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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6783026" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this is a case where some familiarity with the technique in actual play can help.There are two ways of asking "What do you do now?" They are illustrated nicely in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?333786-Pemertonian-Scene-Framing-A-Good-Approach-to-D-amp-D-4e/page2&p=6074234&viewfull=1#post6074234" target="_blank">this excellent post</a> by  [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]:As someone who does a lot of scene-framing, I'll start by saying this: it concerns things like intent and game procedure and these are things which are a lot easier to do, or see in action, than to write about. . . . In my view, the fundamental cornerstone of scene-framing is character. . . . things that talk directly about personality, goals, flaws, relationships, dependencies, desires, problems. . . . Written down it looks easy. At the table it is not. If you play a FATE game, where 5 players each have 10 Aspects, you may have 50 goals and flaws and problems competing for time and if you've got 2 ideas for each of those then you've got 100 possible scenes before play even begins. Then people start interacting with each other and NPCs and before you know it you've got thousands of potential directions to take play. At which point feeling out the players becomes necessary. So if someone threatens an NPC like this - 'Drop the gun or I'll burn your damn house down' you might say 'That would be a cool scene...'. If you get a good vibe back from the table, well if it's still appropriate by the end of this scene then as the spotlight comes back to that player you could say 'Okay, so you're outside Jed's ranch with torches and oil somewhere just after midnight. You're starting forward when suddenly you hear the tail of the rattler as it rears up right in front of you'. Previously stated goal - burn house down. New complication - rattlesnake. . . . When I cut into Jed's ranch and a rattlesnake, I'm not asking 'Are you good enough to deal with a rattlesnake?' I'm asking 'How much are you willing to risk in order to make good on your threat?' The scene is not there to process the outcome of success or failure, it is there to reveal more character to be used for future scenes. This is why games written to this style (Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World and it's spin offs like Dungeon World and Monsterhearts, FATE to some extent, Dogs in the Vineyard for sure) don't tend to penalise failure particularly hard. Failure simply imforms the next scene. . . . Finally, one tell-tale sign for this style is to watch your own GM-ing. Starting scenes is easy. But how are you ending them? And how are you moving on to something else? If you say 'What do you do now?' you are not playing using scene-framing. If you cut to a place where nothing is happening right now you are not playing using scene-framing. Scene-framing in the most aggressive sense means going 'bang!' - straight into the conflict, straight into the action. And again. And again. When it hums like this, as each scene unfolds everyone at the table is alive with ideas as to what the next scene will be be."Fail forward" is a technique best-suited to scene-framing play, that is, play in which narrative dynamism is front-and-centre, and momentum is only rarely lost. Of course, in scene-framing play, the GM needs to listen to player action declarations: when the GM tells the player that the rattlesnake rears up in front of the PC, the player is expected to declare some action in response - ie they declare what it is that the PC does now.But in scene-framing play, the GM shouldn't be asking the players "What do you do now" as part of the process for transition between scenes. The GM should be framing the PCs (and therefore players) into the next confrontation.And flipping it around: if you're playing exploration/discovery/GM-world-building style, rather than scene-framing, then you don't need "fail forward", because it is completely fine for the game to come to a halt, for momentum to be lost, and for the GM to look to the players to kickstart things again. This is the sort of play that  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION] are familiar with and prefer. It has very little in common with the Apocalypse World sort of play that  [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] is mentioning in. And as I've tried to explain, the question "What do you do now?" is playing very different roles in the two approaches.Finally, anyone who thinks that scene-framing play is about railroading is suffering a fundamental misunderstanding. "Railroading' is about pre-determined events where choices don't matter. Scene-framing is about leaving everything open - events, the presence or absence of rattlensakes (or curses or tripwires or . . .) - until a new fictional situation is narrated by the GM in response to the events, context etc generated by the previous scene.Here are <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?736425-Burning-Wheel-First-Burning-Wheel-session" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473620-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-shenanigans" target="_blank">links</a>, to reports of my first and my most recent Burning Wheel session. Both involved use of "fail forward", as I've mentioned in more detail upthread. Read them and you'll see that neither was anything like a railroad. How can it be a railroad, for instance, to have the mace carried down the mountain stream from one PC to another when, until the various action delcarations were made, I didn't even know that one PC would be in the cave looking for the mace, or that another PC would be near the stream at the foot of the keep following servants doing laundry - this being the result of earlier action by the PCs which resulted in an NPC priest's vestments being dirtied and hence needing laundering? Where is the predetermining, or the stifling of player initiative/creativity?</blockquote>

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