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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6727318" data-attributes="member: 42582">This triggered a few thoughts in me. I talk about playing a scene-framed game, but mostly that is to try and convey the gist of how I run my game, and to establish the contrast with either the dungeon approach (which seems to be something of a ENworld norm) or the adventure path approach (which is, I think, the other ENworld norm and also the trigger for this thread).Compared to serious scene-framing GMs, though, my scene-framing is pretty flabby, and I rely pretty heavily on fairly standard tropes to carry quite a bit of the weight in the scenes I frame. So I wouldn't say that I feel mentally exhausted at the end of the game, but that might be because I'm lazy in my GMing.Another way in which I'm a lazy scene-framing GM is that often I leave the consequences of failure at least somewhat implicit in the framing of the action declaration, rather than always spelling it out. For instance, in a recent Burning Wheel session the PCs had just arrived at the ruined tower in the Abbor-Alz where the mage PC had spent time in his younger (pre-play) days. That PC was hoping to find the Falcon's Claw in the ruins of the tower - as the note on his character sheet read, "The Falcon’s Claw is a mundane, run of the mill mace Jobe had made 12 years ago and abandoned in the tower. Probably looted by the orcs years ago, it is made of nickel silver and has a frieze pattern of falcons’ beaks around the head and also a falcon’s claw at the base (i.e. a spike). Probably never to be seen again, let alone to be enchanted to become the Sceptre of The Blue."A scavenging check was made, and failed. So instead of finding the Falcon's Claw, the PCs found some cursed arrows (especially good for shooting elves) that matched the broken arrow one of the elven PCs wears on a cord around his neck - the arrow that slew that character's former master. These arrows were found in the ruins of what had been the mage PC's older brother's private workroom. It was already established - as a central element of the PC's backstory - that his brother was demon-possessed and on the side of darkness rather than light; and that the demon possession had occurred during the events that led to the ruin of the tower. This was the first indication in play, though, that the brother's connection to the dark side might precede those events.This possibility was always implicit in the fiction, and close to the surface, given the various PC backstories and the way these had started to flesh out in prior sessions. But it wasn't made express until I had to narrate failure.Besides laziness, I see this sort of management of the balance between explicit and implicit consequences of failure as a way of managing the balance between player agency and suspense. If I was GMing for strangers, I would probably have to be more explicit more of the time.The other thing I do, which is probably easier with friends than it would be with strangers, is poke and prod the players with out-of-game comments as they debate about action declaration options. For me, this is as important as a way of trying to make the stakes clear and weighty as is the more formal description of the fictional situation. This is also part of why I find GMing Basic D&D, or "skilled play" more generally, so hard. It depends upon the GM exercising a type of neutrality towards the players that I'm not really capable of.</blockquote>

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