D&D 4E Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e

[pemerton]

I'm also rather baffled as to what the choice to replace DMing with published adventures and encounter tables has to do with the actual mechanics of the game.

I don't really understand your reference to "replacing DMing". But on mechanics I have a strong view: different mechanics definitely suit different approaches to play.

Here are three examples, all relevant to 4e:

Healing
In many fantasy RPGs, including D&D, fighting, and therefore healing, is a recurrent element in action resolution. The more that a system mandates keeping close track of time outside of the resolution of an encounter, in order to determine the consequences of injury and the healing of it, the harder it makes it to run a scene-framing game. This is because those system imperatives distract attention at the table away from the emotional and tactical challenges of the scenes, towards and onto the minutiae of who is bandaging whose wounds with what, and how long that takes, and whether the Heal roll is a success, etc.

This has never been as big an issue in D&D, with its hit point system, as in games like Runequest and Rolemaster. But 4e, with its short rest mechanic, makes it a complete non-issue.


Effect durations
This is similar to the point about healing. When effect durations are measure in units like 1 minute per level or 10 mintues per level (very common in pre-4e versions of D&D) then adjudicating those effects requires careful tracking of time, especially but not only by the GM. Which takes the focus of play off the scenes, and onto the transition periods between scenes. Which elevates exploration over engaging scenes as an aspect of play.

4e has very few durations like this (maybe some rituals?).


Detection spells
The detection spell - Detect Evil, Detect Magic, ESP, Locate Object - is a big part of classic dungeon-crawling D&D play. As well as spells, some classes have detection abilities, and they are also common properties of intelligent swords.

As Lewis Pulsipher in particular emphasised in some of his early White Dwarf articles, if the GM is to be fair to players who have access to these spells then the GM has to map out, in advance, those areas of the dungeon that the PCs might explore by use of them. So then the cautious player whose PC detects first gets the benefit of that; and the rash player whose PC just blunders in gets the consequences of his/her rashness.

That level of preparation is pretty much the opposite of a scene-framing approach, which is all about placing and modulating challenges and rewards in resopnse to the ongoing dynamics of play, rather than laying it all out in advance.

4e is the first version of D&D to basically have no detection magic of this sort. (There is the Arcana skill for detecing magic through barriers, but because it's a skill check that doesn't involve resource consumption, the GM can treat it as a trigger to make something up without ripping off the player.)​

Here is a different example, that (for me, at least, based on my experiences) captures a key difference between Rolemaster and Runequest:

Both Rolemaster and Runequest resolve melee combat as a type of contest between attack and parry. But in RQ, the attack and parry are distinct skill bonuses. Whereas in RM, the PC has a single combat skill pool, and allocates it between attack and parry on a round-by-round basis.

One result of this is that the RM player has a lot of freedom, from round to round, to choose the level of risk/boldness for his/her PC. This makes it easier to drift Rolemaster combat resolution in a non-simulationist direction, as players make choices about risk/reward that don't just reflect the PC's point of view, but the player's emotional investment in the scene.

There are a number of other ways in which Rolemaster differs from Runequest by giving the player the opportunity to metagame decisions involved in both PC building and action resolution, all of which support this possibility of non-simulationist drift.​

4e has even more metagameable action resolution than Rolemaster, which - together with other features, some of which I noted above - make it especially well-suited for a scene-framing approach.

'90s games of the White Wolf style (eg Vampire, Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear, or even Call of Cthulu*, arguably) are different, but seem to lack the open scene resolution that determines the next scene; they focus on leading the PCs through a pre-written story - pre-mapped scenes.

The easiest way to understand The Forge, I think, is as a massive reaction against Storyteller style, which has all this "story gaming" rhetoric but in practice involves railroading based on massive GM force. (It sounds as if [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] may have run them in a different fashion.)

I don't have a lot of personal experience with the White Wolf style games, but definitely experienced this phenomenon - GM force and railroading under the guise of "story" - in 1990s 2nd ed AD&D play. Of published 2nd ed modules, I would pick out Planescape's Dead Gods as a particularly egregious example.

I have a lot of games, but the only one that largely meets my OP definition in its description of how to play is Ron Edwards' Sorceror and Sword.

It doesn't surprise me that Edwards spells it out.

It differs though in that the three-stage scene-framing system it describes is couched within heavy 'Dramatic Premise' Narrativism. Pemerton showed me it could be used in a much lighter, non-Narrativist play style.

I have never read a decent description of the process prior to reading Mr P. I certainly did not read a decent description of the process in the 4e rulebooks, or in those of any other RPG I own, other than Edwards in S&S. And Edwards had so much baggage in there with it (actually harmful baggage, IME) that it would never have occurred to me from reading Edwards that this was a technique to use in D&D.

First, thanks again for the kind words.

Second, for me the epistemic process was the opposite. I discovered The Forge more-or-less randomly in 2004 (I can't remember what link or Google search took me there) and found the GNS essays hugely interesting. (And had no prior knowledge of the Usenet discussions and analysis.) And naturally enough they made me think about my own playstyle. At that time I was GMing Rolemaster, and had been doing so for many years, and I was easily able to identify it as a purist-for-system simulation system (= process simulation). But what I and my group were doing with it seemed a bit different from sheer process simulation and world exploration: it seemed to have more in common with the vanilla narrativism that Edwards described. In particular, morality in our game emerged out of play and mostly at the metagame level of player decision and response, rather than ingame as part of the fiction. (I have a long time hatred of mechanical alignment!) And a lot of my play approximated more towards No Myth (improvised NPCs, locations etc) than heavy pre-prep, and that seemed to be a strength rather than a weakness.

So reading those essays, plus other posts, blogs etc, plus starting to look at some of the games Edwards referenced (Maelstrom Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, etc), got me thinking more theoretically about my game and the techniques I was using. And I came to understand the Forge style in terms of my own play, rather than encountering it externally and not noticing it could be relevant to my own (very non-avant garde) fantasy RPGing.

This meant that when 4e started to be revealed by WotC, and some of its key features started to be revealed, I felt I had a fairly good handle on what was motivating the designers and what sort of play their game was meant to support. And therefore was pretty sure it would be a game I would enjoy - a level of mechanical crunch comparable to Rolemaster (for no very sensible reasons my group is pretty crunch-loving), but action resolution mechanics that would better support my preferred approach. (RM's PC build rules are pretty good for light fantasy narrativism play, but quite a bit of its action resolution is not.)

It may well be that Pemertonian scene framing is actually a completely routine mode of play in the sort of games talked about in the RPGnet General forum

As I posted in a thread we were both in late last year, I'm surprised that it doesn't seem to be more common in D&D play. I really stumbled into it when I started GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986/87. I knew that I didn't really enjoy, and was also quite bad at, designing and adjudicating dungeons in the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian style. The difference that OA made was that the PCs had pretty clear inbuilt hooks (honour, family, etc etc) and so did the monsters (the Celestial Bureaucracy, etc), so it made it easy to build and adjudicate fun and engaging encounters on the fly.

After that I ran a two-person thief game in a similar way - of all the AD&D archtypes, I think the thief has the easiest inbuilt hooks (which in my view also explains some of the notorious problems of thieves in dungeon exploration, because it means having to ignore those hooks). And then I strated my series of long-running RM games, which is also how I met my current group.

I guess maybe I'm not explaining well what I find important about what Pemerton describes, how it's different from what I did before, or how it's different from what most GMing advice advocates doing. I know there is a difference, I know it has affected my games - and made my recent 4e games much more enjoyable - but it must be fairly subtle.

I agree that there is a real difference. My path has been a bit different from yours, but since I've become more self-conscious about my techniques and have deliberately cultivated some and changed others, I've felt the difference too.

EDIT: One example of a deliberate change in technique - being a lot more upfront about stakes, for instance by table-talking with the players, and by using many fewer secret notes/one-on-one reveals and instead doing many reveals in front of the whole group even though only one or two PCs would know - thus setting up an emotional tension between what the players know and what their PCs know and can do about it. And giving them clear options for pushing the game forward to resolve those tensions. (Having been doing this for several years now, I've recently discovered that Robin Laws talks about this very technique in his "On the Literary Edge" essay in Over the Edge.)

Also, for what it's worth your explanations make sense to me, but I'm probably not the best test audience!

 

[pemerton]

I feel that this thread would strongly benefit from a very simple example illustrating the two systems.

Example 1
This example is made up, but is very close to some real play from my 4e game.

The PCs are investigating an old catacomb. One of them is a plading of the Raven Queen. The player of that PC says "I'm looking out for any signs of Orcus infestation, and trying to sense if his evil influence is present".

In a simulationist game, the GM consults his/her notes, or perhaps rolls an encounter check. In a scene-framing game, the default answer to the player's question is "You see a niche with a statute in it. It's of Orcus." Or, perhaps,"Yes, he's here. [Roll d10] Take 5 psychic damage as the sense of evil ovewhelms you!"

What does the statue mean? What is the focus of Orcus's malign presence? That's to be worked out by the GM and players in the course of play: the little narration I described has framed the scene (it's a non-combat one involving the presence of Orcus in the catacomb) and now it's up to the players to engage it via their PCs.


Example 2
This example is from my 4e game, and is part of this post. It is a combat variant on my first example.

The PCs stumbled upon an ancient underground temple to Orcus. . . .

As GM, it hadn't occurred to me to place an Orcus temple until one of the players said that his PC spent time going around town trying to find out where the cultists had come from and what they were up to. But I found a suitable poster map in Death's Reach (the one with the statues, pillars and altar) and had some monsters statted up - immoliths and other demons.

After clearing out the demons and dealing with the Altar of Zealotry in the temple (that had fun dominating the dwarf fighter), the PCs opened the back door behind the altar and could see Moria-like stairs descending further into the depths (the map is from one of the 4e Dungeon adventures, Siege of Bordrin's Watch). As they were checking out the stairs they were attacked by a nightwalker and its bodak servants. The idea of putting the stairs there, and using a nightwalker as a balrog substitute, was something I came up with in the time between sessions. But it was easy to narrate a weakening of the barrier between world and Shadowfell in the vicinity of an ancient Orcus temple. This encounter was quite a bit of fun, as a couple of PCs got knocked off the stairs (but, being 17th level, survived), and I got to use the bodaks' Death Gaze successfully at least once (maybe twice) and also Finger of Death from the nightwalker.

Once the PCs had beaten the nightwalker and bodaks, and were searching around, one of them tried to sense if there was any more shadow energy leeching through. I said that there was, and expected the PCs to try to seal the breach. But instead they took up positions and prepared for combat - so I had a dracolich attended by lost souls (levelled-up wraith figments) come through the barrier. This was another interesting combat - I used the MV rather than the MM dracolich, which included more domination of the fighter - and I got to reuse my poster map!​

Notice how the framing, and the necessary backstory to support it (eg the existence of the temple, the weakening of the barrier betwee world and Shadowfell) is done mostly on the fly in response to cues from the players - I am following their hooks rather than them following mine.


Example 3
This is another example from the same post.

As the PCs continue through the Underdark tunnels, I described them coming to a cleft in the floor, and got them to describe how they would cross it. The drow sorcerer indicated that he would first fly over (using 16th level At Will Dominant Winds) and then . . . before he could finish, I launched into my beholder encounter, which I had designed inspired by this image (which is the cover art from Dungeonscape, I think):

I'm not sure exactly what the artist intended, but to me it looks as if the central beholder is hovering over a chasm, with uneven rocky surfaces leading up to it (archer on one side, flaming sword guy on the other). I drew up my map similiarly, including with the side tunnel (behind the tiefling) which on my version ran down into the chasm, and the columns, stalactites, etc.

I didn't use four beholders, only 2 - an eye tyrant (MV version) and an eye of flame advanced to 17th level and MM3-ed for damage. And also a 15th level roper from MV, introduced on a whim when the player of the wizard asked, before taking cover behind a column, if it looked suspicious. (Response to result of 28 on the Perception check before adding the +2 bonus for knowing what he is looking for - "Yes, yes it does!")​

This encounter was preprepared, but notice two things: (1) the travel through the tunnels is not a principal focus of play, but is rather a quickly-narrated bridge between scenes; (2) the roper is not part of the preparation, but is introduce on the fly in response to the player's choice to look for one.



I don't know if [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has any comments on these examples, but I've chosen them to try and illustrate some features of the approach both in and out of combat, and with varying degrees of prep vs improv. Notice that a scene can be non-combat and involve exploration (as with my Example 1) but the stakes of the exploration are framed in relation to the signals sent by the players via their build and play of their PCs.

4e makes this signal-sending by players easy, I've found, because so many player build elements (races, classes, patron gods etc) have clear fantasy themes atached (honour, loyalty, betrayal, life, death, servitude, glory etc). And many elements on the GM's side hook onto these too.

And 4e's mechcanical transparency and reliability makes GM improv easy too. I can roll a d10 for psychic backlash damage to the paladin and know, mechanically, how severe this is. I can stick a roper into an encounter on a whim and know whether or not I've turned it into a TPK. That's why, even though 4e is mechanically quite heavy, I find it in an important way "light" or "flexible" on the GM side of play.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] The man, the myth, the legend...the originator of a new adjective. Glad you're part of ENWorld, and great series of posts!

 

[S'mon]

I don't know if [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has any comments on these examples, but I've chosen them to try and illustrate some features of the approach both in and out of combat, and with varying degrees of prep vs improv.

Yes - I don't improv all the time, as I'm usually running or riffing off published adventures; but I have done so even down to the ad hoc damage, and in 4e it works very well and doesn't come across as punitive the way it would in an OD&D dungeon-exploration game. The ring of the Empress Nemeia mentioned in Dungeon Delve #5 has become a major focus of my Loudwater campaign because of the way players expressed interest in/fear of it, basically exactly the way Pemerton describes. It turned into an intelligent, seductive artifact trying to win over individual PCs and inflict Necrotic damage when they spurned its advances. They have been carting it around several sessions now, trying to get it destroyed, seeking a sage to mask its aura, fighting evil forces trying to seize it, etc. And it has no stats; nothing written down, no DMG Artifact Track.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], I'm blushing! Thanks.

 

[S'mon]

Once more I'm going to extensively quote from the Leverage RPG...
...That's the sort of GMing advice I've been picking up from modern games.

Sure, good example. I think better than in any of the 'modern' games I own - while I'm mostly a grognard buying archaic games, reprints and retro-clones, I do have eg Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (21st century) and recently got All Flesh Must Be Eaten (late '90s). Those games seem very much stuck in the White Wolf paradigm. Indeed the time I played AFMBE at Gencon, it was a complete railroad and it actually turned out at the end of the scenario in the Big Reveal that everything was foreordained and nothing the PCs did made any difference at all - we were damned souls doomed to experience the same pre-written scenes for eternity - in-world! It seems a shame because the Pemertonian style ought to suit the Buffy setting etc very well, but the system and GM advice really weren't directed that way.

Maybe published GMing advice has got better in the past 5-8 years and it's just passed me by? That could explain our different experiences.

 

[S'mon]

And more DMing advice, this time from FATE Core which is currently being kickstarted.

AN INCREDIBLY POWERFUL NINJA GM TRICK
(snip)​

Lots of great GMing advice. I wish the Paizo AP writers took this advice when drafting their adventures! ​

 

[S'mon]

Open World Sandboxing is straight-forward. I believe S'mon uses the "You are here. What do you do?" way of conveying it. This could be in the market, in a dungeon, in a tavern, etc. This would be followed up by more color, introduction of hooks, and arcs and more PC exploration of the nooks and crannies of the built world. The DMs job is not to set adversity or pressure against the PCs. It is to set the scene, the color and play the relevant parts and adjudicate outcomes as the PCs explore. The PCs job is to explore, not to respond to the DM pressure in-kind as is their role as protagonists in the story.

Yes, the opposite (non-Pemertonian) style, the exploratory style in an objective world, IME requires that (1) the GM take an objective approach in modelling the simulated world, and (2) that the PCs are pro-active in seeking to explore that world. You see this in Old Geezer's talk on RPGnet of how Gygaxian-dungeoncrawler play is supposed to work. There is really no role for the 'reluctant adventurer' in this style - the world does not owe you an exciting life of high adventure, you have to go out and seize it! Book-Conan type freebooter PCs seeking wealth and power work well. Hobbit PCs that would rather stay home smoking pipeweed are a disaster in this style, and can easily trash a game.
I think this style of world-sim is the best for supporting genuine Gamist challenge (contrary to Edwards' GNS model) - with an objective environment, all player achievements are 'real' - comparable I think to the challenges we face IRL, though of course our PCs probably have different/superior assets for overcoming them.

 

[pemerton]

I'm mostly a grognard buying archaic games

<snip>

Maybe published GMing advice has got better in the past 5-8 years and it's just passed me by?

I don't buy that many new games, as opposed to modules to crib story ideas and maps. But of the games I do buy, they are probably equal mix old (too many copies of Runequest, for instance, but I must have them all!) and new-ish - most recently the 20th anniversary release of Over The Edge, which has some excellent GMing advice.

But my favourite GM book is the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner. It is so frank about what the game is about and how a GM can help get it there, even moreso than Laws in HeroQuest revised, I think. None of the coyness or incoherence or refusal to talk about metagame that is such an irritating feature of WotC's efforts.

 

[pemerton]

I think this style of world-sim is the best for supporting genuine Gamist challenge (contrary to Edwards' GNS model)

I've never got much into this style, though can enjoy it better as a player than a GM (I suck at GMing it!). But for those who like it, I would think a game like Tunnels & Trolls must look pretty inane and/or juvenile?

 

[chaochou]

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. Because the 'what' of how the game appears on the page may superficially look similar to another playstyle even if the 'how' - the interactions producing the fiction - are different.

In my view, the fundamental cornerstone of scene-framing is character. I don't mean character sheet. Not stats, skills or resources. I mean things that talk directly about personality, goals, flaws, relationships, dependencies, desires, problems. In this sense Str 15, Dex 12 are not character. Character is this: 'Pursued by bounty hunters for dumping Jabba's spice cargo'.

You can not frame a scene if all you know about a character is that they have Str 15, Dex 12. You can frame a scene knowing nothing except that a character is being pursued by bounty hunters for dumping Jabba's spice cargo. If you think about that scene from Star Wars... it doesn't start with Han Solo arriving in the bar, buying a drink, small talking with the barman, trying to chat up some local floozy and then sitting down. It cuts right into the action. The scene is framed: Han is talking with Ledo, a bounty hunter looking to collect Jabba's money.

To do that in an RPG requires some certainties - player understanding of what the scene is and why it's happening, player investment in how this scene could affect their future. As GMs we need the player to provide these things or scene-framing is dead before it has started.

We all know how Star Wars goes. However, for the purposes of an attempt at explanation, let's assume that we're GMing for hunted pilot Han Solo in a sci-fi campaign and nothing has been pre-determined.

We frame straight into our scene with Ledo. Ledo wants the bounty, so he wants to kill or capture Solo. During the scene Han Solo says that all he wants is time to get this easy job done and then he'll have Jabba's money. That's our GM cue right there - the player has told us Han intends to pay if he can get the cash together. Ledo still tries to kill or capture Han - that's his goal - but the cue gives us a cool idea for the next scene if Han escapes.

Unless there are other characters in the game, or other important themes to play with at this point, the next scene we jump to is the rocky remains of Aldeberan floating in space (our cool idea). No messing about. We cut from the bar and say 'Okay, you've jumped your passengers into the system, but there's just this unexplained asteroid field and no planet.'

Why? Because we know Han's motive is to do the job to get paid. He told us in the bar scene, so we know we've got player buy-in. As GM we're introducing a new complication into getting paid. He can't land the passengers on the planet because the planet has been blown up. That's scene-framing. Using the motives and goals the players bring to the table - based on what they say and do in game - to create the next scene.

That's an illustration, so here's a few points from my experience. 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.

It looks easy on the page. But try it and you'll get players going 'But, but, I was going to town to buy a new gun' or 'No, I would have scouted before so I didn't stumble into a rattlesnake'. That's because a lot of players are used to a continuous flow of time. And, to be frank, an awful lot are not used to their character's goals, flaws and problems being focused on so aggressively.

And that's even assuming they care. I've met a lot of player who don't give two hoots about relationships and goals and character - they just want to succeed at whatever is put in front of them. To show off how competent they are. Scene-framing is not a vehicle for that. 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. Jason Morningstar games like Fiasco and Shab Al-Hiri Roach don't penalise failure at all. Compare with D&D, RQ, Traveller, where failure is usually measured by limb loss and bodycount.

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.

 

[S'mon]

I've never got much into this style, though can enjoy it better as a player than a GM (I suck at GMing it!). But for those who like it, I would think a game like Tunnels & Trolls must look pretty inane and/or juvenile?

Well, I think T&T focuses on the Gamist element, to the exclusion of the somewhat-plausibly-Simulated world that is a hallmark of the Gygaxian style (Arneson's Blackmoor GMing was closer to T&T I think). I can see T&T GM advice being written in the James Wyatt style: "Skip all the boring world-details and GET TO THE FUN!!!"

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION], thanks for coming into the thread with a great post.

My play is generally not as aggressive in scene-framing as you describe - there is occasional "downtime", for instance, in which the players take stock and the PCs, as narrated by their players, do things like check their inventories and look around their physical environment. And when closing scenes, I have a bit more give-and-take than you describe. For instance, if the player insisted that they were going to buy a new gun, I would probably back up to that - but my preference would be for the ruleset itself to minimise the mechanical significance of buying new guns, and hence to minimise the incentive for players to do that sort of more exploratory play in pursuit of mechanical advantages.

Your "scouting for the rattlesnake" example is interesting. 4e doesn't have BW-stye Instincts to handle this sort of thing, but it does have various feats and utility powers, some keyed to Perception, that interact with the surprise and initiative rules, and so can occupy something like the same functional space. Nevertheless, I think there is some incompatibility on the margin between the Perception skill as written in 4e, and framing scenes like your rattlesnake one.

Your point on "fail forward" is also a good one. 4e, especially in the DMG2 and I think also in Essentials, advocates fail forward for skill challenges, but doesn't really give examples or much concrete advice. 4e combat technically allows fail forward too, because 0 hp can mean unconcsiousness rather than death, but that sits a little uncomfortably with the death save mechanic, which is a key source of mechanical pressure in combat.

Anyway, thanks again for the excellent post.

 

[Argyle King]

As with past conversations about this, I feel like I somewhat understand the theory, but I still find it alien to my way of thinking. I find it alien because -for me- the world is my scene, and I view framing/breaking that down into small parts is just as much in the hands of the players as it is mine. I feel as though I understand a lot of the steps behind what is being described, and I understand the pieces, but I don't perceive what is different about the implementation of those pieces than just normal DMing aside from setting up specific scenes -which is somewhat normal when it comes to D&D I thought...?

The main difference I see (from what I do) is in something that ManBearCat said when he earlier mentioned that each scene is a microcosm; a closed scene. I dislike that parts from one scene are "closed" from those of another. I understand that there are divisions when it comes to playing a rpg; that's just part of playing a game. However, I prefer the lines of those divisions to be blurred as much as possible, and I dislike the idea of adding extra lines.

I suppose one of the reasons I find these conversations alien is because they often seem to be presented in such a way that simulation and narrative are set as being opposing forces. For me, I find that simulation is the mechanics of the world and the narrative is the fluff; the two should have a cooperative relationship. All things considered when looking back across this post, I think I just don't fully get it.

 

[Balesir]

Yes, the opposite (non-Pemertonian) style, the exploratory style in an objective world, IME requires that (1) the GM take an objective approach in modelling the simulated world, and (2) that the PCs are pro-active in seeking to explore that world. You see this in Old Geezer's talk on RPGnet of how Gygaxian-dungeoncrawler play is supposed to work. There is really no role for the 'reluctant adventurer' in this style - the world does not owe you an exciting life of high adventure, you have to go out and seize it! Book-Conan type freebooter PCs seeking wealth and power work well. Hobbit PCs that would rather stay home smoking pipeweed are a disaster in this style, and can easily trash a game.
I think this style of world-sim is the best for supporting genuine Gamist challenge (contrary to Edwards' GNS model) - with an objective environment, all player achievements are 'real' - comparable I think to the challenges we face IRL, though of course our PCs probably have different/superior assets for overcoming them.

I think there is another option - at least if you go "full sim" - which is to abandon the idea that the PCs must "go adventuring". It's fairly involving to do, but can be very satisfying to set up situations to explore that are not predicated on going "adventuring" but arise as a part of everyday life in the imagined world. This is, perhaps, easiest for one-offs; I have done various Hârn convention/one-off scenarios that were done this way, including my early "Hallmoot", done in response to criticisms (of Hârn) that "all you get to play is some peasant". In Hallmoot you do exactly that - you play a peasant. If you get into any sort of combat or similar "heroic" stuff, you probably die. But several groups have had good fun with the scenario, nevertheless. I think Traveller can also work really well this way, as can RuneQuest (see some of the stuff about the Greydog clan in Tales of the Reaching Moon).

For "adventurer" style games, though, I agree with you completely.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't really understand your reference to "replacing DMing". But on mechanics I have a strong view: different mechanics definitely suit different approaches to play.

Here are three examples, all relevant to 4e:

Detection spells
The detection spell - Detect Evil, Detect Magic, ESP, Locate Object - is a big part of classic dungeon-crawling D&D play. As well as spells, some classes have detection abilities, and they are also common properties of intelligent swords.

As Lewis Pulsipher in particular emphasised in some of his early White Dwarf articles, if the GM is to be fair to players who have access to these spells then the GM has to map out, in advance, those areas of the dungeon that the PCs might explore by use of them. So then the cautious player whose PC detects first gets the benefit of that; and the rash player whose PC just blunders in gets the consequences of his/her rashness.

That level of preparation is pretty much the opposite of a scene-framing approach, which is all about placing and modulating challenges and rewards in resopnse to the ongoing dynamics of play, rather than laying it all out in advance.

4e is the first version of D&D to basically have no detection magic of this sort. (There is the Arcana skill for detecing magic through barriers, but because it's a skill check that doesn't involve resource consumption, the GM can treat it as a trigger to make something up without ripping off the player.)​

Very nice example, thanks.

The easiest way to understand The Forge, I think, is as a massive reaction against Storyteller style, which has all this "story gaming" rhetoric but in practice involves railroading based on massive GM force. (It sounds as if @Neonchameleon may have run them in a different fashion.)

I don't have a lot of personal experience with the White Wolf style games, but definitely experienced this phenomenon - GM force and railroading under the guise of "story" - in 1990s 2nd ed AD&D play. Of published 2nd ed modules, I would pick out Planescape's Dead Gods as a particularly egregious example.

The single time I've run a White Wolf game, I ran it the other way. The way you get if you look at the rules and decide the metaplot and much of the setting will only get in the way. Superheroes with Fangs. Which is a style the rules support extremely effectively - but things like the Prince of the City and the Masquerade (meaning that the PCs are being watched for blackmail material) serve to disempower the PCs. Vampire LARP is IME a step up from Vampire Tabletop because the Prince is normally a PC rather than Someone You Are Forced To Watch. I basically consider the 90s the nadir of tabletop; White Wolf was handing out metaplot by the ream and TSR was shovelling books onto the market with big strong metaplots of their own in which the PCs watched the NPCs do great things.

White Wolf and Paizo have two huge things in common IME. The first is that settings and adventures are intended more to be read than to be played. The second is that they lack functional developers as opposed to designers, so they have no one who will tell them when the ideas they are putting out are bad ones.

I have a long time hatred of mechanical alignment!

I think a lot of people do.

This meant that when 4e started to be revealed by WotC, and some of its key features started to be revealed, I felt I had a fairly good handle on what was motivating the designers and what sort of play their game was meant to support. And therefore was pretty sure it would be a game I would enjoy - a level of mechanical crunch comparable to Rolemaster (for no very sensible reasons my group is pretty crunch-loving), but action resolution mechanics that would better support my preferred approach. (RM's PC build rules are pretty good for light fantasy narrativism play, but quite a bit of its action resolution is not.)

Rolemaster: Tables Lore. In which you have a table to decide which table to use?

Seriously, Rolemaster is IMO the tabletop game I want to see turned into a CRPG. There's a lot of very good stuff there but there's no way in hell I'm going to run it, and I find looking up results on a table slows me down.

Sure, good example. I think better than in any of the 'modern' games I own - while I'm mostly a grognard buying archaic games, reprints and retro-clones, I do have eg Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (21st century) and recently got All Flesh Must Be Eaten (late '90s).

I wouldn't have called you a grognard. Merely someone who has found something he likes. There's a difference And while some interesting stuff was written in the 90s (Robin Laws' Feng Shui springs to mind) I don't think 90s games are in any substantive way better than 80s games. If that's when you were looking around in earnest, settling on D&D (see my comments on White Wolf, above) is very understandable.

the Big Reveal that everything was foreordained and nothing the PCs did made any difference at all - we were damned souls doomed to experience the same pre-written scenes for eternity - in-world!

Urgle. No, just no. Actually it might work for a one shot storygame (I can imagine a game of Fiasco ending this way if the setting's supernatural).

Maybe published GMing advice has got better in the past 5-8 years and it's just passed me by? That could explain our different experiences.

GMing advice has got very much better in the past decade. The two games I copied and pasted advice from are Leverage (2010) and FATE Core (2013), and both systems are about as mainstream as it gets for tabletop that's neither D&D/D20 nor White Wolf (Leverage officially shares a system with Marvel Heroic Roleplaying - another Cortex Plus game). I consider modern RPGs to more or less start in 2003 (FATE was 2003, as was My Life with Master. Dogs in the Vineyard was 2004).

The Burning Wheel Adventure Burner [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] cites regularly is 2008 (Burning Wheel itself was first produced in 2002), and the other favourite he cites (that isn't Rolemaster) HeroQuest was 2008, based on HeroWars in 2002/3.

 

[pemerton]

And while some interesting stuff was written in the 90s (Robin Laws' Feng Shui springs to mind) I don't think 90s games are in any substantive way better than 80s games.

<snip>

I consider modern RPGs to more or less start in 2003 (FATE was 2003, as was My Life with Master. Dogs in the Vineyard was 2004).

The Burning Wheel Adventure Burner pemerton cites regularly is 2008 (Burning Wheel itself was first produced in 2002), and the other favourite he cites (that isn't Rolemaster) HeroQuest was 2008, based on HeroWars in 2002/3.

I also refer to Maelstrom Storytelling a bit (useful, in my view, for running skill challenges) - it's 1994. And Over the Edge is 1992. But it seems that there has been a definite shift in the last 10 years or so, with those earlier games perhaps being precursors to the phenomenon rather than instances of it.

Also, an interesting thing about the Adventure Burner is the 4e influence on it, especially evident in the discussion of how to make "boss" fights work in a system that doesn't have a formal elite/solo mechanic.

 

[Manbearcat]

<snip> In my view, the fundamental cornerstone of scene-framing is character. I don't mean character sheet. Not stats, skills or resources. I mean things that talk directly about personality, goals, flaws, relationships, dependencies, desires, problems. In this sense Str 15, Dex 12 are not character. Character is this: 'Pursued by bounty hunters for dumping Jabba's spice cargo'.

You can not frame a scene if all you know about a character is that they have Str 15, Dex 12. You can frame a scene knowing nothing except that a character is being pursued by bounty hunters for dumping Jabba's spice cargo.

Great post and thanks for the contribution. I would think that certainly helps to clarify to folks. It reminds me of this post in response to Libramarian's question about "narrative coordination". The only thing I'll add is that (as outlined in the post) PC build and resources can be informed by Kickers, Bangs, Beliefs, Instincts ('Pursued by bounty hunters for dumping Jabba's spice cargo'). The two can be a proxy for one another if the system's build tools are thematically deep enough to allow for it and the two hew closely enough to one another.

The aggressive scene-framing that you're describing and @pemerton 's above are two different spectra on the continuum I was referring to upthread. I absolutely agree that you have to have player buy-in and you have to have utter player awareness of the inner workings of what is happening. Otherwise, they are jarred due to the temporal flux. This is why I prefer system with coordination at this buy-in and awareness level (or embed it into my table) and I'm extremely overt with my players, verbally and prop-wise, with the metagame handling (pemerton talks about this as well). I think this is one of the main reasons why this is so foreign to the greater D&D culture given the 25 years preceding 4e were entrenched in passive-aggresive (or blatant) warfare on the metagame. To say metagame referencing was taboo is severe understatement.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I also refer to Maelstrom Storytelling a bit (useful, in my view, for running skill challenges) - it's 1994. And Over the Edge is 1992. But it seems that there has been a definite shift in the last 10 years or so, with those earlier games perhaps being precursors to the phenomenon rather than instances of it.

Also, an interesting thing about the Adventure Burner is the 4e influence on it, especially evident in the discussion of how to make "boss" fights work in a system that doesn't have a formal elite/solo mechanic.

From what I can tell, Maelstrom Storytelling is little different to Amber Diceless and the resolution system is mostly a prop; such games need better advice than normal ones because that's all they have. Over the Edge would quite simply appear to be ten years ahead of its time. It's also gone OGL and I mean to check that out at some point. Both I'd call definite precursors. OTE, like 4e, appears to be missing the other strand I consider distinctive of much modern RPG design - and that Storyteller actually has. Instead of giving people points for drawbacks you give them a bennie each time they indulge. Which means you can, as in both FATE and Cortex Plus, have characters with aspects/distinctions that can be situationally both positive and negative.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Johnny3D3D You're familiar with Comic Books or Storyboarding, yes; Plotting out a story in a sequence of events and boxed scenes?

Scene-framing focused gaming is basically the real time, pro-active practice of that. Maybe that is helpful and has some explanatory power for folks? I mean, folks may not like it as it throws their expectations of temporal resolution and scene transition access/granularity into flux. Nonetheless, that is basically the design intent and how it works out in play.

And again, its spectra on a continuum. The entire game doesn't have to be that. There can just be interludes.