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

[chaochou]

@chaochou , thanks for coming into the thread with a great post.

Thank you!

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.

Ha! Maybe I'm getting old, but I've found I have less and less patience for planning, shopping, arguing, all that stuff that players will do. I'm running Diaspora (FATE) at the moment and if that starts I give the players, I dunno, five minutes while I drink beer and smoke a cig and then say 'Either something happens here or we're moving on...' If they're genuinely arguing about a course of action, they say their piece and get to roll, using all the mechanics available to them - Skills, FATE points, aspects, the works. Then (hopefully) I have an idea of where the winner is going with their thinking and I'm into that scene.

I take downtime as a GM, sometimes mid-scene. Experience has taught me to give scenes thought, when setting them, when talking with my players about stakes and outcomes or even just having to think for a bit about an NPCs goals and motivations. If that means spending a few minutes I take the time.

FATE is also interesting because of the interplay of Aspects and Compels. The player gets a chance to reject the compel. If they accept they know I can go in no holds barred, but I think the fact that there is that negotiation before gives it a lighter touch than, say, Apocalypse World - where you just dump a PC right into a horrible dilemma with no apologies.

But yeah, overall, I think I described the technique on the aggressive end because that's how I roll

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.

I agree about the rules preferences. I'm the same. Personally, I won't back up. I just say "Yeah, you bought a gun. So, what about this rattlesnake?"

Your "scouting for the rattlesnake" example is interesting.

My intention was to show one (common) type of resistance to scene-framing. That is, you get a counter-offer from the player of a different scene. I've met (and played with) plenty whose motive for doing so is to re-frame themselves into a 'better' position - that is better from the point of view of succeeding in overcoming the problem or not encountering it at all.

That's where I was trying to go with the stuff about a scene-framing style not being a vehicle for showboating competency. It's a vehicle for showcasing characterisation, I think.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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.

Excellent example snipped. And just to clarify, if you play a FATE 3 game like Spirit of the Century or Dresden Files. There's a reason FATE Core has cut the aspects to IIRC 6 - one "High Concept" aspect, one Weakness, and four other aspects. (Seven plus or minus two is a useful rule).

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.

Absolutely. If you don't fail in a game of Fiasco, something has gone really, really weird somehow. (For those who don't know, Fiasco is a two hour long or so games about heists and plans that go catastrophically wrong).

If you say 'What do you do now?' you are not playing using scene-framing.

Clarification: If you say 'What do you do now?' you may be playing using scene framing - but if you are you are expecting the PCs (as in Leverage) to pick up some of the actual scene framing. Also having the whole scene fall apart round the Grifter or the Thief (usually) and then turning to the Mastermind and asking what they do is a decent scene frame for the Mastermind's next scene.

 

[Manbearcat]

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.

That's a very good point and very key for player buy-in. I've actually houseruled my 4e game to address this. Our mechanic is predicated upon pre-coordinated (and agreed upon) thematic drawback material for players such that when they address it in play (could be in any manner of conflict) and handicap themselves, they will accrue a future bonus; a reroll, some kind of specific bonus, or an AP to do something specifically laid out in their character creation...akin to the level 11 Paragon Path abilities.

 

[pemerton]

From what I can tell, Maelstrom Storytelling is little different to Amber Diceless and the resolution system is mostly a prop.

In my view that review is very misleading about Maelstrom. It's not remotely diceless - it has freeform descriptors (a bit like Over the Edge) that are used to build a group dice pool (via a mixture of default pool constituents, plus "burning" descriptors to add additional dice to the pool - "burning" is like a call-on in BW, ie once per session). There are also rules for burning a descriptor to do a "Quick Take" - ie a subscene that can produce a local outcome within the scene even if the overall outcome goes the other way (eg we got beaten up by the muggers, but at least I managed to hide the crucial document up the downpipe by succeeding on my quick take). A successful quick take can also add dice to the pool (eg my quick take to light the signal fires succeeds, so guards come running which gives us bonus dice to hold off the barbarian assailants).

Also Maelstrom's not about "follow the plot" either - it's one of the earliest overtly player-driven games.

If the skill challenge rules in the 4e DMG were presented with half the clarity of Maelstrom's scene resolution system - including a more explicit modelling of secondary skills on Maelstrom's quick takes - then the 4e reception might have been very different.

 

[Argyle King]

@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.

I am familiar with Comic Books and Storyboarding. However, those are mediums which have a set beginning and a a set sequence of events which lead to the end (which is also preset.) While there certainly are certain points of interest which I highlight when running a rpg, it's not up to entirely me how the story progresses. As DM -an out of game entity- I prefer to have as little of a hand in the workings of the in-game events as possible because it's not only my story; it's the shared story between myself and the players. The world might be one which I created, but I don't (nor feel I should) dictate how the pieces must or should move and instead prefer to let those pieces (including the ones controlled by the players) move and function in such a way that seems natural to them. As DM, I am as objective as I feel is possible. When I control the actions of an in-game piece, I do my best to do so from the viewpoint of that piece; without giving said piece knowledge it would not have.

note: I'm not saying that doing otherwise is wrong; it's just strange to my way of thinking. The reason I fell in love with rpgs is because they allowed me to enjoy the kind of stories I enjoyed in comics, books, movies, and video games without being bound to things like plot protection for specific characters or what was deemed appropriate for certain styles of stories. I was able to think outside of the boxes which framed the scenes on a comic book page.

edit: To give a more relevant post, I'll also say that while I can see the merit in Pem's way of running 4E, I'm not convinced it would fix the things about 4E which were problems for me (which is what I gather as the premise behind the thread.) I think it's a good method, and I agree that it's probably a good way to handle things. I'm just not sure that method would have an impact on the areas I had trouble with when running 4E.

 

[pemerton]

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.

In Maelstrom Storytelliing, PCs have "weak descriptors" (ie flaws) which can't be invoked to add dice to the pool, but can be used for a quick take (an example in a sidebar uses "painfully shy" to hide the key to the safe during a robbery - "I am so painfully shy that the thugs don't pay me any attention as they rough up my boss").

A player can reduce injury to his/her PC as a consequence of failed resolution by downgrading descriptors into weak descriptors (eg I was courageous, but after being mauled by dogs I'm now nervous around animals - but at least they didn't kill me!).

 

[Manbearcat]

I am familiar with Comic Books and Storyboarding. However, those are mediums which have a set beginning and a a set sequence of events which lead to the end (which is also preset.) While there certainly are certain points of interest which I highlight when running a rpg, it's not up to entirely me how the story progresses. As DM -an out of game entity- I prefer to have as little of a hand in the workings of the in-game events as possible because it's not only my story; it's the shared story between myself and the players. The world might be one which I created, but I don't (nor feel I should) dictate how the pieces must or should move and instead prefer to let those pieces (including the ones controlled by the players) move and function in such a way that seems natural to them. As DM, I am as objective as I feel is possible. When I control the actions of an in-game piece, I do my best to do so from the viewpoint of that piece; without giving said piece knowledge it would not have.

I just meant as the game's framework (zooming in without focus on the in-between transitions) and pacing (the lack of temporal granularity and accounting for moment to moment detail - specifically in the scene transitions). I didn't mean from an authoring perspective. They aren't GM plot railroading or dictatorial authoring of fiction like comic books or storyboarding. Scene-framed gaming brings about fiction that emerges from the interface of DM pressure, player decision points, fortunes, mechanical resolution of the conflict and the interface of all of those things within narrative context.

 

[pemerton]

Ha! Maybe I'm getting old, but I've found I have less and less patience for planning, shopping, arguing, all that stuff that players will do. I'm running Diaspora (FATE) at the moment and if that starts I give the players, I dunno, five minutes while I drink beer and smoke a cig and then say 'Either something happens here or we're moving on...'

I sympathise with your lack of patience, but I'm still running D&D and the inventory stocktake is a tradition that's pretty hard to let go of! And the game also assumes the PCs will acquire items by building them within the fiction - and this takes a bit of time to sort out the accounting.

I would say this sort of thing happens in my game every two to three sessions, and fills maybe half-an-hour of a four-or-so hour session when it happens.

Environmental exploration and narration is a bigger part of my game than that, but not (I think) by traditional D&D standards. Maybe on average half-an-hour to an hour per session - but often that will be in the context of a skill challenge, so probably about half the time the exploration will be part of an attempt by the players to leverage fictional positioning to advantage in resoving the challenge.

Personally, I won't back up. I just say "Yeah, you bought a gun. So, what about this rattlesnake?"

Deft! I have to remember to handle it this way next time this sort of thing comes up.

 

[pemerton]

As DM -an out of game entity- I prefer to have as little of a hand in the workings of the in-game events as possible because it's not only my story; it's the shared story between myself and the players.

Scene-framed gaming brings about fiction that emerges from the interface of DM pressure, player decision points, fortunes, mechanical resolution of the conflict and the interface of all of those things within narrative context.

I agree with Johnny3D3D that it's the shared story between GM and players, and think Manbearcat is right about how scene-framed play produces this.

The upshot is that I therefore differ from Johnny3D3D in respect to the GM's role. I take a very active role, as GM, in the workings of the ingame events - namely, they conspire to continually place complication and antagonism in front of the PCs! That's my contribution to the story. The PCs then respond to those complications and that antagonism. That's the players' contribution.

Without active GMing to create those complications/antagonism (to refer back to [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]'s posts early in the thread, putting things in front of the PCs because they're cool/fun), there wouldn't be any story other than a bare sequence of events, because there would be nothing of significance for the players to respond to and to engage via their PCs.

That's why (as per my example upthread) when the Raven Queen worshipper enters the catacombs, the default is that Orcus cultists are present - instant story!, not just in the sense of a sequence of events, but in the sense that a protagonist (the Raven Queen-worshipping PC) has confronted his/her nemesis (Orcus and his cultists) and some engaging confict between them has ensued.

 

[Argyle King]

I agree with Johnny3D3D that it's the shared story between GM and players, and think Manbearcat is right about how scene-framed play produces this.



Without active GMing to create those complications/antagonism (to refer back to @S'mon 's posts early in the thread, putting things in front of the PCs because they're cool/fun), there wouldn't be any story other than a bare sequence of events, because there would be nothing of significance for the players to respond to and to engage via their PCs.
.

I disagree.

There are other pieces already moving in the world. Those pieces have their own agendas. As such, I disagree that there wouldn't be complications and antagonism without a direct set up on behalf of the DM. In terms of D&D, I've had to learn some amount of framing because the 'encounter' as a design element is something which is tied to the system, and I'm require to make things more linear than I'd normally prefer.


Still, I don't find that framing helped with the problems I had in 4E. In fact, the problems I had with 4E were that scenes I tried to create were too easily broken by the way the world worked in relation to how the PCs function. A previous example I used in a previous thread is an encounter in which the PCs were moving across a chasm in a gondola (the type suspended from a cable; not the boat.) A second gondola carrying enemies were moving toward them. I expected it to be a cool scene, but it quickly became anti-climactic because of how easily PCs were able to destroy not the enemies, but the gondola they were in.

I did fully expect that attacking either the gondola or the cable carrying it would be a tactic used. It's a tactic I did want to be valid, so I didn't say no when a PC asked if they could attack the craft and the cable. I simply didn't expect for it to be so easy so as to render the entire encounter; the entire scene moot and uneventful. I wasn't expecting a perfect model of physics either; I understand that D&D has always been abstract. As a DM new to 4E at the time, the numbers I found when I tried to reference what it should take to destroy the gondola (or the attached cable) were abysmally low in comparison to what the PCs were able to do even with at-will powers.

I don't see how more framing would help with that, but I'd be open to suggestions.

 

[S'mon]

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.

Oh sure, you are definitely right. You're describing the Simulation style that Edwards called 'Right to Dream' AIR. It emphasises the actual experience of inhabiting the fantasy world, and can be the most immersive style of all. It's different from the Gygaxian 'Gamist-Simulationist Nexus' style I was talking about, where a robust world-simulation is there to create the basis for effective Gamist, challenge-overcoming, play.

 

[S'mon]

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.

RPG-wise I'm a child of the '80s, starting in 1984 with Fighting Fantasy, playing quite a lot of different games ca 1985-19991 (Paranoia, Star Wars, Judge Dredd, Call of Cthulu, a bit of Dragon Warriors) - but always mostly and predominantly 1e AD&D. I certainly found the '90s a grim time for RPGing, and while I ran & played some stuff occasionally I had lots of fairly poor experiences and I only really came back to the hobby fully with 3e D&D in 2000. Since 2000 I've played very little that was not D&D-related.

 

[Neonchameleon]

RPG-wise I'm a child of the '80s, starting in 1984 with Fighting Fantasy, playing quite a lot of different games ca 1985-19991 (Paranoia, Star Wars, Judge Dredd, Call of Cthulu, a bit of Dragon Warriors) - but always mostly and predominantly 1e AD&D. I certainly found the '90s a grim time for RPGing, and while I ran & played some stuff occasionally I had lots of fairly poor experiences and I only really came back to the hobby fully with 3e D&D in 2000. Since 2000 I've played very little that was not D&D-related.

Ah. I wasn't born until the early 80s and my only RPG experiences that decade were Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I started in the 90s, oddly enough with mostly 80s games; GURPS, MERP* (sometimes with added Arms Lore), WFRP, Paranoia, Cyberpunk 2020 and *shudder* RIFTS (one of my friends was a fan). The only one of the major 90s continuous streams of books at my FLGS to impress me at all was GURPS (the others being TSR Shovelware at about five books a month, World of Darkness, and RIFTS), and I spent most of the 90s being disappointed by the gap between what I thought RPGs could be and what they were mechanically. Of them, GURPS was my favourite system.

When 3e came out I flirted with it. At last here was a version of D&D that almost matched the design of WFRP and was in sight of GURPS which was to me the high point of RPG design when they weren't flirting with absurdity. And had both the player base of D&D and was Open Source (what can I say? I was a teenager and that was a smart piece of marketing). In the early 00s, I had a look at The Forge, read the essay on Simulationism (which was the creative agenda that the RPGs I liked at the time followed through on), realised Edwards had mangled his understanding of things in the parts I knew, and from there came to the conclusion that if he understood things that badly I expected the promises to be as empty as the ones I'd found the World of Darkness to offer in practice. So I left them well alone.

I initially ignored 4e - I wasn't into gaming at the time. Then I split up from a long term girlfriend and needed more hobbies. I picked up the 4e books and was hooked. Finally the PCs and monsters moved properly. (I'm a kinaesthetic learner and used to dance a fair amount - the way people moves matters to me). And I neither felt as if I was cheating by playing a wizard nor hamstrung by playing a fighter. Then I started looking around the RPG market again in earnest and it bore only a passing resemblance to what I was expecting, in the best possible way. What I'm seeing now actually follows through on the promises the 90s gave in both writing and play. And the Forge I'd dismissed, along with a lot of other people, turns out to have produced a number of works of genius (and no few turkeys but that's to be expected as no one's ideas are good all the time).

For the record if I want to run a game of Buffy, I'm not sure whether I'd reach for Monsterhearts or Smallville. Both, I think, could do it pretty awesomely in different ways. Smallville I think - Buffy isn't normally quite messy enough for Monsterhearts.

* For those who don't know, MERP = Middle Earth Roleplaying and is basically Rolemaster Lite. Something that IMO massively improves Rolemaster.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I have just read the first two pages but I must say I really appreciate the discussion and examples. I love the idea of just rolling with your players ideas. It might feel a bit cliche, but at the same time it's obvious that there is more to the world than the 128 pages of the premade module that a campaign can become if you don't use player input and run dry yourself.

I am going to run Madness at Gardmore Abbey as the backbone of a campaign and I have gotten some very good ideas on how to run it from this thread. There is a lot of material in the module to get me started and with my players ideas I will hopefully be able to keep the game running without going out of ideas - since I will be siphoning off my players.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I haven't gone into the other thing that modern games are doing right that almost wasn't through the whole of the 80s and 90s. To begin with the illustration, SteveD on RPG.net posted a deconstruction of Les Mis under Smallville rules. Which ends with the line "Eponine is a mothering powergamer. But nobody gives a damn because in Smallville, powergaming = drama." And that's another thing that's changed in the past ten years. Power gaming (as opposed to munchkinery) is not a destructive impulse. It's the impulse to understand what the game and system wants, and to do it as well as possible.

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive. And treating people trying to understand what you have actually done as a negative is a mark of pretty awful game design; people who are proud of what they have done normally want to show it off. Also hamstringing myself mentally do I don't use system mastery is a pretty negative play experience.

FATElike games or Cortex + games (Smallville being the third (or rather first) in that family), or most Storygames make my desire to actually use the system into a positive experience for eveyone (in oD&D using the system and the world to your advantage - i.e. player skill - was part of the point). If I turn up to a Vampire game I know to be political and start using Obtenebrate to stealthily blood bond half the room and Dominate to make them drink, it's going to be a sucky experience for everyone not me. If on the other hand I turn up to a Monsterhearts game as a Mortal and throughout the session manage to tangle everyone up with strings while running an effective XP engine we're all going to have a blast. Not only is the DM advice much more effective, player advice and player incentives are too.

 

[S'mon]

I haven't gone into the other thing that modern games are doing right that almost wasn't through the whole of the 80s and 90s. To begin with the illustration, SteveD on RPG.net posted a deconstruction of Les Mis under Smallville rules. Which ends with the line "Eponine is a mothering powergamer. But nobody gives a damn because in Smallville, powergaming = drama." And that's another thing that's changed in the past ten years. Power gaming (as opposed to munchkinery) is not a destructive impulse. It's the impulse to understand what the game and system wants, and to do it as well as possible.

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive. And treating people trying to understand what you have actually done as a negative is a mark of pretty awful game design; people who are proud of what they have done normally want to show it off. Also hamstringing myself mentally do I don't use system mastery is a pretty negative play experience.

I sympathise, but I have some kind of perverse thing with 3e D&D/PF where I can only really enjoy it if I'm playing a Fighter and trying to make the poor bastard an effective PC. I had to play a Cleric in Pathfinder recently and I just couldn't enjoy trawling the rulebook for spells. Using Command & stacked Spiritual Weapons to defeat the BBEG in the final battle was fairly satisfying, but beating her to death with a greatsword would have been a lot better.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I sympathise, but I have some kind of perverse thing with 3e D&D/PF where I can only really enjoy it if I'm playing a Fighter and trying to make the poor bastard an effective PC. I had to play a Cleric in Pathfinder recently and I just couldn't enjoy trawling the rulebook for spells. Using Command & stacked Spiritual Weapons to defeat the BBEG in the final battle was fairly satisfying, but beating her to death with a greatsword would have been a lot better.

I did something simmilar with the 3.5 Bard as a class. It was said by so many to be the weakest so I learned it inside out. And the 3.5 Bard (as distinct from either 3.0 or Pathfinder) is one of the parts of 3.5 that genuinely gets better the harder you look at it.

 

[pemerton]

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive.

I can't remember if this thread is the one where you were ragging on Rolemaster and its Table Lore, but one nice thing about Rolemaster is that, on the whole, it does deliver a better experience the more the players understand it and try to use its features.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I can't remember if this thread is the one where you were ragging on Rolemaster and its Table Lore, but one nice thing about Rolemaster is that, on the whole, it does deliver a better experience the more the players understand it and try to use its features.

Indeed. I may mock Rolemaster a bit in the same way I mock GURPS (and especially GURPS vehicles) but I'd never argue that either wasn't a competently designed game if that was the experience you were looking for, and I've used both. (I'd argue that using Rolemaster for Middle Earth in MERP was a complete mismatch, but that's a whole different kettle of fish).

 

[pemerton]

I'd argue that using Rolemaster for Middle Earth in MERP was a complete mismatch

That almost goes without saying! (But I can say from experience that it does Greyhawk pretty well, and with a bit of spell-list limiting - eg no teleports - it can do high-magic Oriental Advantures too.)