Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6592880" data-attributes="member: 42582">I characterised it as poor GMing. Given that you're the one who raised it, I thought you might have some views on it also.I was setting out my take on the hypothetical in question.Absolutely it's not railroading. Freeze-frame rooms aren't railroading. The room has to be in some state or other: inhabited or uninhabited; a sacrifice taking place or not taking place; the gaoler present feeding the prisoners, or not; the torturer warming up the irons, or not; the room inhabitant using the chamber pot, or not. All that distinguishes a freeze-frame room is that the default state is one that is more interesting, and more particular, to a narrow-span of time:So rather than just standing around (which might happen over minutes or hours), the torturer is about to interrogate the victim (which is an event that occurs over only a few seconds); Rather than just standing around guarding the prisoners (which might happen over hours or days), the gnolls are preparing to sacrifice them (which is an event that occurs over a period of minutes); etc]There is nothing more rail-roady about the second description than the first - they are just different alternatives for narrating the state of the room when the PCs enter it.If the players have declared some prior action that might affect the gnolls, or the torturer, or the existence of irons, or the availability of coal to heat them, then there may be issue of railroading (outcomes that occur regardless of player choices); but nothing of that sort is at play in the typical freeze-frame room.This is one reason why, in the old modules, as well as freeze-frame rooms you get rooms with a % chance to have this NPC, or that monster, in them when the PCs arrive. (It's not the only reason; another reason for that sort of randomisation is that it puts another challenge in the path of the players, because they can't reconnoitre with certainty.)My personal view is that if a piece of fictional content is OK to introduce on the basis of a random roll (eg not unbalanced, destructive of verisimilitude, etc) then it is OK to introduce it by fiat. That means it important to know when your random rolls are contributing to mechanical balance (say, in making wandering monster rolls, rolling reactions, etc) and when they are not (typically, deciding which inn the mysterious stranger is staying at, what her hair colour is, etc). Gygax gestures towards this in his DMG, when he disavows fudging to make the PCs win a combat but gives the nod to fudging to allow the PCs to discover a secret door that will lead to a particular sub-level. In the latter case, he is assuming that this is not an issue of balance but simply of introducing content into the game. In a campaign that involved a lot of player vs player competition (like  [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has been describing upthread) then letting one group of players find the secret door by fiat rather than roll would be unbalancing, and hence the GM shouldn't do it.I don't know anything about the module other than what you've said. If it's an AP, with "mandatory scenes with required outcomes" then it sounds like a pretty standard railroad.From my point of view, there is no such thing as a "mandatory scene" or a "required outcome"[/url]. My goal as GM is interesting scenes, and the outcomes are what they are. The best pieces of advice I've seen that articulate these principles come from Ron Edwards and Paul Czege:<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=20791.0" target="_blank">Edwards</a>, replying to another forum member I was working with a relationship map, not with a plot in mind. I had a bunch of NPCs. Whatever happened, I'd play them, which is to say, I'd decide what they did and said. You should see that I simply gave up the reins of "how the story will go" (plot authority) entirely. I'm pretty sure that you're reluctant to give up those reins despite experience, in your play-history, that lets you know that they don't work very well. I think [your problem] has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. . . . It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the [shared fiction] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that. <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">Czege</a>, also replying to another forum member I think your "Point A to Point B" way of thinking about scene framing is pretty damn incisive. . . . There are two points to a scene - Point A, where the PCs start the scene, and Point B, where they end up. Most games let the players control some aspect of Point A, and then railroad the PCs to point B. Good narrativism will reverse that by letting the GM create a compelling Point A, and let the players dictate what Point B is (ie, there is no Point B prior to the scene beginning). I think it very effectively exposes, as Ron points out above, that although roleplaying games typically feature scene transition, by "scene framing" we're talking about a subset of scene transition that features a different kind of intentionality. My personal inclination is to call the traditional method "scene extrapolation," because the details of the Point A of scenes initiated using the method are typically arrived at primarily by considering the physics of the game world, what has happened prior to the scene, and the unrevealed actions and aspirations of characters that only the GM knows about. "Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. . . .when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.Both of them point to the importance of the fiction into which the GM frames the PCs being interesting and engaging for the players. Both point to the role of  GM-decision-making in this process (ie it is intentional, and needs to be responsive to the players). Czege points out the absence of secret backstory: from the players' point of view, the main goal of play is not to discover the GM's secret backstory, but rather to make meaningful decisions for their PCs ("meaningful" in the sense of expressing something about the character that is important to the player) which then create the context in which new scenes can be framed.Applying this to the module example: if a GM is using a module that has an interesting freeze-frame, and mishandles it, that's on the GM. The GM's role (by my lights) is not to run "mandatory scenes" forcing towards "required outcomes" and then, as in the episode of play you mentioned, illusionistically manipulate the backstory to get things "back on track" when the players depart from the script.That's not a reason for module writers not to write freeze-frames, though. Anyone can come up with the idea of an empty room where nothing ever happens! It's coming up with interesting and engaging ideas that's hard!The 3E module Speaker in Dreams has a "freeze-frame": when the PCs go to a certain part of town, a certain sort of attack will take place (strange aberrant worms breaking up through the street). When I used elements of that module in my 4e game, I ignore that freeze-frame because it seemed to me that it provided nothing I that would be interesting to me or my players. But when the PCs assaulted the cultists' lair, I did use the module's description for who was where. Those are, in a sense, freeze-frames also (none of the NPCs was tied up, glued to the floor, etc), although not as interesting as the more noteworthy ones.</blockquote>

Verification