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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9039187" data-attributes="member: 42582">Seeing as we're doing origin stories . . . I've posted mine on these boards several times over the years. Here's a link to a 2013 post: <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/pemertonian-scene-framing-a-good-approach-to-d-d-4e.333786/post-6074196" target="_blank">https://www.enworld.org/threads/pemertonian-scene-framing-a-good-approach-to-d-d-4e.333786/post-6074196</a>I discovered The Forge more-or-less randomly in 2004 (I can't remember what link or Google search took me there) and found the GNS essays hugely interesting. (And had no prior knowledge of the Usenet discussions and analysis.) And naturally enough they made me think about my own playstyle. At that time I was GMing Rolemaster, and had been doing so for many years, and I was easily able to identify it as a purist-for-system simulation system (= process simulation). But what I and my group were doing with it seemed a bit different from sheer process simulation and world exploration: it seemed to have more in common with the vanilla narrativism that Edwards described. In particular, morality in our game emerged out of play and mostly at the metagame level of player decision and response, rather than ingame as part of the fiction. (I have a long time hatred of mechanical alignment!) And a lot of my play approximated more towards No Myth (improvised NPCs, locations etc) than heavy pre-prep, and that seemed to be a strength rather than a weakness. So reading those essays, plus other posts, blogs etc, plus starting to look at some of the games Edwards referenced (Maelstrom Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, etc), got me thinking more theoretically about my game and the techniques I was using. And I came to understand the Forge style in terms of my own play, rather than encountering it externally and not noticing it could be relevant to my own (very non-avant garde) fantasy RPGing. This meant that when 4e started to be revealed by WotC, and some of its key features started to be revealed, I felt I had a fairly good handle on what was motivating the designers and what sort of play their game was meant to support. And therefore was pretty sure it would be a game I would enjoy - a level of mechanical crunch comparable to Rolemaster (for no very sensible reasons my group is pretty crunch-loving), but action resolution mechanics that would better support my preferred approach. (RM's PC build rules are pretty good for light fantasy narrativism play, but quite a bit of its action resolution is not.) . . . I really stumbled into it [ie scene-framing, no myth techinques] when I started GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986/87. I knew that I didn't really enjoy, and was also quite bad at, designing and adjudicating dungeons in the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian style. The difference that OA made was that the PCs had pretty clear inbuilt hooks (honour, family, etc etc) and so did the monsters (the Celestial Bureaucracy, etc), so it made it easy to build and adjudicate fun and engaging encounters on the fly. After that I ran a two-person thief game in a similar way - of all the AD&D archtypes, I think the thief has the easiest inbuilt hooks (which in my view also explains some of the notorious problems of thieves in dungeon exploration, because it means having to ignore those hooks). And then I strated my series of long-running RM games, which is also how I met my current group. . . . I've become more self-conscious about my techniques and have deliberately cultivated some and changed others . . . One example of a deliberate change in technique - being a lot more upfront about stakes, for instance by table-talking with the players, and by using many fewer secret notes/one-on-one reveals and instead doing many reveals in front of the whole group even though only one or two PCs would know - thus setting up an emotional tension between what the players know and what their PCs know and can do about it. And giving them clear options for pushing the game forward to resolve those tensions. (Having been doing this for several years now, I've recently discovered that Robin Laws talks about this very technique in his "On the Literary Edge" essay in Over the Edge.)</blockquote>

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