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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5206197" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not surprised by this, based on other posts of yours that I've read.I don't entirely follow this. How is "Having gone to sleep in the tavern, you all wake up manacled in the dungeon" the GM playing the PCs or narrating their actions to them?"You all board the ship, and sail without incident for a week" is the GM narrating to the player, but I think there are a lot of groups who don't find this per se objectionable. It's not dissimilar to a GM narrating a shopping expedition - "You want to buy some herbs - OK, you wander around the streets until you find an apothecary". Anytime the continuous flow of ingame time is compressed or skipped over, the GM is exercising some scene-framing power and, at many tables, is going to narrate some actions of the PCs. How hard the GM is allowed to be is a different matter, but even D&D isn't hostile to all forms of hard scene framing. Look at Moldvay Basic, for example, which gives the GM the power to frame the scene of arriving at the dungeon (and we see something similar in the famous example of play in the 1st ed DMG).I don't really think that talking about scene-framing, and suggesting that a bit more conscious attention to it might help mediate GM-player relations, is like suggesting that we play F.A.T.A.L. The OP has posted something which seems to me to express a genuine concern. Your reply is, in effect, to attack the OP's attempt to exercise power as GM. I don't think that's the only coherent response, and based on my own experience I'm far from sure that it's the best response.I think our experiences in RPGing must be quite different. I also think that you're not really in a position to know whether or not my mind has been "killed" by Ron Edwards. What I like about Edwards's Forge essays is that they articulate, in a coherent and analytically fruitful way, many aspects of my own experience as an RPGer. They don't create that experience, but they do help me make sense of it.As to whether proposition/resolution mechanics can create story - of course they can. But if the claim is that they can do so without any scene-framing then in my view it's a different matter. My own views on this are shaped mostly by nearly two decades of GMing Rolemaster. Rolemaster is perhaps second only to Runequest in the purity of its simulationism in action resolution. And this mechanical orientation creates very strong pressures never to cut scenes, never to cut to scenes, to only frame scenes as they emerge out of prior scenes via the action resolution mechanics. And this way of playing does undermine story - it leads to sessions bogging down in needless detail resolving actions that are in fact not the least bit contentious and of no interest to anyone at the table (eg 10th level PCs making haggling rolls to resolve the purchase of 50' of rope).What is needed is a framework that tells us how to skip over this sort of stuff - and in  a traditional RPG that will be via the exercise of GM power, relying upon implicit or explicit consent of the players - which doesn't lead to break downs of trust between players and GM, and which doesn't undermine the integrity of the action resolution mechanics when they are actually brought into play. This is a hard call in Rolemaster, because so many starting states for action resolution are dependent upon the outcomes of prior action resolution, with the result that skipping over things has the potential to produce starting states which are potentially arbitrary and unfair.It's not the purpose of this post to argue that 4e is superior to other versions of D&D. But in the light of the experience I've just described, I hope that you can see why what some people (eg you, I think, and Raven Crowking and Kamikaze Midget) regard as a weakness of 4e - the comparative independence of starting states in a given encounter from the outcomes of prior encounters - is for me a virtue, because it solves what is for me not a theoretical but an actual problem in trying to GM a pretty traditional fantasy RPG, by opening the door to more story-supportive scene framing without opening the door to arbitrary and unfair exercise of GM power in determining the starting states for encounters.I hope the previous few paragraphs have made it clearer why I see the phrase "say yes or roll the dice" as being relevant to scene-framing - it is to do with the interaction between action resolution mechanics from prior scenes and the starting-state of current scenes.I don't fully understand this. In a traditional RPG the GM is almost solely responsible for narrating the world to the players, and so the context of choice for the players is set almost entirely by the GM. Of course I can see the difference between more-or-less continuous play and play with more explicit and harder scene framing. But I'm not seeing how that contrast is related to a contrast between who gets to determine the context in which players make choices for their PCs.EDIT:I'm not the only person who ever thought that a fun scenario to play might be the PCs' escape from capture. The A1-4 slave lords module has at least one, maybe two examples of it (I think it makes provision for the PCs to end up as galley slaves part way through the module, as well as the famous transition from A3 to A4). Michael Silverbane upthread suggested the possibility. I recently ran a capture scenario of my own devising, and my players didn't lynch me or quit the game - they played through it and seemed to enjoy it, both at the tactical and at the story level.One way to frame a capture is for the GM to abuse the encounter building guidelines and then use the action resolution mechancis - eg The Colossal Red Dragon dives out of the sky, lands in front of the party and says "Surrender or die!". Another way is for the GM to pretend to use the action resolution mechanics but actually cheat - the A3-A4 transition relies on this, and I've played scenarios at conventions that take a similar approach. Yet another way is to simply suspend the action resolution mechanics and approach it instead as a question of scene-framing. If everyone at the table thinks that such a scenario might be fun to play out, and if the action resolution mechanics won't be undermined by cutting to the chase (and this is the major contrast between RM and 4e), then I still don't see why it's objectionable to just do it.Approaching it as an issue of scene-framing also has another advantage, to my mind: it allows the players to co-operate in acting against their PCs' interests at the purely metagame level. It doesn't force them to make difficult choices ingame in the course of playing their PCs. As another thread has recently canvassed, having a powerful NPC put it to the PCs that they should "surrender or die" is a source of stress for the players and can lead to TPKs and/or potential damaged feelings. In my view there is a ready explanation for this: if I agree to play D&D or another traditional fantasy RPG, then I have bought into an RPG genre in which my PC's courage and my PC's self-interest normally work together and even reinforce one another. A "surrender-or-die" situation puts these two aspects of my PC's personality at odds, in a way that a lot of players may not be all that happy about. Metagame agreement to a capture scenario circumvents this additional potential source of tension, while still letting us all enjoy the fun of playing out an escape from the dungeon, which is a pretty time-honoured element of the sword-and-sorcery repertoire.</blockquote>

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