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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5186687" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know about general useage, but I agree with what Celebrim has said about scene framing and the Forge discussions about (examples of which are found in the links I posted upthread).At the Forge they call hard scene framing "participationism" when the players consent, and "railroading" when they don't. So whether the A3>A4 transition is railroading or not would depend on player consent. I think that, in practice, this is likely to come back to trust in the GM. In my experience, players used to playing maintream fantasy RPGs (D&D, Rolemaster, Runequest, HERO etc) are wary of (hard) scene framing because they suspect that the GM is trying to rob them of the opportunity to do stuff that would increase their chances of success. One upshot of allowing these concerns to push towards "continuos play"/soft scene framing can be the sort of listening-at-doors, 10' pole play that Gygax characterises as skillful play but that many players and GMs (myself included, I must admit) prefer to avoid. This is the sort of play I was trying to capture with my phrase "austere gamism".I think the A3>A4 example is interesting in reflecting on this because it shows that heavily gamist play (which is at least what I see A4 as supporting) can still involve (hard) scene framing rather than "continous play"/soft scene framing. But it does require some departure from skillful play/austere gamism. This, in turn, requires an increse in trust of the GM not to deprotagonise the PCs.I think that 4e is at least mildly incoherent on this particular issue. The skill challenge mechanics work best (it seems to me, from reading them, from comparing them to what I regard as similar mechanics, and from experience GMing them) in combination with hard scene framing - once the players have explained what they're doing and made their rolls it's done, the scene resolves itself, we move on. But 4e still has a lot of fiddly stuff in the equipment list - lengths of rope, thieving tools, and more (I gather) from Dragon magazines - that encourage attempts by the players to keep the scene open, to try to respond to failed die rolls with "But what about our 10' pole, and our ear-trumpet with wire lattice" etc. It doesn't surprise me that games that rely more heavily on hard scene framing do away with these sort of minutiae, or frontload them into the character's attributes (so they've already been taken account of in the skill roll), rather than leave them in the game. This also helps resolve the GM trust issue (the players only have to trust the GM to abide by the dice rolls, and not also to be fair in giving them opportunities to use their 10' pole).Writing this post has made me curious about the opposit - if fiddly minutiae and the sort of GM-trust issues they can give rise to create a push away from hard scene framing and towards soft scene framing/continuous play, what about the reverse? Are there any sandbox players out there who do away with the minutiae while (I assume) sticking to soft rather than hard scene framing (given that the latter seems a bit antithetical to sandboxing)?</blockquote>

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