Deciding that there are no bowls in a room is just fine without a roll, so long as the DM has done so with a reason for the lack of bowls that makes sense and could be understood in the gameworld. Not based on secret backstory, but on presented and predictable information.
But isn't this an instance of exactly the phenomenon I am describing? A player declares an action for his/her PC ("I look around the room for a bowl") and the GM responds "Sorry, no bowls" without engaging the resolution mechanics, but simply by reference to backstory which the player doesn't know - because of course, if the player knew there were no bowls in the room, s/he wouldn't have declared that her PC is looking for one!
Whether the GM's fiction is authored in the moment, or is prewritten (say, in a room key) is an interesting further thing - that it be pre-authored in a room key is fairly central to classic dungeoneering, whereas spontaneous authorship is probably more the norm in what, upthread, was being described as "storyteller" style. What [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] called "free krieggspeil" allows for spontaneous authorship subject to studied fidelity to the established fiction and expert knowledge - I think in the case of a bowl in a room, though, expert knowledge and fidelity to the established ficiton probably don't answer the question, and so a Moldvay Basic-style setting of a chance and then roll of the dice might be more apporpriate.
But that further interesting thing, and the different sorts of playstyles it can feed into, doesn't really bear on my personal dislike of the technique.
why did you pick finding a container to be the crux of the scene instead of whether or not the PC could, with a container, actually collect sufficient blood? Would it not have been the same, and possibly even better since it's testing PC ability, to test to catch the blood after "say(ing) yes' to the presence of a bowl?
it appears that there's multiple ways to skin this cat. The 'yes bowl, test catch' method works just fine with DM judgement and secret backstory, AND with the player-centric principles you've proposed. The 'test bowl, yes catch' seems odd, in that it's focusing on the presence of a bowl rather than PC action.
Better for whom?
A game focused on seeing how good the PC is at catching blood in bowls? Absolutely. But that wasn't the game I was GMing.
What the player put into play was the presence or absence of a bowl.. In the moment of play, that was the thing that the player cared about - "My master wants to offer the blood to the spirits, the blood is spilling out, is there anything to catch it in!" So the focus was on the presence of a bowl - that's how the check was framed. (And I don't know why that is especially odd. There is literary precedent for focusing on the presence or absence of something that will aid the protagonist, rather than the protagonist's performance as such: "My kingdom for a horse!" There is also RPGing precedent: D&D wizards need objects, like spellbooks and components, and are vulnerabl without them. But we rarely check to sre if they can successfuly cast their spells.)
An important element of GM judgement, in my preferred approach to RPGing, is to go where the action is. In the BW Adventure Burner (recapitulated in the Codex), Luke Crane has a bit where he says (I think it's a heading, or maybe an intro sentence), "Don't be a wet blanket, Mr GM." In other words, judging
where the action is, and then recognising when the time has come to "say 'yes'", is a pretty key GMing skill.
My sense of Framing is that this is where the GM places the PCs at the start of a game or session, correct?
Not really. Every time the GM narrates the ingame situation to the players, and then asks them (expressly or implicitly) "What do you do?" is a moment of framing. The response is action declaration: "OK, my guy is going to . . ."
Some of the fictional elements used in establighin a scene are just colour: eg the drow tentacle rods are a lurid purple (I think - it's been a while) rather than (say) swirling aquamarine. That is, they don't matter to resolution but just add flavour, reinforce theme, etc.
What counts as colour vs framing in the stricter sense is highly context dependent. If one of the players suddenly remembers "Don't we have a scroll of protection from purple weapons?", then what the GM may have intended only as colour suddenly becomes part of the framing more strictly construed. As I've mentioned upthread, it can also be the case that stuff that at one point of play was mere colour (a yellow-robed skulker has been seen around the place) can beomce jpart of the framing of a subsequent situation.
The relationship of the PCs to the framing fiction is
fictional positioning. You'll have seen [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] upthread emphasising how important he finds it, in RPGing, to be able to skillfully engage the fictional positioning. This is also an important part of clasic D&D play (I don't necessarily disagree with the difference Campbell has noted between B/X and Gygaxian AD&D, but put them to one side for present purposes). For instance, in White Plume Mountain there are doors, and there are pits with super-tetanus spikes in a frictionless corridor. The pits are not mere colour: they matter to resolution of declarations of movement down the corridor. Are the doors mere colour? At first blsuh, perhaps - or, at best, the checks needed to open them play a "clock" function in generating wandering monster checks. But then a player says, "Can't we take the doors of their hinges so as to surf down the frictionless corridor over the pits?" Now the doors are part of the framing, and the PC's ability (in the fiction) to use them, has become an important element of fictional positioning.
How players can change their PCs' fictional positioning, and hence change the sorts of options open to them in action declaration, is a big difference in RPG systems. One way of stating my dislike of the use of secret backstory to adjudicate action declarations is that the players are subject to fictional positioning of their PCs that they are unaware of and can't (in any meaningful sense) control.
(What counts as meaningful obviously is highly context dependent.)
But the GM does not have any secret backstory to draw from....so he is drawing everything from what has been established by the players' actions, right?
No.
For me as a GM, one of the most important things is to settle on the framing of situations. This includes determining the right mix of elements that arise from or reflect past events, plus new elements that speak to the salient player/PC concerns. In this second category there are at least two subcategorise: stuff that emerges from things the players have previously made part of the fiction (eg a new member of a secret society that is part of a PC's backstory); new stuff that the GM introduces (eg a new NPC trying to hunt down members of the secret society).
Two examples of that last sub-category from upthread: not because I'm denying you any courtesies (I hope) but because you might have seen some of the posts and so they might ring bells.
(1) The renegade wastrel elf (in BW this is called a dark elf, but is not a drow in the D&D sense - more like Maeglin and Eorl in The Silmarillion). I introduced this character into the fiction as part of the narration of consequences of failure on a check to travel safely across the Bright Desert to the Abor-Alz. The navigating PC was the elven ronin, who has a Belief to
always keep the elven ways, and so a renegade elf who fouls waterholes seemed fitting. (And I had just been re-reading The Silmarillion.)
I hope that the above exposition makes clear the difference between this being an elf and (say) an orc. The latter - whether or not it would have been good GMing (the same PC also has an Instinct to attack orcs when he sees them) - would have carried quite different thematic weight.
And having it be a dwarf would have been bad GMing, because nothing about any of the PCs would be spoken to by having the destination waterhole be fouled by a dwarf.
(2) The yellow-robed leader of the goblin army, who - it turned out - was the advisor to the baron of the city the PCs ended up arriving at, and liberating from the threat of the goblin army, around low-to-mid paragon tier.
This character was first introduced as colour: another NPC told the PCs of a yellow-robed skulker hanging around ancient minotaur tombs. The tombs were significant for three reasons: (i) prior events had established that dwarvish culture had minotaur roots, and one of the PCs was a dwarf, with strong loyalties to the dwarvish clans and traditions; (ii) the minotaurs were the predecessor culture to the Nerathi empire, and one of the PCs was trying to restore the Nerathi civilisation; (iii) the tombs had some sort of connection to Orcus (the Raven Queen's arch-nemesis), and several PCs were Raven Queen devotees of varying degrees of fanaticism.
Dropping in the skulker sows a seed for future colour and framing: later on the PCs saw him fly off from a goblin fortress on his carpet (as I posted upthread, I think this was in the context of an infiltration skill challenge); and later on still they discovered that he was the baron's advisor, and that no one in the city new that he was actually a Vecna-cultist with various nefarious plans.
pemerton said:
If the GM is doing this in his/her own time, and simply making notes in a folder headed "Campaign Record", then - at that point - it is not even clear what it would mean to say that it is part of the shared fiction. Who is it shared with?
there are two ways this could factor in. The first would be the GM deciding, when the PCs don't pursue the assassin, "okay, here's what happens as a result....I'll make a note of it in case it matters later on". The second would be the Gm deciding later on when it does in fact come into play what had happened with the king and the assassin.
The first that you describe seems to be the same as what I said: the GM makes notes in a folder headed "Campaign Record".
The question implicit in what I've been posting is: what is the status of that GM note?
If it's ideas/plans for possible future framings, consequences etc then it is not, at present, part of the shared fiction at all, and hence not secret backstory because not any sort of backstory. An illustration of what I've got in mind: the GM might nnes "assassin escaped, head's to PCs' home village". Then, when the PCs return to their village, the GM mentions a new village resident who doesn't leave his house very often and wears a heavy cowl when he does. Depending on context, that bit of GM narration is either colour or framing. At the point of narration it becomes part of the shared fiction. And whether or not it is an instance of what I have called GM-driven or player-driven play is impossible to tell from what I've just described, because we know nothing about how the assassination of the king, the fate of the assassin, and the PCs' home village, fit into any player goals/concerns/interests expressed/manifested via PC build and play of the PCs.
But here's another possibility: the GM makes notes that the assassin is hiding out in the PCs' home village. And that various friends, family etc of the PCs, who live in that village, are cowed, murdered by the assassin, etc. Then (let's suppose) in the course of play, a player declares that his/her PC sends a message to the village, asking (say) a friend to do some small favour or other and then send a note back confirming it's been done. And the GM decides (behind the screen, as it were) that the messenger is intercepted by the assassin, the favour never performed, no return message sent, etc - and all the player knows is that, as time passes in the game and s/he asks the GM "Have I got a return message yet?", is that the GM answers "No, no return message". That would be an instance of the GM using secret backstory - ie fiction that s/he is treating as an established element of the gameworld, but that the players don't know about - as part of the framing, part of the fictional positioning, and adjudicating action declarations accordingly. That's an instance of what I don't enjoy./
why would the GM have the PCs' attempt to reach the court rebuffed without explaining why? You seem to attribute some need for secrecy here on the part of the GM, but I cannot see why. Perhaps such an attempt is rebuffed, but the PCs find out it's because the king was killed....and they then recall that time when they had learned that an assassin may have been after the king, but they did nothing.....
I don't see this as fundamentally different.
When you say "the PCs find out" - well, there's many ways that can happen. Upthread, in discussing a comparable example, [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] suggested that an unexpcected rebuffing migh trigger the players (via their PCs) to start digging around. Or maybe the GM tells the players as part of the narration of the failure: "Your contact at court says sorry, but you're not welcome - something to do with the recent assassination of the king." And of course there are other possiblities as well.
It's nevertheless the case that the action declaration is failing on account of the GM treating, as part of the backstory which contributes to fictional positioning and hence factors into adjudication, something that the players don't have access to as part of the framing of the situation.
It's got the same basic structure as the message-to-the-home-village example that I just spelled out.
Here are the three elements as you originally presented them:
(i) having regard to consistency with the fiction already established in the course of play
(ii) having regard to the concerns/interests of the players as manifested through their creation and their play of their PCs
(iii) bound by the outcomes of action resolution
I decide I am going to run the Tyranny of Dragons Adventure Path. I discuss this with my players. Each of them creates a Forgotten Realms character for the game. Each of them creates ties to the Sword Coast region. For additional investment, I look at the ideas they come up with, and I take elements from the Adventure Path, and tie them to the characters. Then we play the game and I let things play out as they would based on the performance of the PCs.
It seems that this game fits all the criteria you've cited.
That's at such a level of abstraction I can't tell. When I am talking about (i), (ii) and (iii) I am talking about them operating as constraints
at every moment of framing. One result of (ii) is that it shapes narration of failure, which therefore feeds into (i) and (iii) in framing new situations. I find it almost impossible to conceive of how that could operate over (say) 10 sessions of play and yet the outcomes and hence the framings still fit within the framework of a 100+ page AP.
Now, if by "running ToD" you mean taking bits from it and adapting them, shaping them etc so that, as your campaign unfolds, so that you use particular maps, NPCs etc in your game but the actual sequence, story etc is quite different - well, I can see that. But that wasn't what I took you to mean when you talked about "running an AP".
Just looking at the first half of a 30-ish page module: Bastion of Broken Souls. That has at least two encounters in it which open by saying that the NPC in question (an angel, and a banished god) fights the PCs and can't be reasoned with. In each case my players approached the encounter by reasoning with the NPC. I had to ignore those bits of instruction to the GM - which are instructions to the GM to declare action declarations unsuccessful on the basis of (silly) backstory known only to the GM. Which meant that the scenario unfolded quite differently from how the author of the module envisaged. Which meant that the second half - which assumes a certain pre-planned trajectory of events - was useless. (Which I suspected when I bought the module - it was somee of the ideas in the first half that seemed interesting to me.)
It is because this is my uniform experience with even short modules - ie there are some interesting ideas and situtaions, but the totality of the thing rests upon assumptions about frmaing, outcomes etc that are simply not compatible with player-driven RPGing - that I find it very hard to imagination a 100+ page AP unfolding differently.
there is no reason that a GM's desires for the game cannot be in harmony with that of the players.
This is true, but (as far as I can see) has no implications for how action declarations should be adjudicated.
For instance, I run games where my desires are (as far as I know) in harmony with those of my players. That's why I use some techniques but not others.
