D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[pemerton]

There's a huge difference between an RPG and a movie. An RPG is an interactive medium. In that way, it's a lot more like reality than like a novel.

I'm pretty close to [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] here: playing an RPG is a part of real life, and it is a part of real life that involves playing a game.

The fiction that is generated by playing that game is not much real life. But, like other fictions, it can be more or less interesting, more or less engaging. I prefer more rather than less!

I see the justification for avoiding "boring" scenes by bringing on adversity/conflict to have the PCs engage with. On the other hand, as a GM, I'd feel like I had failed on my part of the bargain if I hadn't set the stakes high enough in the framing material such that those in opposition to the PCs goals are actively generating that conflict as a natural outgrowth.

I'm not sure what you have in mind here.

For instance, to go back to an example that has already been discussed in this thread: will the prisoners be sacrificed off-screen, on the basis of the GM's reference to a secret backstory (in this case, a pre-prepared timeline), or not?

If you're taking a "natural outgrowth" approach, then presumably that has to be a possibility. But if you're taking a "no boring scenes" approach, then presumably it's not an option (not to say you can't have the PCs come into a room where the prisoners are already dead and the gnolls gloating, but that would have to be a known consequence of some prior scene that the PCs (and hence the players) had been framed into, not just the result of the GM's own extrapolations from the secret timeline).

In my 4e game, I placed a town. Given that I was using some material from "Speaker in Dreams", the town had a baron. Given that I had just bought the MM3, and had read all about catoblepas's and their relationship to fate, hubris and the Raven Queen, and has a party full of Raven Queen devotees, I decided that the baron had been visited by a catoblepas as a harbinger of some doom. I also decided that the baron would be attacked by Orcus cultists.

So far that's all backstory; none of it is framing anything.

Then, the question is: when do these events happen? The day before the PCs arrive, or when they are in the town? The night they spend hanging out with the dwarven elders, or the night they are invited to dine with the baron? It seems to me that the questions answer themselves! Of course the attack of the Orcus cultists is timed to coincide with the return of the catoblepas a year after its first appearance, and of course that happens to be the evening the PCs are invited to dine.

That's framing.

To make it work, a few other things have to happen. For instance, the PCs have to get their invitation to dine after the backstory has come out, but not very much after, so that the players know that when they accept the invitation, they will probably have to confront the catoblepas. Otherwise, it won't work - let out the backstory too early, and the PCs will make other plans and hence not be around for dinner on the right day; don't let them know about the backstory at all and then they don't see that anything is at stake in accepting the invitation to dinner.

If the players, in full knowledge, decline the dinner invitation then of course all bets are off - the next day they learn of the savage massacre in the baron's great hall, when a catoblepas appeared and Orcus cultists attacked. (That's analogous to the players deciding they don't care to rescue the prisoners anymore.)

The framing can't be achieved, that I can see, simply by relying upon "natural outgrowth". At least not reliably.

I would also be uncomfortable with it in an instance where I've framed a scene, in accordance with the PCs expressed goals and prior outcomes, but the players play the characters inconsistently. Suddenly those conflicts and natural outgrowths of prior scenes become moot, or lessened in impact.

If the players play their PCs inconsistently in order to squib on the stakes you have framed them into, then narrativist play won't work. (Some gamist play will break down too - eg the players decide their PCs would rather farm potatoes than raid dungeons.)

But that's a social-contract/table problem, not a problem about GMing techniques, it seems to me.

But maybe you're not worried about squibbing - see what follows just below:

Am I just supposed to toss aside the "framing" information that governs the stakes?

If what you are worried about is that you have misjudged, and hence the scene you framed lacked the interest for the players that you hoped it would have, then in my view absolutely you should let it go. There are any number of ways a creative GM can add in fictional material, motivations, etc to turn the scene into just some low-key bit of transition or plot dump, or to take it in a new direction that will engage the players, etc.

If this is repeatedly happening then you have the problem Ron Edwards described, of not being able to frame scenes that are worth anyone's time.

This has been a real problem in a number of campaigns I've played/run. A player creates a decent character concept, but comes up with no way that the character they've chosen would feasibly be involved in the campaign as constructed. I've then had to backfill events (usually hamfistedly and unsuccessfully) to try and keep the character involved somehow.

To me, that sounds like a failure of communication at campaign start-up: again, a table/social contract issue rather than a methodology issue.

I guess if repeated experience reveals that, in fact, with this group, it is in practice not feasible for the GM to continually come up with situations that will be engaging to the players given the PCs they want to play, then a GM assertion of authority over plot becomes a second-best alternative. To me it seems very second-best, however.

 

[JamesonCourage]

If it's based on a check then the determination is not being made by "what the GM thinks appropriate". It's an example of the mechanical resolution that I went on to describe.

And I was responding to your "GM-dominated" game example.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

How is one of these more of a railroad than the other? In each case, the GM is framing the PCs into some fiction. No outcome has been determined. On the face of it, none of them looks like a railroad to me.

In the third situation, the GM has decided that something unlikely will happen. In the second case, what the PCs encounter is indirectly a result of player choices. In the first situation, the PCs are treated just like any NPCs in the situation.

The third case is the clear outlier here. That's the situation which is more of a railroad than the other two.

Is any of these more conducive to player agency than the other? In the abstract that is hard to answer, but I think everything else being equal perhaps Day 3 of the timeline, or the freeze-frame, is more likely to engage the players and lead to some interesting action declarations than is the description read by the first GM, or Day 1 as read by the second GM.

Yes, the second situation is a product of (indirect) player agency. Anything that happens after that is an extension of player agency.

In the third situation, anything that happens is a direct result of the GM's imposition of the unlikely scenario.

Is any of them more or less verisimilitudinous? On the face of things, not that I can see.

Yeah, the third one. If an average of 5% of each day at the Garden Gate is spent with an overturned wagon full of weapons, but you've contrived that 100% of the time that the party arrives at the gate involves this happening, then this encounter is not reflective of the reality of the world.

My preference as GM is to err on the side of interesting. That has no connection to railroading.

That's a matter of perspective. I would say that a GM preference for interesting, if it biases the occurrence of events in the game, is a form of railroading.

 

[LostSoul]

In the third situation, the GM has decided that something unlikely will happen. In the second case, what the PCs encounter is indirectly a result of player choices. In the first situation, the PCs are treated just like any NPCs in the situation.

The third case is the clear outlier here. That's the situation which is more of a railroad than the other two.

I think a lot depends on how the DM decides to frame the situation in option 3. If it was the result of choices the players made previously - in a skill challenge, let's say - then I think the case can be made that the players had agency. If it's out of the blue then I think you're leaning more towards railroading - I think it'd be better to have a scene that leads into the situation at the gate, even if it's just some rumours from an NPC.

I don't think you need to avoid scene-framing and keep a detailed timeline in order to avoid railroading. I think the players must be aware of the consequences of their actions, though, especially if the consequences are related by theme instead of cause and effect.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that this tends to lead to a very GM-dominated game.

For instance, a PC tries to persuade an NPC to abandon his/her post because s/he is serving an evil cause. Or tries to persuade an NPC to turn on his/her spouse or lover. In real life, these sorts of things happen. In fiction, these sorts of things happen. In RPG adjudication based on the GM's conception of what is appropriate for the NPC, not so much.

Once you introduce mechanical systems that allow the player to have an influence (say, AD&D's loyalty system, influenced by the PC's CHA) or some sort of system of social skill resolution, then a further question arises: why are the players (via choices around PC build, action declaration etc) allowed to influence these pivotal plot events, but not others (eg whether or not they arrive in the nick of time). And so then one looks to have action resolution mechanics to resolve other pivotal events (like the idea, mentioned multiple times upthread, of a skill challenge to manage time pressures).

I think the classical answer would be that the PC is, in the fiction, influencing the guard to abandon his post. This is a 'Naturalistic' situation, there is in-game causal relationship between the action taken by the PC and the resulting outcome. Why is the player not allowed to influence whether they arrive in the nick of time? They ARE! However the 'Naturalist' agenda restricts player influence to things which are within the causal agency of the character, and NOTHING ELSE. The only allowed avenue of interaction with the game for the player is the character. If the character can't 'go faster' to arrive in time, then the player has no other agency. He can't petition the DM or expend some resource or assert some other rule of the game to achieve 'being there in the nick of time'.

Obviously rules systems cannot prevent players from TRYING, and this is one of the weaknesses of the DM-centricism inherent in the Naturalist agenda. The players can always threaten to go play in another game, buy the DM a pizza, argue eloquently, etc, all of which undermines the DM's agenda. One of the properties I perceive in Naturalism is that it is always going to be extremely difficult to say how exactly any given situation advances the agenda. The goal is very diffuse. Its claimed that the whole game will be 'better' in some sense because 'everything flows naturally', but nobody can actually pin down any specific point in the game and show concretely how that works.

Contrast this with gamism, I can pretty much say what will or will not make a more interesting or better game. I might be WRONG about that, and it may differ for different styles of player of course, but there are some pretty good guideposts, and making good highly-playable fun games has become rather a science over the past few decades. Heck, you can take a college course of study in it.

Likewise a narrativist agenda has some fairly solid guideposts as to what advances it. The idea is to make an exciting and engaging narrative. At any point in play you can utilize some, again somewhat subjective, criteria to say "yeah, this will be more interesting than that."

I think the end result is that the naturalist agenda simply hasn't been as much as recognized, let alone really designed towards. Certainly [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] will tell you he knows how to further it, but I'm not sure to what extent even he really knows what works best. To me at least, it feels very murky and subject to failure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's a huge difference between an RPG and a movie. An RPG is an interactive medium. In that way, it's a lot more like reality than like a novel.

When I play an RPG the last thing I'm after is some experience that matches with what I have in real life. In that sense both movies and RPGs are escapism.

 

[TheFindus]

Man, I am late to this very interesting and entertaining thread. I see many similarities in the different playstyles but after reading through 114 pages I am sure we now know where the differences lie.

A few questions and remarks to clarify this for me, if that is ok:

So, for example, a large portion of my last session: The PCs started in the largest city in a particular nation under the watch of the noble house that one of the PC's belonged to. He had traveled here because of word that his mother was gravely ill, and had arrived a week too late. She had left him a letter telling him how she felt about him and asking him to perform a couple specific tasks (including finding a good woman), but the PC was more interested in her cause of death.

As far as I can tell, the player (through his PC) tells the DM in this way that his interest lies in a sort of "detective" story, a who-has-done-it. I cannot see how this is different from [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s approach, as his style is basically based on following the players interest for where the game should go.
And since everybody at the table seems to be ok with this, conciders this genre-appropriate and an interesting subject for play, this is what this part of the session will be about.

With that, they left south, and arrived at a city where they could acquire said troops. On arrival, beggars approached, but one adolescent girl was more persistent than the others. She begged and begged for the arriving lords (R and his two brothers) to save her, and promised that she was willing to work. When she reached for R, he pulled back, as a thought struck him: his noble house was particularly known for being close to the common folk, and he knew that his mother had visited family in this city just before coming home and becoming ill.

I see this as a freeze-frame-scene: why is the girl more persistent than the other beggars? What purpose does this serve other than to serve as a clue (we are in a detective scenario, after all). Now, what I find interesting is that the player has this thought about the role of the family of his PC with regards to the illness of the mother. Was that resolved by the roll of the dice? If so, who rolled?
In 4E, an Insight roll (maybe Streetwise?) would be in order. Maybe in [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] style the DM rolled the dice and looked up the result in a prepared table. If this is so (which I do not know but would like to) think the 4E approach protagonizes the players because the result of the roll is based on the abilities of the PC (which is also "gamist"). A roll on a table, however, deprotagonizes the player, because it is based on just a random roll without any influence on the player(PC part. Then again, maybe a "say yes" approach was used.
That said, as the play example does not say who rolled, there does not have to be adifference in play styles because in [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION]'s game the player could have also rolled for his PC's ablities. Then there would be no differences at all in playstyles, if you ask me. You can also "say yes" in any style, really.

The players hypothesized that the care package may have been the carrier of the curse, either diseased itself or cursed to disease her at a certain point. R and his brothers asked the guards to round up the five beggars, and then R went to the local baroness to ask for her help (who promised R the troops as soon as a patrol arrived two days from now). R went to go see the captain of the city watch, but had to wait (again, checks for this, etc.).

Who checked if the PCs had to wait? Was this done with a roll on a table? Or could (as the players have the power to in 4E) to press for a more sooner meeting time with a) a skill challenge b) with a simple roll for Diplomacy, Intimidate, Streetwise or Bluff or c) by the use of some powers (martial or otherwise)?
The advantage of this approach being that it is all about what the players want the game to be about: maybe they like to play detective stories and built their PCs accordingly and want to use those skills. But as this could have been done in [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION]'s game as well, there might not be a difference in playstyles worth mentioning.

With a lot of mysterious money appearing but no names, the only link left was the baker. They approached her and brought her back to the garrison for questioning, sending guards back to tend to her oven. While questioning her (and finding out that she was hiding something), a guard burst in, yelling that there was a magic user at the bakery attacking guards. All the PCs were alerted, and ran to the bakery (leaving one of the brothers and the guard captain to continue questioning the baker in a more hurried manner).

On arrival, the fight was over. The woman had tried attacking the guards that had come into the bakery, but they had apparently killed her. The bakery was searched, and a secret cache was found with about 100 silver, a magic starmetal sword (both very rare in the setting), and a pocket of gems used purely for necromantic purposes. These were all gathered and brought back to the garrison.

On arrival, the captain had found out some information from the baker. She had apparently been blackmailed and threatened by the necromancer, who had paid for her shop and was using her as a front of sorts. She had been living and hiding in the shop, and it was her who had provided the care package to the baker, who had then passed it on to the beggars. The PCs assumed that it was the necromancer who had provided the 100 silver to the beggar for him to bribe the family (and later killed him for some reason), but had no proof.

This part, in my opinion, highlights the real differences: the players decide to play a detective story. But they do not solve the mystery because the captain (an NPC) finds out the information. The PCs also do not fight the evil necromancer because the guards do that.
This would not happen in [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s game. And it would not happen in my games either. If the players show clear intent to play a detective story, why deprotagonize them by not letting them do what real detectives do: find the real clues, fight the person behing the murder etc.? And if all of this was the result of the roll of the dice on a prepared table: why make such a table at all?
In my opinion, this example is, of course, a story in an RPG. And it is not a railroad (I do not consider the clue-giving freeze-frame-scene with the beggar girl a railroad at all). But the intent of the PCs and their players did not matter much to the story at the table and how it resolved. Maybe this is naturalistic, but it is not exiting, at least not in my opinion. If random rolls on a table prevented me as a player with my character to actually be a detective because random rolls on a table decided that NPCs do all the work that actually make up a good detective story, the game would be bland in my opinion. Especially because the clear intent at the beginning of the session was: forget my moms letter, I want to find what/who killed her. Well, "I" did not, "the captain" did.
There is a difference between having to live with a missed DC/a wrong decision and having NPCs doing the work for you because the DM decided not to have the necromancer attack while the PCs are literally at the scene. I do not understand how this is this any less "naturalistic" anyways?
Why not let the PCs fail forward instead of them being either not there or completely unable to obtain the really useful information? What is the DC for finding out more from the baker instead of "she is hiding something"? 4E offers a skill rolls, skill challenges and a clear fail forward approach.
Where is the advantage of the naturalistic playstyle?

Now, at every decision point, the players have context in what they're basing their decisions on. Information revealed (from investigation or from NPC tips [which may or may not be true]), knowledge of the setting (how this noble house generally treats the common people, how certain NPCs might act), facts about PCs (R values honor and justice, which is why he argued with his sister that he must personally see to this task, instead of entrusting it to the military; also, he said that if he wasn't willing to risk his own life, how could he ask other soldiers to?).

All of these decisions are made with the context of what's led them up to this point. That's why PC histories are required (and why I have two different mechanics to help flesh those out), so that even at the beginning of a campaign, you know where you're coming from, you have personality traits picked out (mechanically, even), and so on.

I agree that all of this matters. But in my opinion, in this specific example all of this did not lead to a satisfying result regarding the nature of the intended subject of the story for the session: playing detective. So in the end, regardless of the PC background and naturalistic go-abouts, the players did not get what they said they wanted (whatever result). And that would not happen in a narrative/gamist game.

 

[TheFindus]

In the third situation, the GM has decided that something unlikely will happen. In the second case, what the PCs encounter is indirectly a result of player choices. In the first situation, the PCs are treated just like any NPCs in the situation...

The third case is the clear outlier here. That's the situation which is more of a railroad than the other two...

Yeah, the third one. If an average of 5% of each day at the Garden Gate is spent with an overturned wagon full of weapons, but you've contrived that 100% of the time that the party arrives at the gate involves this happening, then this encounter is not reflective of the reality of the world...

That's a matter of perspective. I would say that a GM preference for interesting, if it biases the occurrence of events in the game, is a form of railroading.

I can see that some people might have a problem with the believability of the situation. But that has nothing to do with freeze-framing in itself. JamesonCourage posted a freeze-frame with a beggar-girl upthread that is completely believable. So if your quarrel is with the believability of a certain scene, I agree with you. But this has nothing to do with the freeze-framing in general.
That said - and this being a thread about how wonderful 4E is - 4E offers a time-keeping mechanism without having to count rounds or hours and is based on what the PCs can actually do/where there strengths and weaknesses are: the skill challenge. And this is all about the stakes as well: if the players know that time is an issue, the skill challenge can be about that. If they do not know, the skill challenge can be about finding out about the true nature of the problem: time (followed up by another skill challenge about how fast they really are). Or a quest (for which 4E has explicit rules as well). Which is good for the gamers out there, too, since two skill challenges (plus a quest) mean more XP. Hurrah!
Anyways: freeze-frames need to be believable, of course.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

On some level this mandates the players having an understanding of what the GM is doing "naturalistically" with the game world. How do events flow around and through the PCs? What existing responsibilities and passions are the PCs invested in to justify their involvement with the "scene frames" they're interacting with? This has been a real problem in a number of campaigns I've played/run. A player creates a decent character concept, but comes up with no way that the character they've chosen would feasibly be involved in the campaign as constructed. I've then had to backfill events (usually hamfistedly and unsuccessfully) to try and keep the character involved somehow.

This is why meta-plot is the enemy of scene-framing play. There is no big DM-generated backstory that the player has to fit his character into. As you described earlier there may be 'setting elements' that could engage a player and speak to what motivations and backstory they want to give to the character. Nor am I implying that the world has to be entirely void of significant conflicts and events, just that the DM should present these in response to player input and shouldn't invest himself in a plot beforehand.

This is one of the reasons I wrote about, and criticized, my own heavily scripted 2e campaign from years ago. That heavy scripting virtually dictated what the parameters of the campaign were, what things the players had to engage, etc. Not only was it a horribly inefficient use of time and energy as a DM, it was plainly actively undermining the fun of the game.

My modern campaigns present a number of threats and issues that might be brought to the forefront depending on what the players indicate interests them. If they ignore some of those campaign elements, then I probably will just let them rest, they won't impinge on the character's story arc. Perhaps at most the characters might hear some rumors of events taking place outside of their sphere of interest, perhaps.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's saying "the PCs will encounter this, no matter their choice. That fits my definition of railroading.

What choice are the player's trying to make that is being overridden by the DM? You're rolling dice, aren't the dice just as much 'overriding' as the DM. I mean SOMETHING has to be described, IMHO its up to the players to decide how to react, that's their decision point. If the DM refused to allow the players to have their characters simply move on and ignore the peasants, then that would probably take on the character of railroading. Just having the peasant break his hoe on something is no more than dangling a plot hook and asking the players if they want to bite. If that's railroading then what isn't?