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Yeah I should have been more clear that I was talking about Apocalypse World rather than Blades. I can see how the two are different, given that in Blades clocks have mechanical interactions.

Well I’ve been thinking about this mostly through the lens of Apocalypse World and I think I’ve found my problem with visible clocks. As a player I think you want fuzziness in how consequences will play out. I’m not a huge fan of this framing but there’s at least two kinds of escalation in...

Yes and it’s why it’s so darn frustrating to me. It seems like it should be an unmitigated good. Has it caused any problems in your games with theme? No matter how minor? I really think I’m just going to have to experiment and see how it works out for me. Who knows, given how great it should...

I wouldn't put it this way, I'd use the far colder sounding 'it gives situation legibility', but they amount to very similar things. So why don't I like the idea? I'm still trying to work through it. They could declare things can happen at any time but there's fairly good reasons as to why...

I’ll have to consider this. On the one hand I like the idea of showing clocks to the players because it makes the situation as a whole more legible. On the other hand, it seems intuitively deeply wrong, although I’m not sure I can articulate why. I think I’d want to be a player character in a...

I don’t think I’m clear on what you’re saying, are you saying that the players need to see the clock? If not, then isn’t telegraphing what the npc is going to do next still just a kind of case by case thing? I mean normally you’d want to but I don’t know why you’d need a clock for that.

My problem with fronts (or getting rid of them), is that how you organize and keep track of the situation tends to be fairly idiosyncratic. Fronts are one way of doing it but they’re not going to work for everyone. Which is admittedly, a fairly mild objection. The same could be said for clocks...

I was thinking abut this objection to scene framing and the suggestion that the name takes you out of the fictional world. I do have a solution though, we could call it The Process of Fictional Ubiety Actualization. Which admittedly does sound cooler than scene-framing. We’d have conversations...

Yes, and it’s a bit embarrassing I’ve been getting it wrong.

Different strokes I guess. I use the phrase ‘disconnected mechanics’ all the time, despite the fact it was coined specifically to show why the games I play aren’t actually role-playing games.

I agree. Or to put it REALLY charitably, 5E has many mechanics that can potentially bomb Narrativist play, caveat emptor.

A lot of the Forge/story games crowd have had huge issues actually getting the style of game they want. The parts of the furniture are there in trad games but the assembly guide isn’t. So yeah, if you read The Burning Wheel you can back port the knowledge to 5E but you don’t get that knowledge...

They didn't, they can request scenes but the GM has authority, same as in any game that has the kind of trad GM/Player split. If people are letting players actually frame scenes (rather than just saying I go here, or I see this person or whatever), then I'm not sure what to think. I've only ever...

By itself it doesn’t. Whoever has the power to frame scenes has unilateral situational authority, and unilateral situational authority IS story authority. Well kind of, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s an extreme example: So a snippet from my post earlier in the thread: A player is...

You should use it, it’s a really cool concept for thinking about some rpg stuff. A scene is a location, with people and things in it, and a relationship between the people and things. Scene framing is: How do you decide what location you are at, and what people and things are there, and what’s...

Ah ok that’s interesting, one of the questions I was going to ask but didn’t was about exactly that. Like if there was a resource mechanic, something like: you can exert yourself to really think hard but you can only do it twice a before you need eight hours rest. I think you answered that...

I think I get where you’re coming but I’m always going to have a suspicion that people are ok with knowledge checks because the first game they played when they were 14 had them. I think some old game stuff has had a kind of theoretical reassessment, where what seems to be really dumb on the...

So I might over categorize things and with the usual caveats that these are fuzzy. I’ve noticed three kinds of loop amongst Gamists. A) Connected mechanics type risk assessment. When there is a mechanical overlay which aligns the player choice and character choice, then the knowledge you have...

I’m one of the GNS faithful, I have a little shrine to Ron Edwards in my room and everything. When I’ve gotten deep into these types of conversations before I’ve found that everyone (almost) who declares they’re into immersion is actually a gamist. Now if you don’t believe in the GNS model then...

Hmm. I think a lot of great role-playing techniques come from the fact you can commit to stuff without the knowledge of the other players. The most obvious being something like the plan of a Dungeon or the motivations/values of an NPC.