Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5454479" data-attributes="member: 42582">But 4e isn't a wargame. It's an RPG. And - judging from the copy on the back of the PHB - "The World Needs Heroes!" - and from the text of the PHB and DMG, which talk about the players creating PCs who are heroes who become paragons who go on to realise epic destinies, it is an RPG which is focused on the players realising the stories of their heroic PCs.This comment suggests to me that you don't have a lot of experience in playing non-simulationist RPGs. It's also pretty dismissive, suggesting to me that (as a GM) I'm not able to produce any more interesting, engaging or coherent play than would arise from a deck of combat scenarios. I don't know whether or not the RPG sessions you run bear much resemblance to a game of Talisman. Mine don't."Just in time" GMing - I'm borrowing the phrase from a poster on these boards whose username I can't recall at present - or, as it's called on the Forge boards, <a href="http://inky.org/rpg/no-myth.html" target="_blank">"No Myth"</a> RPGing - is about the GM setting up a situation and letting it unfold in response to the players' decisions. While there might be a general backstory that sets the parameters of that unfolding, plus mutually understood genre conventions that impose further limits, the details are worked out during the course of play and in response to play. It's a non-sandbox alternative to the railroad.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/299440-exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-sunday.html" target="_blank">Here is a link</a> to an actual play report of a "just in time" exploration scenario that I GMed. I think you'll see that it couldn't have been run without a GM, and bears no connection to GMing from a deck of cards.And here is <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=1361.0" target="_blank">a favourite quote of mine from Paul Czege</a>, describing GMing in this style (assuming that he's not exaggerating too much, his game is a bit more hardcore than mine). You'll see that there's bascially no resemblance between the sort of experience that players get out of situation-based GMing, and the sort of experience that you get from playing a game of Talisman:Let me say that I think your "Point A to Point B" way of thinking about scene framing is pretty damn incisive . . . 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. More often than not, the PC's have been geographically separate from each other in the game world. So I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out. I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. 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. How does it feel? I suspect it feels like being a guest on a fast-paced political roundtable television program. I think the players probably love it for the adrenaline, but sometimes can't help but breathe a calming sigh when I say "cut."</blockquote>

Verification