D&D 4E Pemertonian Scene Framing and 4e DMing Restarted

[pemerton]

do the X-Men have a Defender, though? They seem to be all Strikers & Controllers

Colossus; and in some modes Cyclops.

 

[pemerton]

I think a third category is being excluded, though: people who genuinely enjoy a different style of play. For purposes of this discussion, that includes both passive (casual) players and pawn stance players.

Nothing wrong with these players at all, but if you have a table full of them scene framing may not be the best approach! Break out G1-3 or White Plume Mountain instead.

if I have a highly variable group of players then some overarching non-PC-dependent plots are necessary too. No point building everything around PCs when the players don't turn up.

My approach is definitely influenced by the fact that I've always had very stable gaming groups.

Does Edwards actually use 'turtle' to describe his supposedly 'brain damaged' players, though?

Not the "brain-damaged" ones, but in my quote upthread (post 27) he talks about:

very experienced role-players with this profile: a limited repertoire of games behind him and extremely defensive and turtle-like play tactics. Ask for a character background, and he resists, or if he gives you one, he never makes use of it or responds to cues about it. Ask for actions - he hunkers down and does nothing unless there's a totally unambiguous lead to follow or a foe to fight. His universal responses include "My guy doesn't want to," and, "I say nothing."​

This is not a White Wolf 90s brain-damaged player; it's a different target of Edwards' wrath, a scarred 80s Champion/AD&D player who is a victim of adversarial GMing by someone who took those aspects of Gygax and Pulsipher too literally! A variant on this person is described in another Edwards essay as "the bitterest roleplayer on earth" - his/her ideal game would have very heavy, "Gygaxian naturalist" simulationism lead naturally into a very low-real-world-competition gamism: which is to say the player wants to follow the very naturalistic cues, rather than aggressively "step on up" and seize the game by the proverbials.

I think these players exist, or at least use to - I've met them and played with some of them. Though as is often the case, I think Edwards exaggerates their bitterness and dissatisfaction. But they can certainly cause mismatch with a certain style of play.

 

[S'mon]

I think it's important to at least try to distinguish between three categories of player.

First are those who are actively disruptive, either by refusing all calls to leave their safe zone and engage with the game (like the disruptive Turtle mentioned above), or by engaging with it only in a destructive manner (the Chaotic Stupid type). Whether these players are genuinely enjoying themselves, or they're acting out because of past bad experiences in-game or problems out-of-game, doesn't really matter. They're hurting the fun of everyone at the table and trying to "cure" them is a sucker's game. My only caveat is that when young, usually teenage, players do this, sometimes they grow out of it. If an adult did I'd tell her to leave my table without hesitation.

Second are those who have had bad gaming experiences that shaped their playstyle into something they aren't genuinely enjoying, but who come out of it merely passive rather than disruptive. I personally don't mind having these players, or understand those who do, and sometimes they come out of their shells from watching other people have a good time with a more active style. Whether or not it's worth trying to draw them out or not is up to the individual group, of course.

I think a third category is being excluded, though: people who genuinely enjoy a different style of play. For purposes of this discussion, that includes both passive (casual) players and pawn stance players. If somebody just wants to hang with friends and roll some dice once in a while, or just wants to engage with the game as either a strategic or tactical exercise, that doesn't mean they're wrong or even missing out. They may be getting exactly what they want from the game, even if it doesn't look it to somebody with a different agenda, and casual players in particular can get what they want out of almost any game.

I agree pretty much entirely with your division: Turtle/Reactive/Watcher, you could put it. I'd only say that while passive Watcher players should not be a problem, and are called out as a valid play style in the 4e DMG, true pawn stance players in an RPG tend to be very detrimental to the immersion of the other players and GM. A real pawn-stancer lacks any character identification, has no internal in-world aspect on the game-world, treats his PC as a playing piece, explicitly denies that his pawn has any status as a 'person', and will thus constantly be pulling me out of my own immersion in the fantasy world. I can play a board game with that guy, but I have no desire to play an RPG with that guy.

I agree with your last paragraph above; non-disruptive passive players should not be a problem, unless your whole group is composed of such. I find they provide useful ballast to a player group. I was shocked at my exiled-dwarf-prince player who refused to talk to the dwarven royal court at the banquet; but I came to understand that while the player liked having the idea in his own mind of his elf and dwarf PCs as exiles from their people (IRL he was a Sikh convert to Christianity), he was not interested in exploring this in-game. It was the same with romance later - he liked the idea of his elf Archmage PC acquiring a beautiful elven Paladin girlfriend, but he explicitly told me not to run any romance stuff with her. Not my absolute favourite playstyle, but not harmful or disruptive in a normal D&D game.

 

[S'mon]

Nothing wrong with these players at all, but if you have a table full of them scene framing may not be the best approach! Break out G1-3 or White Plume Mountain instead.

My approach is definitely influenced by the fact that I've always had very stable gaming groups.

Not the "brain-damaged" ones, but in my quote upthread (post 27) he talks about:

very experienced role-players with this profile: a limited repertoire of games behind him and extremely defensive and turtle-like play tactics. Ask for a character background, and he resists, or if he gives you one, he never makes use of it or responds to cues about it. Ask for actions - he hunkers down and does nothing unless there's a totally unambiguous lead to follow or a foe to fight. His universal responses include "My guy doesn't want to," and, "I say nothing."​

This is not a White Wolf 90s brain-damaged player; it's a different target of Edwards' wrath, a scarred 80s Champion/AD&D player who is a victim of adversarial GMing by someone who took those aspects of Gygax and Pulsipher too literally! A variant on this person is described in another Edwards essay as "the bitterest roleplayer on earth" - his/her ideal game would have very heavy, "Gygaxian naturalist" simulationism lead naturally into a very low-real-world-competition gamism: which is to say the player wants to follow the very naturalistic cues, rather than aggressively "step on up" and seize the game by the proverbials.

Hmm - I've heard of players scarred by vindictive GMing, who see (eg) PC backstory or personal ties as an excuse for the GM to torment them, fridging their girlfriend or whatever. These players may say things like "I just want to play the adventure", and I can see how they can show characteristics of the genuine sui generis Turtle or Pawn-Stancer. But I don't think it's the same thing. The genuine Turtle takes perverse satisfaction in not engaging with the adventure or game-world; whereas this kind of emotionally scarred player might like to do so - but he thinks the GM will just use it to hurt him again. Unlike the genuine Pawn Stancer, he might like to identify with his PC as a 'real character' - but again he's afraid the vicious GM will just use this as a weakness to exploit. The real Pawn Stancer IME is like the real Turtle, gaining actual satisfaction from not playing the game. I've seen them smile with satisfaction as they deliberately disrupt the immersion of the other participants.

 

[Garthanos]

I think these players exist, or at least use to - I've met them and played with some of them. Though as is often the case, I think Edwards exaggerates their bitterness and dissatisfaction. But they can certainly cause mismatch with a certain style of play.

I know I have met one.. .back in 1983 or so? I am not sure about bitter... but shell shocked and verging on paranoia like a war victim or something.

 

[pemerton]

Hmm - I've heard of players scarred by vindictive GMing, who see (eg) PC backstory or personal ties as an excuse for the GM to torment them, fridging their girlfriend or whatever. These players may say things like "I just want to play the adventure", and I can see how they can show characteristics of the genuine sui generis Turtle or Pawn-Stancer. But I don't think it's the same thing.

<snip>

this kind of emotionally scarred player might like to do so - but he thinks the GM will just use it to hurt him again. Unlike the genuine Pawn Stancer, he might like to identify with his PC as a 'real character' - but again he's afraid the vicious GM will just use this as a weakness to exploit.

This all fits both with my own conception of the sort of player I have in mind, and I think with what Edwards says: in his Step On Up essay, for instance, he says of the "bitterest roleplayer" that

for playing the character, it's Author Stance all the way. He likes to imagine what "his guy" thinks, but to direct "his guy" actions from a cool and clear Step On Up perspective. The degree of Author Stance is confined to in-game imaginative events alone and doesn't bleed over into Balance of Power issues regarding resolution at all.​

The genuine Turtle takes perverse satisfaction in not engaging with the adventure or game-world

<snip>

The real Pawn Stancer IME is like the real Turtle, gaining actual satisfaction from not playing the game. I've seen them smile with satisfaction as they deliberately disrupt the immersion of the other participants.

I've never encountered either of these two player-types. (A good thing, I think.)

 

[chaochou]

I don't know where this post is going. I've got a vague point in mind so I'm going to ramble and see where it leads.

So I started roleplaying in around 1981 or 1982, aged 10 or 11. Mainly D&D but I went to a games club and there'd be Runequest and Traveller and Boot Hill, Car Wars and minis games, wargames, boardgames. A real melting pot. I moved towns a couple of times, but by 1987 I knew a pretty large and varied group of roleplayers (and boardgamers and wargamers).

And by this time I knew a lot of close friends who were looking for 'something else' from roleplaying. We'd followed the GM breadcrumb trail hundreds of times, whether in D&D or RQ or Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Twilight 2000 or WHFRP. It could be fun, a real exciting rollercoaster. But it was just that, an exciting ride where we got to shout and laugh and go 'whoooo!' as the attractions whizzed past. Take that ride 500 times and it gets stale.

We wanted to create games that felt like Blade Runner or Aliens or Neuromancer. But the accepted wisdom of using GM force to keep the game progressing didn't allow anyone to be or feel like Deckard or Hicks or Case. We were still just stooges in the GMs show.

Now, a lot of people were thinking very hard about this, even back then. The problem was the prevailing mindset - which was that solving this problem somehow involved the GM doing something different. That if the GM suddenly hit on some magical formula, this perfect game would spring up and be awesome. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about how to try and GM these 'player-empowering' games where player choice completely drove the themes and the central story.

(As an aside, I think the sandbox was an early attempt to solve this problem. And while not what I, or many, were looking for certainly offered a new and intriguing type of play. It attempted to eliminate much of the GM force, but personally I didn't find it filled the void with anything of interest.)

Anyway, it took about 10 years of development and evolution in game design, but when it started appearing it turned out that a bunch of very clever people had realised not just that that 'the GMing had to be different' but also 'the playing had to be different'. In other words, our 'player empowerment' of 1987 needed to come from the player, not the GM. That was a key breakthrough and it may seem obvious, but anyone that wants to pretend so is being wise after the event. It was a theoretical brick wall back then.

My experience is it still isn't obvious now. I decided to broaden my horizons a while back and went along to a local rpg club to meet some new people. What I saw was a lot of games which could have come from 1985. They had shiny new rulebook and systems but the game was the same as it was back then. I ran Apocalypse World for some people. Two or three, who were familiar with Fiasco and Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel, dove straight in. But others, used to following the GMs cues to the answer, were lost - and that lostness was manifested as being passive and reactive.

So when I hear about passive play and passive players I have a lot of sympathy because I've met a lot of cool people over the years looking for something they haven't got from mainstream play, but who are wary of being told 'This time it'll be different - it'll be your story, your decisions'. They've heard that sales pitch 1000 times and it hasn't been true.

 

[innerdude]

I don't know where this post is going. I've got a vague point in mind so I'm going to ramble and see where it leads.

So I started roleplaying in around 1981 or 1982, aged 10 or 11. Mainly D&D but I went to a games club and there'd be Runequest and Traveller and Boot Hill, Car Wars and minis games, wargames, boardgames. A real melting pot. I moved towns a couple of times, but by 1987 I knew a pretty large and varied group of roleplayers (and boardgamers and wargamers).

And by this time I knew a lot of close friends who were looking for 'something else' from roleplaying. We'd followed the GM breadcrumb trail hundreds of times, whether in D&D or RQ or Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Twilight 2000 or WHFRP. It could be fun, a real exciting rollercoaster. But it was just that, an exciting ride where we got to shout and laugh and go 'whoooo!' as the attractions whizzed past. Take that ride 500 times and it gets stale.

We wanted to create games that felt like Blade Runner or Aliens or Neuromancer. But the accepted wisdom of using GM force to keep the game progressing didn't allow anyone to be or feel like Deckard or Hicks or Case. We were still just stooges in the GMs show.

Now, a lot of people were thinking very hard about this, even back then. The problem was the prevailing mindset - which was that solving this problem somehow involved the GM doing something different. That if the GM suddenly hit on some magical formula, this perfect game would spring up and be awesome. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about how to try and GM these 'player-empowering' games where player choice completely drove the themes and the central story.

(As an aside, I think the sandbox was an early attempt to solve this problem. And while not what I, or many, were looking for certainly offered a new and intriguing type of play. It attempted to eliminate much of the GM force, but personally I didn't find it filled the void with anything of interest.)

Anyway, it took about 10 years of development and evolution in game design, but when it started appearing it turned out that a bunch of very clever people had realised not just that that 'the GMing had to be different' but also 'the playing had to be different'. In other words, our 'player empowerment' of 1987 needed to come from the player, not the GM. That was a key breakthrough and it may seem obvious, but anyone that wants to pretend so is being wise after the event. It was a theoretical brick wall back then.

My experience is it still isn't obvious now. I decided to broaden my horizons a while back and went along to a local rpg club to meet some new people. What I saw was a lot of games which could have come from 1985. They had shiny new rulebook and systems but the game was the same as it was back then. I ran Apocalypse World for some people. Two or three, who were familiar with Fiasco and Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel, dove straight in. But others, used to following the GMs cues to the answer, were lost - and that lostness was manifested as being passive and reactive.

So when I hear about passive play and passive players I have a lot of sympathy because I've met a lot of cool people over the years looking for something they haven't got from mainstream play, but who are wary of being told 'This time it'll be different - it'll be your story, your decisions'. They've heard that sales pitch 1000 times and it hasn't been true.

This is pretty interesting to me--what would you say were the first hints of games, or specific mechanics in games, that explored some of this? My experience at the time is incredibly narrow--In the '80s, I pretty much played BECMI, a little Top Secret S.I., and Battletech, and that's about it.

 

[chaochou]

This is pretty interesting to me--what would you say were the first hints of games, or specific mechanics in games, that explored some of this? My experience at the time is incredibly narrow--In the '80s, I pretty much played BECMI, a little Top Secret S.I., and Battletech, and that's about it.

I can only give personal recollections, so with that proviso..

The first time I remember getting a hint was in about 1986, playing The James Bond RPG by Victory Games. That was the first time I encountered a true metagame mechanic, the Hero Point, which allowed a reroll - or maybe an auto-success on a failed roll, I don't recall exactly. Anyway, it clearly started to give the player a tiny bit more say in what was happening. Of course, it's only a tiny step forward - you're still in the GMs adventure, stopping the GMs villain, doing the GMs thing. But it was a hint.

Then Warhammer FRP gave you Fate Points, similar deal. And these started to become more common.

Over the Edge was another step forward (1992) but I didn't play it until a few years later. That allowed characters to have freeform descriptors. So, you could say your character was, a 'nasty piece of work' and that allowed you to make 'nasty piece of work' rolls. So, clearly, the GM is then supposed to react to you to improvise situations where a 'nasty piece of work' fits in.

I think that allowed a significant shift - GMs could build situations around player descriptions, where the prevailing attitude had been that players 'build' PCs to conform to GM situations.

But the first time I bought a game and realised I didn't have a clue what I was reading was HeroWars, which I bought when it came out in 2000. I've always been a big Glorantha fan, ran and played a ton of Runequest II and here was a new Greg Stafford game. That game, designed by Robin Laws, is what opened my eyes to all the new stuff RPGs could do.

It had Worlds, NPCs, PCs all built entirely out of freeform descriptors. It's resolution system was an eye-opener, allowing players to freely intermix skills, relationships, beliefs, magical abilities - all into one pool to resolve a problem or conflict. People really struggled with that (me included). But all you had to do was ensure the player kept adding to the narrative - you want to use your 'Relationship Wife 21' to help negotiate with the village elders? Then narrate in your wife and how your wife matters... Now your wife's in play, she can be threatened, bribed, kidnapped and she matters to you, both mechanically and as a character... Now she has real thematic weight, not just color. Now we get the story of what happened that time you introduced you wife to the village elders because you, the player, decided to make that happen...

HeroWars is how I ended up at The Forge (it had a very active HeroWars community at that time) where there were long discussions on how to make sense of all these tools. It was a very poorly explained game, with bad production, awful copy editing and horrendous layout. You could tell there was a brilliant and innovative game there, but it took some effort to find it. And from there I started dipping into other publishers.

So then you get your Sorceror and Dogs in the Vineyard (both, what, 2002?) and you've got games that really explain to players how to grab them and play them. Sorceror was particularly strong at explaining to players what they have to do because it forced them to create their own 'Bang' - their own immediate situation, moral dilemma, intractable problem which required action, however ill-advised. Dogs was strong for GMs in that it clearly explained how to create situation, rather than 'story' or 'plot'.

Right now I think Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World are the outstanding rpgs at explaining player-driven games from both player and GM viewpoints.

That's my thoughts, experiences and reminiscing! Very happy to hear others.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

The real Pawn Stancer IME is like the real Turtle, gaining actual satisfaction from not playing the game. I've seen them smile with satisfaction as they deliberately disrupt the immersion of the other participants.

People in any stance can be dicks, and the discourse around RPGs encouraged a culture of enshrining one playstyle and denigrating another for decades. It doesn't surprise me at all that there are people who not only want to play in pawn stance but go out of their way to disrupt actor or author stance players. I don't think being disruptive is inherent to pawn stance play, though, or even that pawn stance play is necessarily incompatible with other people at the table immersing or telling a story. (Mind, if they don't get enough tactical or strategic play, either they're going to be bored or they're going to try to create those - like the person who skips the cut scenes in a console Tactics RPG.)

Nothing wrong with these players at all, but if you have a table full of them scene framing may not be the best approach! Break out G1-3 or White Plume Mountain instead.

Oh, absolutely, a full table is a very different story! ^_^ I was thinking of situations where you have one or two players who are interested in driving the game, and one or two who are interested in enjoying the ride. Conventional RPG wisdom on this situation has, IMX, gradually morphed from "smack down those spotlight hogs" to "draw those unengaged players in to the game." My feeling is that often, neither of these are beneficial. Reactive players are happy to follow proactive players, not because they're unengaged or intimidated, but because they want to be passengers, not drivers.

This is pretty interesting to me--what would you say were the first hints of games, or specific mechanics in games, that explored some of this? My experience at the time is incredibly narrow--In the '80s, I pretty much played BECMI, a little Top Secret S.I., and Battletech, and that's about it.

I think there were a few early games that tried to do this, or that backed their way into mechanics that helped it happen. Pendragon and Ghostbusters leap to mind as some of the first games to start exploring the idea of rules shaping play, rather than just describing the world play took place in.

But people didn't really start thinking coherently about it until the mid-late 90s, and it happened because not just individual tables (as chauchou is talking about) but whole game lines tried to do new things, without trying to make new tools.

The earliest games were sandboxes. One step removed from wargames, they were very much in the pawn stance as we'd understand it today. The GM drew up a dungeon and filled it with monsters, traps and treasure. The players rolled up characters and tried to balance risk and reward to "beat" the dungeon by cleverly using their resources. That's not to say roleplaying didn't happen - it did, and the participants enjoyed it, but it wasn't what the game was for. Roleplaying was one of the things that spiced up the problem solving, along with joking around, swapping stories, and generally hanging out with friends. Fantasy fiction inspired the worlds, but that was as close as the relationship to fiction went. The GM was adversarial, not because he was a jerk or on a power trip, but because the players' fun was expected to come from overcoming the challenges he'd created, and the GM's fun, as often as not, was in finding out how (or if) they'd do so.

But this playstyle was just what developed naturally at Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's tables and among their circle of friends. It wasn't clearly communicated through the rules. When those rules got out "in the wild," a lot of people started using them to play Let's Pretend instead of Fantasy ing Vietnam. These people didn't want "story" to mean fun (at least if you were there) anecdotes about gaming sessions past, they wanted to play a story...

... and they would spend the next twenty years trying to figure out how to make that fun. Adventure modules morphed from being environments to explore to being stories to play through. GM control was the only way people understood to tell more of a story, which led to railroads like the Dragonlance Chronicles. Late TSR AD&D 2e and early White Wolf Storyteller games were the extreme of this kind of gaming, right down to being enshrined in the name of the latter system! The GM, who was originally called the Referee, an impartial but hard-handed arbiter who managed the world, had become the Storyteller, a very much partial but often velvet-gloved author and director. Players seeking to take creative advantage of the rules and the game world, the virtues of the earliest games, because vices because they were "disrupting the story."

It's important to note that I don't think there's anything wrong with this style, either! I love Japanese-style video game RPGs where the characters and plot are preset and player participation is limited to combat, and as long as the GM's story is good, I enjoy that at the table, too. Like the lethal, player-skill driven sandbox, the metaplot-driven railroad isn't my first choice, but it's a choice I can and do enjoy.

But systemically, AD&D and Storyteller did nothing to create the kind of games they claimed to be. Vampire was billed as a game of personal horror... and the book contained a laundry list of firearms and cool powers. Looking back it should be no surprise that it lent itself to playing superheroes with fangs! But at the time, nobody seemed to understand that how an RPG was designed influenced how it was (or could be) played. Instead, by the peak of Storyteller style, playing by the rules was widely considered a dirty thing, roll-playing rather than role-playing.

It's only after dissatisfaction set in, and the internet offered new avenues for discussion, that modern, purposed RPG design started being a thing. (Board games would undergo a similar revolution in the same period, with Eurogames. I personally suspect that the purposed, professional design seen in the expanding, big budget video game industry was an inspiration, if an indirect one, but the correlation doesn't require causation.)

Robin Laws was one of the first to call for the development of RPG theory, so it's no surprise he was either the first or one of the first to design a game that consciously did something truly different on a systemic level. HeroQuest/HeroWars is the earliest game I can think of that consciously set out to create a specific kind of play through its rules. Its Big Idea boils down to making all attributes equal, whether they're physical, mental, social or even environmental, so effective play consists of making your attribute the important one for a given confrontation. HQ is an amazing achievement, and it works, but it's fair to criticize that it can get samey if you're not careful - all things being equal, all the things in it are equal. It also doesn't create a certain kind of story, it's just a toolkit for creating stories through play.

The Forge (and its predecessor and sometime contemporary, rec.games.frp.advocacy) took this to the next level. Forge-inspired games like Sorcerer and My Life With Master are usually tightly purposed, and players are meant to play by their rules to create a certain experience. Most of them are story-oriented, because that was the desire that, in the late 90s, traditional RPGs were trying and failing to address, both because of how they thought about mechanics and how they thought about the GM/player divide. Rather, because they hadn't thought about either.

The Forge talked the talk about Gamism and Simulationism (incoherent though the latter may be), but never seems to have walked the walk. But their ideas inspired other groups of designers to start looking at their mechanics and their advice in new ways. D&D 4 is probably the most prominent example of that, but new games that don't intentionally try to create a type of play through their design are the exception rather than the norm now. A game like The One Ring is superficially traditional but mechanically supported theme and style run through it from cover to cover.

There was initially a hostile reaction against this new kind of thinking, and to some extent there still is. Roleplayers had been trained for decades to treat different playstyles as inferior playstyles, and, for good or ill, most people come to this hobby by being introduced by an existing player - with existing biases.

In terms of games with great advice as well as the mechanics to support it, I'd look to the FATE 3 games (Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files and the recently-kickstarted Fate Core are excellent choices), the Cortex+ games (Leverage is probably the best for advice, but also Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and Smallville), and Luke Crane's Burning engine games (Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, Mouse Guard - but Crane can make Ron Edwards look soft-spoken, so this isn't for those who aren't willing to append "IMHO" even where it may not have been intended; MG is better in this respect).