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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6593875" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm pretty close to [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] here: playing an RPG is a part of real life, and it is a part of real life that involves playing a game.The fiction that is generated by playing that game is not much real life. But, like other fictions, it can be more or less interesting, more or less engaging. I prefer more rather than less!I'm not sure what you have in mind here.For instance, to go back to an example that has already been discussed in this thread: will the prisoners be sacrificed off-screen, on the basis of the GM's reference to a secret backstory (in this case, a pre-prepared timeline), or not?If you're taking a "natural outgrowth" approach, then presumably that has to be a possibility. But if you're taking a "no boring scenes" approach, then presumably it's not an option (not to say you can't have the PCs come into a room where the prisoners are already dead and the gnolls gloating, but that would have to be a known consequence of some prior scene that the PCs (and hence the players) had been framed into, not just the result of the GM's own extrapolations from the secret timeline).In my 4e game, I placed a town. Given that I was using some material from "Speaker in Dreams", the town had a baron. Given that I had just bought the MM3, and had read all about catoblepas's and their relationship to fate, hubris and the Raven Queen, and has a party full of Raven Queen devotees, I decided that the baron had been visited by a catoblepas as a harbinger of some doom. I also decided that the baron would be attacked by Orcus cultists.So far that's all backstory; none of it is framing anything.Then, the question is: when do these events happen? The day before the PCs arrive, or when they are in the town? The night they spend hanging out with the dwarven elders, or the night they are invited to dine with the baron? It seems to me that the questions answer themselves! Of course the attack of the Orcus cultists is timed to coincide with the return of the catoblepas a year after its first appearance, and of course that happens to be the evening the PCs are invited to dine.That's framing.To make it work, a few other things have to happen. For instance, the PCs have to get their invitation to dine after the backstory has come out, but not very much after, so that the players know that when they accept the invitation, they will probably have to confront the catoblepas. Otherwise, it won't work - let out the backstory too early, and the PCs will make other plans and hence not be around for dinner on the right day; don't let them know about the backstory at all and then they don't see that anything is at stake in accepting the invitation to dinner.If the players, in full knowledge, decline the dinner invitation then of course all bets are off - the next day they learn of the savage massacre in the baron's great hall, when a catoblepas appeared and Orcus cultists attacked. (That's analogous to the players deciding they don't care to rescue the prisoners anymore.)The framing can't be achieved, that I can see, simply by relying upon "natural outgrowth". At least not reliably.If the players play their PCs inconsistently in order to squib on the stakes you have framed them into, then narrativist play won't work. (Some gamist play will break down too - eg the players decide their PCs would rather farm potatoes than raid dungeons.)But that's a social-contract/table problem, not a problem about GMing techniques, it seems to me.But maybe you're not worried about squibbing - see what follows just below:If what you are worried about is that you have misjudged, and hence the scene you framed lacked the interest for the players that you hoped it would have, then in my view absolutely you should let it go. There are any number of ways a creative GM can add in fictional material, motivations, etc to turn the scene into just some low-key bit of transition or plot dump, or to take it in a new direction that will engage the players, etc.If this is repeatedly happening then you have the problem Ron Edwards described, of not being able to frame scenes that are worth anyone's time.To me, that sounds like a failure of communication at campaign start-up: again, a table/social contract issue rather than a methodology issue.I guess if repeated experience reveals that, in fact, with this group, it is in practice not feasible for the GM to continually come up with situations that will be engaging to the players given the PCs they want to play, then a GM assertion of authority over plot becomes a second-best alternative. To me it seems very second-best, however.</blockquote>

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