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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7064985" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is, more-or-less, what I described in the OP as "railroading". I'm ultimately not fussed about labels, but that's a well-known one which conveys why I personally am not a big fan (either as player or as GM) of "story-teller" RPGing.I agree with this, although I think I incline more towards the scene-framing approach than you do.I think the actions character take impact the fictional world is especially important. I would add (if it needs to be rendered explicit) in ways that matter, given the theme/subject matter of the game. Choosing what colour hat my PC wears is not, per se, impacting the fictional world, unless perhaps I'm playing The Dying Earth. Choosing how to work through my suite of resources (eg do I fireball this round or next?) is not impacting the fictional world.Choosing whether to befriend a NPC, or oppose that NPC (or both) - that's impacting the fictional world. Especially if it's the player's own backstory for his/her PC that made the NPC salient in the game.One issue with scene-framing in relation to the above: what does it mean to convey the fictional world honestly? I think this has a few components: (i) respecting the backstory that has been established through play; (ii) honouring the players' successes and failure, with respect to how intent intersects with fictional positioning intersects with goals/theme/aspirations; (iii) feeding (ii) through the filter of (i) when framing new scenes. Which in turn connects back to the impact of declared actions upon the fiction. The framing of new scenes should respect that. It's not just an ingame causal logic; it's a protagonistic narrative logic.I've been re-reading some old AD&D modules. One of them, Five Shall be One, is virtually incoherent in its attempt to mix "referee" and "storyteller".It's full of these combats that (on paper, at least) look rather brutal - and in a system, AD&D, where the default consequence for losing in combat is PC death. And it has all this advice and urging to the referee to make these combats hard, to play the ambushing NPCs to the hilt, etc. Yet the whole thing is predicated on the assumption that the PCs will survive these combats - and not just survive them, but triumph in them, defeating the "bad guys". Eg there's no provision, in the scripted events, for the PCs ever surrendering so as to avoid dying.The module has some interesting ideas, and I remember using a bit of it a few years after it came out in my RM game. Unlike some quest-y type modules of that era, there is a certain thematic logic to the whole thing, and some of the encounters speak to that thematic logic in a reasonable way. But the whole thing, as written, just makes no sense. It's almost as if the author simply didn't notice that you can't just take the "build a tough dungeon room" idea (ie GM as referee) into a scenario based on a sequence of scripted events (ie GM as storyteller) and expect it to work. Given the unforgiving nature of the mechanics, the GM is practically guaranteed to have to fudge something along the way if the module is to be played through - but unlike the Dragonlance modules, the author doesn't actually come out and give advice on how/when to do this.Absolutely. I like Luke Crane's description of classic D&D as a cross between Telephone and Pictionary. It's a style of GMing that I suck at, partly because I'm a bit too sloppy, and moreso I think because I find that emotional distance too hard to maintain: I want to rib the players (or mock them if its warranted), urge them on, be the conscience on their shoulder, remind them of what's at stake.(It's an approach I learned at a Con 20-something years ago, from a really evocative free-form Cthulhu GM - that was actually one of the few CoC scenarios I've played which wasn't a railroad, because although the progress through the Dreamlands setting was pre-ordained, the actual focus of the game was the transformative effect on our characters, and this was something that we were allowed to play out among ourselves, with the GM playing the role I just described.)</blockquote>

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