The Player vs DM attitude

[Celebrim]

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh on the idea of scene framing.

I don't think I've been harsh on scene framing generally. I've been harsh on particular attempts at hard scene framing to create particular plot contrivances.

 

[Hussar]

I don't think I've been harsh on scene framing generally. I've been harsh on particular attempts at hard scene framing to create particular plot contrivances.

Fair enough I suppose.

I've certainly played with enough players who would totally agree with you. That the idea of letting the GM "hard scene frame" and take control of their characters, even for short periods of time is anathema.

I'm not entirely sure why though. If I trust the GM to provide an enjoyable adventure, why do I not trust him enough to let him stuff me in a small box and then tell me to get out of it?

I'm a bit on the fence here to be honest. I hate being forced, but, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the GM's I play with now would force me into situations that I would enjoy. In fact, one of the GM's started the campaign with us in prison for various reasons.

Maybe that would be the way to do it. Instead of "You wake up in the dark room", it's "How did you get into this room - describe what happened." and then roll with it.

 

[pemerton]

Because between the two events, something dramatic and important must have happened. The wizard locks, alarm spells, locks, jury rigged noice traps, bottles balanced on the door handle, and so forth that the party takes precautions with when resting in a strange environment didn't go off. No one heard the dogs in the courtyard, and the guy with the Light Sleeper feat and lots of ranks in hearing slept like a babe even when someone bundled him in sheet. No one got a saving throw versus whatever poison we must have ingested, and no one made their skill check to notice it in their food, no one had a chance to wake up, the villains didn't flub any action, the players having woken up apparantly had no oppurtunity to do anything, a long transport occurred in which the players slept soundly and safely drugged and trussed. In short, lots of things happened but we don't know what they are. Only the DM knows what they are, and now the DM will have to tell us what happened to us and how we reacted (or didn't).

This paragraph makes so many assumptions about the situation that it's hard to know where to start. Suffice to say that I don't think I've ever had a party go to sleep in a tavern with wizard locks, alarm spells and bottles balanced on the door handle. If the players did describe their PCs doing all that, then (everything else being equal) they're sending a pretty clear signal that they want to play out an attempt to thwart someone breaking into their room - in which case, as a GM I'd run that encounter rather than the capture scenario.

As to your points about saves vs poison, Light Sleeper feats etc - that reinforces my earlier comments that mechanics matter here. For example, one mechanical way of treating the Light Sleeper issue is to require the GM to give the players some sort of metagame token in exchange for the Light Sleeper not waking while being captured. That's not D&D's way of handling it, obviously - hence my comments that D&D makes scene framing trickier than in some other games - but it's a pretty well-known mechanic, and I don't know of any evidence that games that use it produce adversarial GMing or railroady play.

Either the villains are so powerful and compotent that we had no chance at all, in which case, we are likely stuck here forever unless this is a nonsensical forcing trope for the sake of creating the story you want, or else the events between now and then didn't actually happen in which case this is DM fiat carried to its worst degree - obliviating all choice and options and telling us what is and has happened.

This more or less repeats my first two options for capture in my Edit of my earlier post - abuse of the encounter building guidelines, or abuse of the action resolution mechanics. These are not the only two options - but for other (metagame driven) options to arise, the action resolution mechanics need to make room for them.

So either you have decided you have the right as a DM to play my character for me, or else you are hitting me with some overwhelmingly compotent foe who could clearly have destroyed me in a blink who will then mysteriously turn incompotent at exactly the point that we are most in their power and mercy. Either way, that's ceased to be a game I can believe in or enjoy.

Or there is the third, metagame alternative in play.

I find Ron Edwards to be openly sneering, insulting, and arrogant. I find him dismissive of anything Ron Edwards doesn't like. Therefore, I feel justified to reply in kind. I find his description utterly incoherent and undescriptive of my own gaming. While he is obviously extremely intelligent and does open up for conversation a lot of useful ideas, I find that much of the core of what he holds to be absolutely true is absolutely not true. For example, its my opinion that most good and enduring RPG designs are what he calls 'incoherent', and that that trait is precisely what makes them good and enduring. But anyway, enough Forge bashing because its beside the point.

My real point wasn't to defend Ron Edwards, who (if he cares) is more than capable of looking after himself, but rather that you described my mind as having been "killed" by him. I was making the point that I don't think you know me well enough (as far as I'm aware, you only know me from a few posts on a messageboard) to make that judgment.

We don't need that at all. All we need is the implicit or explicit consent of the whole table, which involves no exercise of GM force at all.

What matters are subsequent, downstream consequences of upstream encounters. For example: in a game system that defaults to detailed monteray accounting, and which want to explore the implications of the PCs being down on their luck, there is mechanical pressure to resolve the haggling, because it matters to the game whether or not the PCs spend that extra silver piece. Even for that sort of game, however, there is a good chance that resolution of the haggling is itself boring for many or all of the participants in the game. But the mechanics, which provide no alternative to detailed monetary accounting, make it hard to try a different way of going about it. In particular, it is hard for the GM to simply stipulate a price without interfering in an arbitrary way with the workings of the mechanics.

I think skipping from going to sleep in a tavern to waking up in the dungeon goes along way past potentially arbitrary and unfair, besides being totally not fun. Even losing is alot more fun than missing a dramatic scene. Of course, your opinion is apparantly that its worth it to miss a dramatic scene and obliviate all player choice if it just achieves the outcome you desire.

Again you're making a lot of assumptions. After all, maybe the dramatic scene was the consumption of the drugged meal in the tavern the night before - what had seemed innocuous takes on new meaning in the light of subsequent events!

You're also assuming that the GM's desire is the only one operating here. I've never asserted that, and indeed finished my last post (in the edit) with a more detailed discussion of the advantages of metagame scene framing because it gives the players an alternative "in" to the discussion.

But anyway, let's suppose that in a given session there's time to resolve only a handful of dramatic scenes. I don't see how it is per se objectionable to resolve scenes (1) wake in prison, (2) escape from the cell, (3) sneak through the corridors into the baron's bedchamber, (4) kill him in revenge and (5) jump out the window escaping across the moat, rather than starting at (0) fight in tavern room at night.

I don't really see what 4e has to do with this at all. I'm giving system independent advice and frankly I just see this as an attempt to start an edition war, a red herring, and not worth responding too.

Fair enough. Needless to say I think the viability of different approaches to scene framing is heavily system dependent. Even if we disregard various sorts of metagame mechanics as part of the system, the action resolution mechanics for a system have a huge implication for the sorts of scene framing it makes viable.

The GM in a traditional RPG has vast control over the game world, but his ability to use force on the players is extremely limited. It's very hard for a GM to go from 'Going to sleep in the tavern' to 'Waking up chained to the wall in the dungeon' because players are hugely resourceful and traditional PCs have so many resources at there command. You can challenge the PC's, but capturing them without killing them is extremely difficult if you play it fair.

And I don't really take this as a refutation of my earlier claim that games that constrain scene framing by reference to traditional action resolution mechanics are potentially tactically and strategically rich but incline towards the thematically narrow and limited. If it's all AD&D-style action resolution all the time, with bottles balanced on doors and saving throws against poison and killing trumping over capturing, you won't get to play a capture scenario - in which case your game won't really resemble the sword and sorcery stories that (for many players) made the genre attractive in the first place.

There are obvious mechanical alternatives within the same general approach to action resolution mechanics - for example, in RM knocking out is more common than killing, atlhough it tends to be "unconscious from blood loss" rather than "knocked out by a well-placed tap to the head" - but the obvious alternative solution, for those who want to explore these other elements of the genre, is to take it to the metagame. As I've said, this depends upon the action resolution mechanics tolerating that sort of move.

One approach you don't suggest is to simply not decide that now is the 'capture scenario' time and simply let it happen. You play enough games, eventually capture and surrender and the like naturally arrise. It's happened to me as a player, and its happened to whole parties once when I was the DM and to individual players three or four times (at least).

Which, as Hussar said, is in practice not to play that sort of scenario. If you don't want to, fine. If others don't want to, fine. No one's making you, or even urging you. But the notion that it can't be done without exercising GM force via abusing the encounter building guidelines or the action resolution mechanics is simply not true. It can be done by tolerating a metagame approach to scene framing.

Oh geez. Far be it for that to ever happen.

Upthread you expressed concern that players shoudn't have things put at stake that they didn't buy into, and now you're saying that it's OK for a traditional fantasy RPG to force a split between courage and self-interest, whereas perhaps the most basic presupposition of standard heroic fantasy RPGing (drawing on tropes established by REH, Tolkien etc) is that these two will not come apart. It's not a coincidence that fantasy RPGers have a strong aversion to having their PCs surrender (as is being discussed in multiple threads at the moment). The unity of courage and self-interest is almost inherent to the genre.

You also seem to be saying that it's anathema to frame the capture scene, but it's acceptable to run the Colossal Red Dragon "surrender-or-die" scene. I certainly know which sort of game I'd rather play in - one in which the GM frames exciting scenes and I can be confident that the GM is abiding by the encounter building guidelines, than one in which the GM abuses the encounter building guidelines so as to railroad the players. And the "surrender-or-die" scene is a railroad, because it is as encounter with only one real option, namely, to surrender. Whereas the capture scenario is not a railroad at all. The encounter has multiple meaningful choices, and the framing of the encounter (assuming that the players did not trap their door with spells and beer bottles) doesn't vitiate or even implicate any player choices.

Finally, as to the question about the play preferences of the OP's posters. The OP said this:

I've tried talking to my players (repeatedly) but like paranoid conspiracy theorists the more I assure them I am not out to get them in the rat basterd way the more convinced they become that I am just setting them up for a huge fall.

I'm not as confident as you are in inferring from this information that these are players who are happier playing ASL-style AD&D rather than The Dying Earth. There's just not enough there to tell.

The OP also said this:

Players in turn, having suffered in these games themselves, or having been schooled by those who have suffered, develop the counter attitude. Winning, (ie not letting your character die, be tricked, kidnapped or failing to complete the objective (whatever it happens to be)) is the only way to play. Anything else is letting the DM win.

In my experience, this style of "turtling up" D&D play is quite common. Sometimes I'm sure it's an expression of a genuine desire to play in that way. But I've also seen it in players who very obviously are trying to have a different sort of experience in their fantasy RPGing. And reading articles and letters to Dragon magazine through the 80s one (or at least, this one!) can see the issues being played out, in discussions of alignment, clerics and paladins, XPs for non-combat encounters, GM die-roll fudging, etc, etc.

Games like AD&D 2nd ed try to resolve the issue by keeping the same "continous play" assumptions and the same action resolution mechanics but adding heaps of injunctions to the GM to use egregious force to produce dramatic scenarios. For me, this is a terrible way to play an RPG, but I know that there are some (perhaps many) who like it.

I'm suggesting a simple alternative - if you want to have your RPG include the sorts of fantasy scenarios that attracted you to the genre in the first place, then just do it. It's GM power, but it's egregious GM force only if (i) we make all sorts of assumptions about the nature and purpose of the action resolution mechanics, or (ii) we assume that the players don't want to play that sort of game. The solution to (i) is, if necessary, to change systems. The solution to (ii) is to talk to your players. But I'd be surprised if every turtling player, once they are shown that a different sort of play is possible, really turns out to want to play exclusively in the turtling mode.

 

[Psychotic Jim]

I agree with this statement if the following words are appended: "...about something that the PCs have to deal with in the future, rather than stuff they've already dealt with in the past."

The traditional villain monologue is delivered at the denouement of the adventure, and answers (for the benefit of the audience) all the remaining unanswered questions like "Who killed Doctor Littledoo?" and "Why did the sharks have frickin' laser beams on their heads?" As a rule, the answers to these questions become academic once the villain has met his grisly demise.

Although... even when the monologue is about important stuff, most players will get bored if you go on for any length of time. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, most DMs are crappy writers and good villain monologues are very hard to do. Right at the climactic moment of the story, you're gonna stop and do a bunch of exposition? You have to make it really tight and compact or it kills the momentum. And that problem is increased by an order of magnitude in an interactive medium like RPGs, where the players expect to participate instead of just sitting and listening.

Do the (potentially) final verbal exchanges between the PCs and the antagonist have to be a monologue?

In other words, can it be an interactive dialogue? With a give and take form both sides, each one wanting to gain the upper hand from another, so that nobody gets bored? This may come from knowing my players well, but that method seems to work for my group.

Then again, I don't always make my "final confrontations" have to necessarily be a violent, direct physical confrontation- it's up to how the players (and dice) handle the situation and how the game flows. I think, if the players have something to gain from speaking to the villain/antagonist, then I think they're more likely to engage in "listening to Hannibal".

 

[pemerton]

Maybe that would be the way to do it. Instead of "You wake up in the dark room", it's "How did you get into this room - describe what happened." and then roll with it.

That's one way to do it. It has its own potential problems, as per this blog that LostSoul linked to a while ago. Short version - in a fairly traditional game in which each player is advocate for his/her PC, it can generate a bit of role confusion, and undermine the strength of the game, if the player is also given the job of having to narrate the adversity for his/her PC.

It would probably also make a difference if you used the "what happened" as the start of a game - so in effect the player is writing his/her PC's backstory - or if you used the "what happened" during an ongoing game - which is to an extent asking the players to do something that traditionally is the job of the GM.

Not at all saying it can't be done. But like everything else about adventure design and scene framing, it has the potential to go wrong! (I think this potential to go wrong is pretty much endemic to the RPG form, which relies so heavily on the GM to deliver the story elements, but at the same time needs the GM to hang back at just those crucial moments - so much room for mistakes in judgement!)

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I would argue that the attitude does not need to be stopped so much as moderated.

it really comes down to what the DM and what the players expect from the game.

Some players and Dm's have a strong narrative bias. Generally, this manifests for the players as a willingness to make sub optimal tactical or strategic decisions in the interests of making the story / narrative more interesting. For the DM, this will manifest as a willingness to disregard the dice if the result does not serve the story, or to handwave certain game elements if doing so makes the scene at hand more impressive. This kind of a game will have a strong story emphasis. There will be no real danger of a TPK. If things go badly, then the DM will find a way around it (lowering the AC of hte monsters to let the pc's hit or kill more easily, etc).

Other players and Dm's have a strong tactical bias. This may manifest for the players with optimized build choices, and a tendency to question the Dm if he thinks the monster is performing better then it ought to. For the Dm, this will manifest as a willingness to go with the result dice, even if it harms the story. This is the game where you might encounter a TPK, and the game where the players can actually get away with killing the primary Villian by getting the jump on him during what the DM thought would be a non combat encounter. If things go badly, then oh well.

Dm vs Player is not always counter productive.

When it works, it creates a sense of tension that you cannot really duplicate by pure narrative. When the players know their characters could die during combat, it creates a sense of dramatic tension you wont get any other way. It also creates a truer sense of accomplishment for your players when they manage to survive fights that they did not think they might have.

To put it another way, haivng a campaign villain execute innocent villagers is a standard issue plot device for most games. The villain who does that is not that remarkable. But the villain who forced my players to run away from a fight, and who killed Bob the Fighter while doing it? That is the NPC my players actually want to kill.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Lanefan]

And I don't really take this as a refutation of my earlier claim that games that constrain scene framing by reference to traditional action resolution mechanics are potentially tactically and strategically rich but incline towards the thematically narrow and limited. If it's all AD&D-style action resolution all the time, with bottles balanced on doors and saving throws against poison and killing trumping over capturing, you won't get to play a capture scenario - ...

Well, in fact yes you can. All you need to do is put the party into combat against foes that are a *lot* tougher than they look, but who are striking to subdue rather than kill. Party eventually all get clubbed senseless, wake up later in cells, and there's yer capture scenario...

You also seem to be saying that it's anathema to frame the capture scene, but it's acceptable to run the Colossal Red Dragon "surrender-or-die" scene. I certainly know which sort of game I'd rather play in - one in which the GM frames exciting scenes and I can be confident that the GM is abiding by the encounter building guidelines, than one in which the GM abuses the encounter building guidelines so as to railroad the players. And the "surrender-or-die" scene is a railroad, because it is as encounter with only one real option, namely, to surrender.

It is surprisingly difficult to engineer a scenario where the only true options for every character are surrender or die. Someone always has an out.

In A3 I tried twice to set up a surrender or die situation. Both times there were enough 'outs' in the party that although they suffered losses (and some did surrender the second time) there was always someone left free to carry on. In the second case, it didn't lead so much to an escape scenario (though that's what we played it as anyway, for fun) as a rescue-from-outside scenario.

Lan-"AD&D is not thematically narrow and limited"-efan

 

[pemerton]

Lanefan, I can't give you more XP at this time.

In my defence I'll point to my weasel-words - "incline towards the thematically narrow and limited" - but otherwise I'll accept that I'm talking in broad-brush terms, perhaps too broad brush. I do think, though, that once the turtling sets in it can be very hard to recover that thematic vibrancy. And I'm saying this from my own play experience, not just as theoretical speculation.

The issue of "outs" is an interesting one. In my experience, it mostly turns on spellcasters having some sort of option that the GM didn't foresee. If you play that sort of situation according to the action resolution mechanics, then as you say the PCs might get lucky. My memory of the slave lords is that the module suggests fudging the rolls if necessary (what I called upthread "abusing the action resolution mechanics") but I don't have my copy in front of me and so may be misremembering.

The issue of surprisingly tough foes striking to subdue is also an interesting one. In my terminology, I've called that "abusing the encounter building guidelines", but obviously that's not terminology that's neutral across different approaches to the issue!

I'm pretty sure that my players would be highly irritated by the under-the-radar subduers, because they would see it as abusive GMing. But in a different sort of game, especially one which doesn't use the notion of encounter building guidelines, then it could work out differently.

 

[pemerton]

Some players and Dm's have a strong narrative bias. Generally, this manifests for the players as a willingness to make sub optimal tactical or strategic decisions in the interests of making the story / narrative more interesting. For the DM, this will manifest as a willingness to disregard the dice if the result does not serve the story, or to handwave certain game elements if doing so makes the scene at hand more impressive.

I really do not like this sort of play. I don't like it as a player, because it subordinates my priorities to the GM's. And I don't like it as a GM - if I wanted to write bad fantasy fiction I'd do that, rather than referee an RPG.

Other players and Dm's have a strong tactical bias. This may manifest for the players with optimized build choices

This describes me and my group reasonably well, although the optimisation is only half-hearted by CharOps standards (but also a bit more rules-as-intended rather than rules-as-cheese).

For the Dm, this will manifest as a willingness to go with the result dice, even if it harms the story.

<snip>

Dm vs Player is not always counter productive.

I'm very happy to go with the results dice, and I play my monsters as tactically well as I can within the reasonable parameters of their Int and cultural/behavioural write-ups. This doesn't harm the story, though, because the game I play is sufficiently well-designed that the action resolution mechanics support the unfolding of story.

This is the game where you might encounter a TPK, and the game where the players can actually get away with killing the primary Villian by getting the jump on him during what the DM thought would be a non combat encounter. If things go badly, then oh well.

I'm not sure what to make of this. If the GM introduces the villain into the narrative at a certain point, then I guess there is a possibility of the PCs getting the jump. I play a system, however, in which this sort of possibility can be pretty-much excluded. For example, in a recent session, the PCs saw the primary villain flying off on a flying carpet while they were sneaking into the basement of his fortress to kill the hobgoblins there and rescue some prisoners. The PCs themselves had no way to fly, and no way to defend themselves against the large numbers of hobgoblins celebrating a funeral who would have noticed any arrows being fired at the villain. And the rules of the game make a one-shot kill of the villain via an arrow impossible (he has too many hit points) and the players know this. I was therefore very confident that the sight of the villain on his carpet would add some colour, and flesh out the background a bit more, but would not lead to his untimely demise. And unsurprisingly, it turned out as I expected. (EDIT: if they had tried to take him down, by coordinating all their ranged attacks to hit simultaneously, and had succeeded, then the session would have played out very differently from how I expected, and I would have had to stat up a whole bundle of extra hobgoblins, but I still think it would have been a pretty interesting story!)

When the players know their characters could die during combat, it creates a sense of dramatic tension you wont get any other way.

I just don't agree with this. For example, in high level Rolemaster many PCs have access to Self-Keeping, a spell which preserves the body and soul in the event of death short of brain destruction, meaning that only healing but no resurrection is required for recovery. I've GMed RM combats in which some of the PCs had access to this spell, all did, or none did - which is to say, with wildly differing degrees of possiblity that the PCs might die. I never saw any evidence that it made any difference to the drama.

The possiblity of losing the combat is a different thing. But there are all sorts of loss conditions for a combat besides dying - unconsciousness being an obvious one.

It also creates a truer sense of accomplishment for your players when they manage to survive fights that they did not think they might have.

My players get a sense of accomplishment from engaging the mechanics well. And the fact that the mechanics are about warriors, wizards, dragons, demons etc - in short, the flavour text - certainly adds some spice to that sense of accomplishment. But again, I don't think that the characterisation of the loss conditions as PC death, as opposed to PC defeat in various other forms, makes a lot of difference.

To the villain who forced my players to run away from a fight, and who killed Bob the Fighter while doing it? That is the NPC my players actually want to kill.

Now I believe that, and I've had similar experiences GMing. But at least in my own case, it hasn't turned out either that other villains are less engaging, or that PC death is the only way to generate intense emotions. My last campaign ended with the players trapping a Voidal entity, the Prince of Hell and a petty demon lord in a dead star that they magically reignited (the idea of the dead star and its reignition is from Monte Cook's Beyond Countless Doorways). The Voidal entity they had fought twice in various forms. The Prince of Hell they had been struggling against for many sessions. The petty demon lord they fought only once - when they captured him - and he had never killed a PC. Nevertheless, I think imprisoning him gave the players the most satisfaction, simply because (i) he was the longest running of the foes during the campaign and (ii) he had therefore racked up the biggest number of niggling annoyances for the party.

A lot of things, including unexpected little things, can make a villain be the one that the party especially hates, and I think it's very hard to generalise from a particular campaign to scenario design in general.

 

[Lanefan]

The issue of "outs" is an interesting one. In my experience, it mostly turns on spellcasters having some sort of option that the GM didn't foresee.

Or a Thief-type makes a really good sneaking roll...

If you play that sort of situation according to the action resolution mechanics, then as you say the PCs might get lucky. My memory of the slave lords is that the module suggests fudging the rolls if necessary (what I called upthread "abusing the action resolution mechanics") but I don't have my copy in front of me and so may be misremembering.

That suggestion is in there. However, my party weren't exactly approaching the slave lords module in the traditional way. It's supposed to "end" with the party facing down the lords and losing, but my lot never got that far. They attracted enough attention wandering around in Suderham that some of the lords came to them (they barely escaped), then later were hiding in a cave on the same island when the lords came to them again (some surrendered this time, others escaped).

The party never realized until much later the lords had been scrying them all along; and a few of the lords had got bored waiting for the party to find them and went out after them instead.

My plan was to either have the party captured or befriended by one of the lords who is a double agent [insert long story here]; if captured they'd have woken up already out of prison and drifting on a boat at sea.

The issue of surprisingly tough foes striking to subdue is also an interesting one. In my terminology, I've called that "abusing the encounter building guidelines", but obviously that's not terminology that's neutral across different approaches to the issue!

I'm pretty sure that my players would be highly irritated by the under-the-radar subduers, because they would see it as abusive GMing. But in a different sort of game, especially one which doesn't use the notion of encounter building guidelines, then it could work out differently.

In the specific case of the slave lords, why would your players see strike-to-subdue as abuse? Slavers aren't usually trying to kill their inventory! There's loads of other situations where strike-to-subdue also makes realistic sense; it's hardly abuse, and in these cases I'd suggest your players might want to lighten up a bit.

Lan-"slave to the grind"-efan