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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8440044" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks for providing that wonderful passage.I have never GMed that.I have played that - tournament CoC and other BRP-type games, with lovingly crafted and deftly curated and presented scenarios. As a player in the CoC ones, my job is to enjoy going mad, and emote the hell out of it as best I can.I think there is an interesting drift, or transition, or resemblance (I'm not sure what the right verb is) from story-hour style to a certain sort of non-frenetic situation-first.  I've posted before about my deep appreciation for Jerry Grayson's Prince Valiant scenario The Crimson Bull, and what a success it was <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/prince-valiant-actual-play.654732/" target="_blank">when I GMed it</a>. It uses "story hour" techniques to gradually build up the situation - the PCs lead the bull to the Vale of Mudde over a series of days, having little vignette-ish events happen on the way that gradually reveal the magical character of the bull, and invite them to form an orientation towards the bull and its magic. What prevents it being a railroad, in my view, is that none of those vignettes requires the players to make a thematically-crucial or situation-resolving decision: they just layer on a sense of the situation and the stakes until the final moment which does crystallise all that build-up into a moment of dramatic decision-making. (Of course if the players did make a thematically crucial decision in one of the vignettes - eg killing the bull - then the GM would have to resolve that with a degree of improvisation, similarly to what I had to do at the conclusion given that the author did not anticipate the approach my players ended up taking.)What helps with the use of the "vignettes" to establish framing is that the system - Prince Valiant - treats travel, camping etc purely as colour unless a participant - typically but not necessarily the GM - makes them otherwise. So whereas in a resource-clock type game there is a cost to going along with the GM's framing if - in the fiction - it is building up over miles and days of travel, in Prince Valiant that costs nothing.</blockquote>

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