Cut scenes in your RPG

[The Human Target]

I think some definitions are in order. By definition, if you add the players as actors into the scene, it's no longer a cut scene.

A traditional cut scene is when you cut away from the story of the protagonists (the PC's in RPG terms), and tell the story of some other characters. A cut scene in gaming refers to this and also to situations when the game takes control of the player's avatar and makes choices on the player's behalf and shows things happening to the character without the player's input.

So if the PC's are in the scene and are able to control their characters, then in my opinion we shouldn't call that a cut scene.

When a DM reads a lengthy piece of text describing something that the PC's have become aware of, that's what's called 'Color Text' or 'Scene Framing' (depending on how it is being used). That really falls into what you'd call 'Expository Narration', where you are giving the players enough details to understand what is happening to their characters. A cutscene is used instead to either give the players information that their characters don't have - something happening elsewhere or elsewhen - or to temporarily take control of the characters in order to avoid some troublesome hard to simulate aspect of play. I guess you could consider that 'Expository Narration' as well, but its a different sort of narration than 'Scene Framing'. Everyone uses some sort of scene framing. Not everyone uses cut scenes.

cRPGs often heavily rely on cut scenes for pacing reasons and to deal with the limitations of their interface. Mass Effect for example blends cut scenes with participatory play in absolutely brilliant ways. But IMO, PnP RPGs can be - and should be - far less reliant on cut scenes. For example, it's less compelling in a PnP RPG for the DM to tell you what you say, as opposed to letting players choose their own words for their characters. In a game like Mass Effect, obviously that can't work, leading to situations where you direct your character only to hear them say things that you would have never chosen for them to say, and leading to very few options regarding how you'd respond to any conversational overture.



Agreed. RPGs in large part are played by people who have the desire to be inside their favorite stories, or favorite sorts of stories. So while 'cinematic' as it pertains to RPGs has been defined in different ways, in the sense you mean it, it's usually all to the good to make your game cinematic.

Whatever you say.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

And again, I'm not saying that that is badwrongfun. I am saying that hooking the players but not the characters (or more rarely, the characters but not the players) is an example of lesser skill than doing both at the same time. And as a matter of best practice in our GMing, we ought to be shooting for the moon and not merely what we can get away with.

I wholeheartedly agree that we ought to be shooting for the moon--which is exactly what my GM did. He successfully engaged us in his game in a way that I haven't seen before and he engaged the players and the characters at the same time.

None of that is necessarily bad, but I think all the plot points you describe can be given to the players through participatory play.

Since most of the cutscenes occurred in places and with people that the PCs had no knowledge of or connection to, I imagine making them participatory play would come off as contrived. But maybe the GM could have worked them in.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I posed to my GM why he used cutscenes instead of participatory scenes and if he thought a participatory scene could have worked better than a cutscene. This was his response:

One of the things I enjoy about cutscenes is that it shows how the world progresses without the players being around. The world is not on a pause button until the players arrive and influence events. Would the attack be an awesome scene with the players involved? Absolutely. But you guys chose to be somewhere else at the time, and the battle went on without you. That's not a bad thing, mind you - maybe when you turned left, you were involved in another major part of the story. But I think cutscenes give the world a more living feeling to it. You guys aren't just wandering from place to place doing everything that matters in the game - the world progresses without you. It gives weight to the choices you make too - you realize that maybe if you had chosen something different, you could have changed the outcome.

 

[Celebrim]

"One of the things I enjoy about cutscenes is that it shows how the world progresses without the players being around. The world is not on a pause button until the players arrive and influence events. Would the attack be an awesome scene with the players involved? Absolutely. But you guys chose to be somewhere else at the time, and the battle went on without you. That's not a bad thing, mind you - maybe when you turned left, you were involved in another major part of the story. But I think cutscenes give the world a more living feeling to it. You guys aren't just wandering from place to place doing everything that matters in the game - the world progresses without you. It gives weight to the choices you make too - you realize that maybe if you had chosen something different, you could have changed the outcome."

Your GM sounds like a thoughtful guy who I'd enjoy talking shop with. I'm not sure I fully agree with his reasoning, but his reasoning is coming out of the right place IMO.

In my essay on railroading, I wrote that railroading techniques could be justified when they were used to grant meaningful agency to the player, rather than being used for the reason they were most often used for, which was to take away agency. The use of "cut scenes" was one railroading technique that I discussed in the essay.

What I like about your GM's response is that he clearly is coming at cut scenes from a gaming perspective, and not from a literary perspective. His justification isn't - as it too often is - to show how awesome his NPCs are or how awesome his story is, or even to hook the players into the story. Nor is his justification that running a participatory scene that had the desired outcome would be too hard. Instead, his justification amounts to trying to prove to the players that they actual do have agency, and can make meaningful choices.

Most importantly, he seems to only be using cutscenes to show players events the characters didn't directly participate in, and not to take control of the PC's and remove player control in order to get scenes to work out the way he wants.

When I talked about using a railroading technique to give meaningful agency to the players, it wasn't "cutscenes" that I had in mind, but things like "small world", "hand waves", or "Schrodinger's Map". So it is extremely interesting to see a GM approaching cutscenes as a player empowerment tool. And your GM's explanation fits my theory of when a GM does well by pulling railroading techniques out of the toolbag.

I remain not completely sold on the idea though. For one thing, for this particular case, I don't buy the "you guys chose to be somewhere else at the time" explanation. By your account, the events are happening in a campaign 'Prelude'. Surely the GM controls the backstory sufficiently to ensure that where the PC's begin the story coincides with where the most interesting part of the story is happening. I don't buy the explanation that the story starts in Hillsville, but the GM chooses the most interesting things happening at the time to occur in Forestburg and that that isn't something he controls because the players choose to be in Hillsville. This is a Prelude. The players haven't had opportunity to make meaningful choices yet about where they are at.

Secondly, in the real world we have the sense that things happen in parts of the world we aren't in, and that our choices might have been able to change the outcome. Yet, we have that sense that the world works this way completely without recourse to cut scenes. It seems to me that there are ways to convey the knowledge to the characters without recourse to cut scenes. For example, in my game the PC's knew that a battle was likely to be fought in one area, but instead 'turned left' and explored a different path. I wanted them to know what had happen in the battle, so I had a minstrel show up in the tavern and relate the events of the battle. This 'story within the story' conveyed all the information of a cut scene, but by the conceit of having a minstrel convey the words to the characters, I was able to read a cut scene to the players without breaking the 4th wall. All the same words got read, and it took all the same amount of time, but both the characters and the players now had the same information, so no worry about metagaming, and the scene was interactive at least minimally, in that the players could now ask questions to the NPC about things they were curious about, or critically have their characters make knowledge checks about elements of the story to get more details about it. How can you have characters make knowledge checks to understand a story when you have a cut scene that isn't playing to them? For that matter, in a lengthy campaign featuring many cut scenes, I'd expect players to become confused regarding what they know and what their characters know: "Did we learn that in a cut scene or did it happen to our characters?"

A modern version of this technique would be like having the players see a breaking news report on the TV, a technique you'll also see quite often employed in movies. In general, any story told in the first person tends to have "stories with stories" where the protagonist learns about what has been happening in places they aren't in. Even stories with multiple perspectives will often use "stories within stories" in order to have cliffhangers where the audience is surprised in ways that they would not be had they already had the viewpoint of all the characters. For example, Tolkien repeatedly employs these stories within stories, usually (but admittedly not always) framing flashbacks to create dramatic cliff hangers. Now granted, just because it works in novels or movies isn't necessarily a reason to adopt the technique into gaming, but the structure of an RPG tends to be closer to first person perspective (or multiple viewpoint) than not, so why not adopt techniques like that in preference to cutscenes?

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Your GM sounds like a thoughtful guy who I'd enjoy talking shop with.

He is and I'm sure you would--we have some great RPG conversations!

For one thing, for this particular case, I don't buy the "you guys chose to be somewhere else at the time" explanation.

When he said that he was speaking in general for all of the characters and all of the cutscenes, not specifically for the prelude. I get what you're saying but his statement was pretty accurate. An interlude cutscene could be at the northern border where the orcs were invading and all of the characters were in the south. Or the cutscene was at a hidden location or a location that the characters had no reason to have access to--which is the reason why his statement is accurate for the prelude cutscene with the king and queen. None of the characters had any reason to be in the king and queen's court and the royalty had no reason to have the characters in the secret meeting. The same goes with minstrels to convey the cutscenes. Sometimes you could have them come from the location to share the information but often this was information that they would have had no access to either.

 

[AnimeSniper]

The only time the group I game with has used cut-scenes was when a fellow DM did a multi-generational campaign where the great-grandchildren of human PC's were approached by their elders once companions, i.e. elves and etcetera, and had to fight the reemerging BBEG or other dark thing...
Mostly the DM went briefly into explaining the actions are PC's had on the world... peace settled upon the land and those who fled their lands returned to begin anew rebuilding their lives from the ashes of war and destruction.

One PC married into a minor noble family when he saved the NPC daughter of said noble during one moment of the campaign

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I haven't ever used one, and can't ever see doing that. Not really into trying to tell a story to the players in that regard when I run a game. The players come up with their own story though the gameplay so a cutscene of stuff that isn't happening to them is unnecessary.

 

[Imaculata]

Cut scenes where the players are present

Since a table top role playing game is an interactive experience, I'm not sure if what we call a cut scene is actually a cut scene. When I think of a cut scene, I think of a linear script that plays out in front of an audience. The type of scripting you'd see in a video game. But scenes in my games are always interactive.

A story can have scenes, in which certain pre-written things can happen. But the players always have agency. They can do what ever they like. They are not watching a play unfold while they stand by frozen in place.

For example, I recently had a scene in which a pirate captain brought tribute to his holy temple, by dropping a treasure chest into a volcano. The players were there to await the blessing of the head priestess. Little did they know that the pirate captain was in fact a master illusionist in disguise, and the treasure chest was filled with black powder. The chest exploded, igniting the volcano. In the chaos that followed, he stabbed the priestess in the back and then teleported away.

Was this a cut scene? The players were entirely free to react in what ever way they wished. But they were simply caught unaware by a clever villain. Occasionally something like this will happen in my campaign, because you need to move the story forward. When an evil cult assassinated the Marquis of an important coastal city, that was also a scripted thing that happened. But is this a cut scene, or just "a scene".

Cut scenes where the players aren't present

I rarely do this, because I prefer to tell the story from the point of view of the players. However, on rare occasions I might make an exception. One such case was when one of the players sent an elaborate letter to an npc, to ask if he would pardon a prisoner and put him in their service instead. I paused the game play to relate what happened in another city when the letter arrived. I thought it would be fun to let the players know what the reaction of this npc would be to the contents of the letter.

 

[Obryn]

I used cutscenes all the time when I was running Star Wars Saga Edition.

The more cinematic the game, the more likely it is that I'll use cutscenes.

The Zeitgeist adventure path uses them a few times, as well, to great effect. Because - again - cinematic.