equivalent:
* You're looking for an inn? OK, there's one inn - the Green Griffon.
* You're looking for an inn? OK, you end up at the Green Griffon.
Now for Lewis Pulsipher these are very different, because he expects that the GM will have each inn at least notionally statted out (or randomly generated on the spot if stats aren't available) so that the players, via their PCs, can scope it out for traps, evil etc. A scene-framing game can't work with those sorts of exploration heavy mechanics (as I discussed upthread in post 21) - thankfully for the would-be scene-framer, 4e mostly drops them.
In a scene-framing game, the GM's role is to go where the action is. If that's the Green Griffon, that's where you go. Whether you achieve that by modulating backstory (the Green Griffon is the only inn) or by narrating how things unfold (the PCs end up at the Green Griffon) is secondary. Both are exercises of authority within the purview of the GM.
maybe the GM decides that the tavern is completely boring and instead we get:
GM: You're at the city gate.
Player: We go looking for the tavern.
GM: You party long and hard into the night, so you're still a little hung-over the next morning when you're shopping for supplies at Dink's store and spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket.
As you've presented it that looks like bad GMing. What has Dink's store got to do with anything? The players signalled interest in a tavern, not a store.
I'm reminded of the folloing
post by Ron Edwards, replying to a poster concerned about player and GM authority over scene-framing:
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared]I[maginary]S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
One principal skill in scene-framing GMing (as Eero Tuovinen notes in the blog I quoted upthread, and as Edwards points out here) is to be able to frame scenes that are worth anyone's time. The GM has to be good at gonig where the action is, and at introudcing complications and bringing out consequences, that make for interesting rather than boring play.
And we can keep cranking:
Player: Okay, we're done here. We head back to town.
GM: Okay. It's two weeks later and you're shopping for supplies at Dink's store. You spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket. You shout, "STOP THIEF!" and he starts running for the door. Whaddya do?
Can you give any example of a post, or of published GMing advice, which would suggest that this is a good approach? Or has anything to do with scene-framing?
Here is a relevant discussion in Marvel Heroic (Operations Manual p 34):
An Action Scene might begin in media res, in the middle of the action - Thor and his Warriors Three are already in the midst of a titanic battle with Frost Giants, or Cyclops and the X-Men are already three hours into the middle of the diplomatic encounter [between agetns of the Shi'ar and Kree empires). What's important is that this is where the real action starts. . .
You [the GM] should ask directed questions of the players, encouraging them to describe what their hero is doing . . . You might even establish a particular fact at the same time: "You're with the officers of the Imperial Force. Hoow did you agree to this position?"
If you're a player, you should allow for some relaxation of control over your hero for this purpose, because after this point everything you do and say is up to you and the roll of the dice. If the Watcher [ie the GM] asks you, "How did you agree to this position?" use that as an opportunity to build on the story. You might say, "Cyclops wants to see the big picture, so he's staying back to be sure his tactical genius is put to good use." Or, "Cyclops doesn't trust the Sh'iar officers, so he's staying near them in case they decide to pull a fast one on his team."
There are at least a couple of important points here. One is about a clear allocation of player and GM authority over situation. The other is about the importance of going where the action is, and framing scenes that express and relate to the evinced concerns of the players (evinced via backstory and play of their PCs). Thor and the Warriors Three aren't in the middle of a carpark arguing about pizza money - they're in the midst of a titanic battle with Frost Giants!
Unless Dink's supply store is a whole lot more significant than your examples are painting it as being, I'm seeing your examples as just bad GMing.
You'll also tend to see a decrease in even bothering to ask the players what they want to do next, because it will generally be irrelevant and over-ridden.
What examples of play, or games, do you have in mind?
From Marvel Heroic again (p 40):
Transition Scenes allow the characters involved to do something with what they've learned before the next conflict is met head-on. . .
[A] Transition Scene's purpose is to determine what the next Action Scene is. If this is already settled, then the Transition Scene helps to put that into context. . .
t's your responsibility to frame Transition Scenes just like you would any Action Scene. Start out be asking directed questions of the players. You want them to decide what their heroes are doing and how they're using their resources . . .
That advice certainly doesn't bear out your claim.
What also tends to happen at this point is that the game or GM will start introducing more STG / narrative control mechanics or techniques: The GM is taking so much control away from the players that it's necessary to compensate by giving them back control in other ways.
Ahh. This is the point where we learn we're not actually playng an RPG. I wondered when it was coming!
I have Heavy Gear, for instance, and it's not the worst offender, but all that Maintain the Metaplot and This NPC Cannot Die stuff is just awful. An even worse case is '90s Chaosium; I have or had the Stormbringer adventure Rogue Mistress and it is the worst railroad I have ever seen, complete with untouchable author's-pet NPC.
