I liked all five paragraphs there (#719 from "What does Gygax..." to "... in his writings.").
Thanks. And yes, you did make it clear you were being tongue-in-cheek about "Gygaxian illusionism", but I thought it was actually an interesting point in terms of (what I see as) a big shift in default approach between classic D&D and AD&D 2nd ed.
I see that you are in the US. Have you ever read anything by Lewis Pulsipher in the early White Dwarf? I think he can reasonably be regarded as a spokesman for the British version of Gygaxianism at that time. It was in trying to GM along the lines he instructed that I discovered I'm not very good at that approach!
On a tangent, this is why I have trouble with putting together a campaign that goes to the really high levels. What would the world be like if there were lots of high level people/creatures around who could charm/bluff/diplomacy there way in to see the king (or do lots of other things)? Would any castle from a really old successful empire default to having magically hardened walls, anti-teleportation auras, spells to automatically detect the invisible and evil intented, and have its main guards be charm proofed? If not, how did they manage to survive so long?
My solution to this problem is to treat the kingdom, etc, as themselves fully integrated into the broader cosmological framework. So its something like bandits vs village (heroic), orcs vs kingdom (paragon), abyss vs heaven (epic). Less naturalism, more mythology.
Oriental Adventures was the first time I encountered this sort of approach in a fantasy RPG (I hadn't discovered RQ/Glorantha at that time). And I think this is the basic set-up of core 4e.
Is the difference that the forcing side would judiciously use fudging or over-turning RAW to maintain the consistency of the game world and to account for the NPCs place in the world as if he were a real character in that role, while the non-forcing side would have the Chamberlain fully fledged out and if they missed something in the description that led to something un-Chamberlainy happening then so be it? (Is forcing needed if one doesn't fully stat up major NPCs?)
yes, that means there's often Schrodinger's NPCs, and no, that doesn't matter (to me) in the slightest.
On this my approach is like TwoSix's. It's come time, in this thread, to pull out one of my favourite quotes from Paul Czege characterising "indie" style:
There are two points to a scene - Point A, where the PCs start the scene, and Point B, where they end up. Most games let the players control some aspect of Point A, and then railroad the PCs to point B. Good narrativism will reverse that by letting the GM create a compelling Point A, and let the players dictate what Point B is (ie, there is no Point B prior to the scene beginning).
I think it very effectively exposes, as Ron points out above, that although roleplaying games typically feature scene transition, by "scene framing" we're talking about a subset of scene transition that features a different kind of intentionality. My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about.
"Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently.
<snip>
By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. We've had a group character session, during which it was my job to find out what the player finds interesting about the character. And I know what I find interesting. I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. And like Scott's "Point A to Point B" model says, the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.
Now Paul Czege is a pretty self-consciusly avant-garde RPG designer and (judging from this passage) GM. I think he would find my games pretty staid and pretty prosaic. But the techniques he describes are still ones that I have found very helpful in my own GMing. Particularly the idea of holding NPC personaities somewhat unfixed at the start of the scene, and then developing them (and backstory more generally) to maintain pressure on the players via their PCs.
