[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] - thanks for the above, I can't XP but you're helping me to get an (even) better grasp on Pemertonian Scene Framing, just as I hoped would happen when I made this thread!
Very happy to oblige!
Playing a role is performance, acting, immersive, immediate, and un-contextualized. Some of the things these role-playing games ask the players to do jars that.
I know you wanted to drop the equation of "scene framing" with "player control over backstory", but I feel that here you are still making that equation.
I'm happy to use (pre-errata) Come and Get It as an example - when the player of the fighter in my game uses that power, his dwarf is using either his honking great hammer or his even longer-reach halberd to draw nearby foes into proximity. This is "immersive, immediate and un-contextualised" - I'm a super-tough dwarf with a super-big weapon who is faster and stronger than anyone else on the battlefield, and I'm using that advantage to draw all my foes into a bunch around me - where I then proceed to beat the heck out of them.
There is no requirement for the player to narrate or deal with any part of the backstory to do this - s/he just describes what his/her PC is doing.
Now consider the following, very different, scenario: the fighter is wielding a dagger, and is standing on a pillar of stone at the centre of a 15' square pit. And the player uses Come and Get It to try and drag enemies into the pit. I can see how that scenario puts a bit more pressure on player immersion. But (i) it's a pretty corner case. I've never seen that particular one come up, nor anything too much like it. And (ii) the pressure on player immersion is far from total: if I'm playing that fighter, then I'm probably conceiving my fighter as the king of all knife-fighters and the king of all arena-fighters. At which point the idea that I can lunge across the pit, and make one of my enemies on the other side get scared enough to misstep a dodge and fall into the pit is not absurd at all. It's about playing my king of all knife fighters in an "immersive, immediate and (mostly) un-contextualised" way.
Dictating the actions of others or events in the world automatically stops you from thinking in-character. Once you start thinking about how the world should react to your character, your immersion (as I'm using the term) is kind of blown -- you're not thinking about what your character does, you're thinking about the way other characters ought to behave and the way the world ought to work.
I think it might be more precise to say that narrative authority and immersion are two entirely different cognitive exercises, and so can't be done at the same time. Pretending to think like an individual means abandoning meta-context, and thinking about meta-context necessarily means not thinking like a person embedded in that context.
I have seen this asserted by others too from time to time. But it's an empirical claim, and my own experience doesn't confirm it. In particular, it is just not true that you need to go "meta" or outide the context to exercise narrative authority. You can do that from the persepctive of your PC, interpreting the mechanical outcomes in a way that experesses your PC's convictions and understanding of the world.
I will illustrate this with an example from my 4e game that I've posted in other threads:
The PCs were fighting some NPC hexers. One of the hexers used his Baleful Polymorph power on the PC paladin of the Raven Queen. This had duration "until end of the caster's next turn". For the next cycle of initiative, there were the inevitable jibes from the other players about not slipping on the slimy frog, etc. Then, at the appropriate point in the intiative cycle, I described the frog turning back into a paladin, just as the rules required me to.
The paladin's turn then came up, and the player, in character, made some rude remark to the NPC hexer. The hexer replied to the effect of "I'm not scared of you or your mistress - after all, I just turned you into a frog." The player, in character, replied "And my mistress turned me back" - the obvious implication being that his mistress, and him as her vessel, are more powerful than the hexer's petty magic.
This is all done thinking in character. The player at all times is speaking as his character, thinking as his character, giving voice to his character's convictions of the Raven Queen's divine power. And the very interesting thing about the 4e mechanics is
they don't contradict him. The mechanics leave it completely open why, within the fiction, the Baleful Polymorph will end when it does. And the example I've given shows how a player can fill that fictional space via incharacter narration, thereby reinforcing rather than forfeiting immersion.
There are interesting connections here to [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]'s suggestion a few posts upthread that immersion
includes immersion in the epistemic expectations of your PC. Note that a process simulation system, as opposed to the fortune-in-the-middle at work in my example, actually can make it quite hard to immerse in a religious PC whose conviction is as strong as what I've just described, because the player knows that it is
not his/her divine mistress, but rather the roll for the Fortitude (or whatever) save, that has brought the spell to an end. That is, the system does not vindicate the epistemic expectations of the religious PC.
This is, in part, why classic D&D supports sword-and-sorcery much better than romantic fantasy. Because in sword-and-sorcery, any conviction in the power of the divine is fundamentally misguided! - the world is valueless and cares nothing for mortal wants. That players experience outcomes as the result of the roll of the dice and nothing more conveys the empty, mechanistic character of the world. (Which does raise a question of what the cleric is doing as a core class in a sword and sorcery game - but that's a puzzle for another time).
There are also conections to Balesir's ideas upthread about the rules-fiction relationship. In the example I've given, the fact that one participant at the table cared about why his PC had turned back from being a frog, and epxressed a reason for that in character, produces a specification of the fiction that is uncontested by anyone else at the table, and therefore, via ordinary workings of the social contract for narration, true within the shared imaginary situation.
AFAICT, the Moldvay example is about glossing over the things that the game isn't going to be "about" -- things that aren't going to impact the outcome of the thing you're interested in playing through, and that aren't part of the challenge of the game. That's quite different from determining the challenge on the fly as in the Orcus example. In the Moldvay example it doesn't matter what happens on the way to the dungeon. In your example, it matters if Orcus is in the dungeon or not, and he's not, until someone asks if he is. That's a very important distinction I think this comparison glosses over.
Are you talking ingame or metagame? Ingame, Orcus was always in the dugneon. A PC wondering if he's there doesn't put him there (if we put to one side the AD&D 5% chance of hearing name spoken rule). At the metagame level, the player
wants Orcus to be about somewhere, because they've built that into their PC; and they
know that Orcus is going to be about somewhere, because they know the GM is responding to the hooks they've built into their PC. What is at stake is the "how", the "why" and the "what about it?" of Orcus being present. And the player (in default 4e, in which the GM exercises authority over campaign backstory and scene-framing) doesn't learn this except by discovering by engaging the gameworld via his/her PC.
It's not "discovery" as I'm using the term if it doesn't have an independent existence.
The notion of "independent existence" is tricky. In one obvious sense the gameworld
has no independent existence until it enters into the minds of the game participants (at which point it is independent of any one of them, being an intersubjectively shared imaginary world). Before that, it's just someone's subjective intentions to narrate a fiction in a certain way.
A dungeon map and key is one for the GM to externalise and settle that intention - and in map and key play, I would think that the GM is cheating if s/he departs from the map and key. I mentioned this upthread as a necessary underpinning for skillful Gygaxian use of detection spells.
But "discovery" is surely not limited to learning what is on the dungeon map and key. After all, in a classic random hexcrawl the contents of the gameworld aren't predetermined by map and key - they are settled on the fly by rolling on a table. Scene framing is contrived rather than random, but is no different in its temporal aspect from on-the-fly random rolling, which has typically never been regarded as inimical to exploratory play. (But is inimical to skillful use of detection magic.)
chaochou's example isn't about discovering a rattlesnake, it's about creating a complication for the scene -- it exists simply because it makes a tense scene. That doesn't fill the kind of need you're looking for if you're looking for a game that delivers "discovery." If what lays around the next corner is "whatever the DM thinks is interesting," you're not exploring anything other than the DM's current state of mind.
Which is not relevantly different, as far as I can see, from exploring the results of rolling on random tables. Yet that is a pretty standard approach to classic D&D exploratory play, especially in the wilderness.
My view that exploratory play is possible in a no myth game is based on my own experience:
here is a link to an actual play report on a 4e session I deliberately ran as an exploratory session, but that was semi-no myth and definitely not a classic map-and-key sandbox.
Discovery-oriented play is about wonderment, not about excitement
Which, based on my actual play experience, can be achieved in no myth play. I agree that there is a difference between wonderment and excitement (cue the "Halls of Moria" music from Howard Shore's score to the Fellowship of the Ring!). But I don't think it is at all related to the degree of GM prep vs improv. It is connected to the motivation behind the GM's framing of situations. Scene-framing play aimed at producing wonderment wouldn't fit the description of the standard narrativtic model I posted upthread - the rationale for play would be different - but could in my view, based on my own experience, proceed pretty easily in a no myth style. (And elements of wonderment are part of my 4e game, though generally subordinate to the thematically-oriented play.)
