You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[pemerton]

PC #1: "Ok, we encounter Odin, the Alfadur. His battered and bruised body is bound to the trunk of the World Ash. He's bleeding badly out of his eye where the Norns have just rudely plucked it from his head. He mutters incoherently, something about his thirst perhaps and then slips off again into unconsciousness. He looks helpless and like he has maybe one hit point left."

PC #2: "Well, we can't let the old man suffer. I coup de grace the All Father"

PC #3: "We rock. Whose next?"

You can't challenge a player that can scene frame.

No. All you've shown is that a player who chooses not to challenge him-/herself can successfully refrain from doing so. But what you describe isn't the way people who generated solo dungeons from the back of the DMG, or who went through DDG page-by-page, actually did.

Scene framing is what the story teller does when he describes what the characters are currently seeing and experiencing to the players so that they can share in the imagined space. It's when you give the actors there scene. "Ok, you've just remet after not seeing each other for a long time. You are in a city called Amalteen, which is an important port town and you having breakfast on the patio of this tavern which is right on the harbor."

That's not scene framing as any RPG text that talks about scene-framing uses the term. It's just colour.

It also bears little relationship to scene-framing in cinema or theatre, either. When I think about the scene in Casablanca in which Rick sits down at Ilsa and Victor Lazlo's table, the colour of the table cloth, or the precise arrangement of items on the table, is not part of the scene-framing. (It almost certainly wasn't canvassed by the script writer, and may well have not been determined by the director.) The framing of the scene, rather, is that within moments of the audience having heard Claude Rains' character explain that Rick never drinks with his guests, Rick sits down at these guests' table - guests whom we already know, via the cuing when Ingrid Bergman is first seen, are important to the story. The framing of the scene - of that scene, at least - is about the drama and emotion that are inherent and pent up, and the anticipation is in uncertainty as to how it will resolve, and what excatly the relationship is between Rick and these two people.

"Giving the actors their scene" means conveying to them the stakes (dramatic, emotional, thematic) of the situation. In an RPG it's a bit different, because of the lack of script and the identity of performer and audience. Luckily there are 10 to 15 years worth of gaming manuals telling us various ways of approach scene-framing under these constraints. Here is a pretty good one - about half-way down the page, under the heading "The Standard Narrativistic Model".

I look at your initial description of the harbor and realize where the problem is. You talk about scene. I talk about scenario. There was no scenario in your initial framing. It's just a description of the harbour. There's nothing going on. There's nothing really to do. It's window dressing, afaic.

I agree with this, except rather than "scenario" I would tend to talk about "stakes", just because that's the pretty standard language in scene-framing analyses of and approaches to RPGing.

Yeah, but by saying that scene framing is about setting stakes, he's implying I'm giving the players their goals.

No I'm not.

In standard scene-framing play the GM identifies the players' goals (at the simplest, by asking them; in more sophisticated set ups, by following the various formal or informal system flags that players run up), and then frames the scene around those goals. The GM follows the players' hooks, not the other way round.

Stakes? Simulationist games don't have stakes, or at least mine doesn't. Stakes imply foreknowledge of outcomes. How could I know what the stakes are? How could I know if they matter?

First, "stakes" imply knowledge of outcomes. When Rick meets Ilsa, the stakes are fairly clear (if also complex): will he join the allied cause? will he reestablish his relationship with Ilsa? will he, via one or both of these paths, redeem himself? But (notoriously, in the case of Casablanca!) knowledge of those stakes doesn't foreordain any outcome.

Second, how could the GM know if things matter? By following the players' hooks as to what matters to them. As Eero Tuovinen discusses in the blog I linked to, there are a variety of ways of achieving this. The way I did it in my 4e campaign was pretty simple: I told the players at the start of the campaign that (i) each PC must have someting or someone to whom s/he is loyal, and (ii) each PC must have some reason to be ready to fight goblins. From that, play has unfolded fairly successfully, and of course gives the players plenty of opportunity to give more signals about what matters to them. (Obviously there are systems with more formal techniques, like Beliefs in Burning Wheel or relationships in HeroWars/Quest or Spritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel. But mine worked OK.)

Third, what exactly is the relevance of simulationist games not having stakes (at least not in the sense in which narrativist games do), given that Hussar has already stated that he is not a simulationist GM, and has either stated or implied that he doesn't have simulationist priorities as a player either. And Greenfield was describing a pretty classic D&D tournament, which is based not around simulationiost priorities but gamist ones.

 

[Celebrim]

I trying to prep for a game, so I can't respond to this interesting discussion as fully as I liked (and an earlier response seems to have disappeared), however:

No. All you've shown is that a player who chooses not to challenge him-/herself can successfully refrain from doing so. But what you describe isn't the way people who generated solo dungeons from the back of the DMG, or who went through DDG page-by-page, actually did.

Well, yes, obviously if you have full authority to frame the scenes you can choose not to challenge yourself no matter what the supposed elements are. That was my point. I love that you brought up generating solo dungeons though as a method of challenging, because when a person uses a dungeon generation method like that, the whole point is that you are deliberately forgoing the ability to frame scene and you are instead vesting that authority in a random number generator and some sort of system. That system then gets random inputs and tells you what the scene is. Once you affirm that scene, you can then try to play things out fairly just as you might play yourself in chess. The whole point is if you want challenge, you need something else to set the scenes because scene framing power is just too powerful, even when not used as strongly as in my example.

That's not scene framing as any RPG text that talks about scene-framing uses the term. It's just colour.

I'm not convinced of that. I know that its not scene framing as it is used in a standard story first narrativist game. That doesn't mean its not scene framing. It's just not scene framing as I might use it to generate a different sort of game, one where terms like 'stakes' might actually be a very accurate and effective term for describing what was going on.

When I think about the scene in Casablanca in which Rick sits down at Ilsa and Victor Lazlo's table, the colour of the table cloth, or the precise arrangement of items on the table, is not part of the scene-framing. (It almost certainly wasn't canvassed by the script writer, and may well have not been determined by the director.)

When I think of scene framing, I think of the part of the script the writer needs to set the scene, give a setting for the dialogue to occur in, and perhaps tell rather than show things about the character so that someone who picks up the script gets to know something about them before the dialogue begins.

This is the first scene framing in Pulp Fiction, for example:

INT. COFFEE SHOP – MORNING

A normal Denny's, Spires-like coffee shop in Los Angeles.
It's about 9:00 in the morning. While the place isn't jammed,
there's a healthy number of people drinking coffee, munching
on bacon and eating eggs.

Two of these people are a YOUNG MAN and a YOUNG WOMAN. The
Young Man has a slight working-class English accent and,
like his fellow countryman, smokes cigarettes like they're
going out of style.

It is impossible to tell where the Young Woman is from or
how old she is; everything she does contradicts something
she did. The boy and girl sit in a booth. Their dialogue is
to be said in a rapid pace "HIS GIRL FRIDAY" fashion."

It's called scene framing because its the book ends for the dialogue that sets up the scene we are going to have. Notice the telling and not showing, and incidentally the fact that the story starts in a tavern with nothing much apparantly going on except a conversation.

The framing of the scene, rather, is that within moments of the audience having heard Claude Rains' character explain that Rick never drinks with his guests, Rick sits down at these guests' table - guests whom we already know, via the cuing when Ingrid Bergman is first seen, are important to the story. The framing of the scene - of that scene, at least - is about the drama and emotion that are inherent and pent up, and the anticipation is in uncertainty as to how it will resolve, and what excatly the relationship is between Rick and these two people.

Yeah, but even if that were true, all that is scripted. In a RPG you don't hand scripts to players and tell them what to say. But what you are really describing isn't scene framing either from the stand point of the script writer or the cinematographer. What's going on here is that we are introducing our protagonist (or as it will actually turn out, our protagonists). That part of Casablanca is equivalent to the part of my campaign where the PC's are sitting on the patio after the scene frame sharing bits of each others backstory IC and making inquiries about the environment they are in. It's bringing the audience, which in the RPG is their fellow players, into a relationship with their characters.

"Giving the actors their scene" means conveying to them the stakes (dramatic, emotional, thematic) of the situation. In an RPG it's a bit different, because of the lack of script and the identity of performer and audience.

Yes, it is a bit different. The standard narrative model is an adequate description of running of running a narativist game. In a simulationist game, you not cutting to 'story' where you've predefined what the story is or is about.

First, "stakes" imply knowledge of outcomes. When Rick meets Ilsa, the stakes are fairly clear (if also complex): will he join the allied cause? will he reestablish his relationship with Ilsa? will he, via one or both of these paths, redeem himself? But (notoriously, in the case of Casablanca!) knowledge of those stakes doesn't foreordain any outcome.

I've not even sure 'stakes' are good way to discuss cinema. Why don't we leave them to the narrativists game that the term is applicable to.

Third, what exactly is the relevance of simulationist games not having stakes (at least not in the sense in which narrativist games do), given that Hussar has already stated that he is not a simulationist GM, and has either stated or implied that he doesn't have simulationist priorities as a player either. And Greenfield was describing a pretty classic D&D tournament, which is based not around simulationiost priorities but gamist ones.

Well, I'm in this discussion too. Maybe they have stakes or find stakes a useful way of thinking about what is going on. But they are the ones that allow players to scene frame, so maybe there is a connection. And in any event, a gamist game has goals (winning) and not stakes (emotional tradeoffs/payoffs, what a player is willing to pay/risk to obtain some other outcome in the story).

 

[pemerton]

It is impossible to tell where the Young Woman is from or how old she is; everything she does contradicts something she did.

<snip>

Their dialogue is to be said in a rapid pace "HIS GIRL FRIDAY" fashion."

This is not "giving a setting for the dialogue to occur in". The second bit is not "tell rather than show things about the character" either.

 

[Hussar]

But, Celebrim, when you look at a lot of theater plays, there are virtually no scene descriptions like you are referring to in Pulp Fiction.

I mean, this is the opening scene of Macbeth:

ACT I
SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

There is absolutely no scene framing such as you refer to. Well, other than, "a desert place". The important bits are the witches and their interaction.

---------

I'll try to give another example and see where it goes. I'm trying to give as much detail as I can, but, please, read this assuming everyone is trying to have a good time. The DM is very good and the other players were also very much on the ball.

We were delving into a dungeon beneath a city when we stumbled across a Grell which proceeded to obliterate one of the PC's and beat the snot out of the rest of us. We retreated back to the surface. We decided that the monster likely wasn't going anywhere, and we needed some extra muscle. So, we spent a couple of days hiring mooks. Now, this was my idea, so, maybe I shouldn't have bothered, but, everyone thought it was a good idea at the time.

So, we advertise and whatnot and get a dozen or so applicants. We only had enough money for about 6, so, I said, "Well, we pick the best six and move on." No go. The DM insisted that we interview each and every NPC and decide for ourselves. So, about a third of a session later, we finally have our six troopies and now I'm fuming because I'm so frustrated. Next we have to equip them because none of them have weapons. Fair enough, large city, I hand the DM a shopping list. Again, no go. We have to actually go to the weapons shop and buy stuff, complete with lengthy conversation with said shop owner.

Now we've blown through about half a session on things that I absolutely had no interest in.

From my point of view, I wanted six hirelings, they would do this one thing and go away. That was it. I wouldn't begrudge a few minutes of get to know them, but, honestly, since we already had a goal (kill the grell and move forward), I simply wasn't interested in what the DM wanted. But, since I completely lacked any means of moving things along, I couldn't reframe the scene in any fashion and had to go along with the DM.

This sort of thing doesn't happen when I run games and I don't play with DM's like this anymore. Celebrim, you asked how players can reframe scenes and this is how I would have done the above. When the players have a clear goal, then if they indicate they are not interested in deviating from that, then I don't force the issue. Instead of the "Get to know the local color and people" scene, I scrap that scene and move on. Probably from the point of the shopping list to outside the Grell's lair. That entire scenario would have taken me all of ten minutes instead of almost two hours. All because one of the players indicated that he or she wasn't interested in what was going on.

Now, OTOH, if the players were totally into the "Get to know the local color and people" scene, they wouldn't indicate that they wanted to move on and the scene would play out as I originally intended (if I was actually running this scene). Conversely, if I, as DM, was going to skip past this scene but the players indicated that they actually wanted to get to know the hirelings, then I expand the scene to include that.

IOW, the players through informal flags (thanks Pemerton for that term, it makes good sense) can reframe virtually any individual scene in any direction. Considerations like, "How would this realistically work?" as in the centepede train example, simply aren't something I even think about any more. If the players wanted to get into that consideration, they would raise flags by tying themselves to the centipede, crafting make shift saddles, talking about skills, whatever. OTOH, since the player said, "I summon the centipede, it should take us three days to get to the city", that's a pretty clear flag that "Dive into the details of travel" is probably not on the menu at this time.

 

[MarkB]

So, we advertise and whatnot and get a dozen or so applicants. We only had enough money for about 6, so, I said, "Well, we pick the best six and move on." No go. The DM insisted that we interview each and every NPC and decide for ourselves. So, about a third of a session later, we finally have our six troopies and now I'm fuming because I'm so frustrated. Next we have to equip them because none of them have weapons. Fair enough, large city, I hand the DM a shopping list. Again, no go. We have to actually go to the weapons shop and buy stuff, complete with lengthy conversation with said shop owner.

Now we've blown through about half a session on things that I absolutely had no interest in.

From my point of view, I wanted six hirelings, they would do this one thing and go away. That was it. I wouldn't begrudge a few minutes of get to know them, but, honestly, since we already had a goal (kill the grell and move forward), I simply wasn't interested in what the DM wanted. But, since I completely lacked any means of moving things along, I couldn't reframe the scene in any fashion and had to go along with the DM.

It occurs to me that this might potentially have been your DM trying to raise some informal flags that what you were doing was something he wasn't going to have any fun with - that to him, the players hiring muscle to fight their battles for them didn't make for an interesting or enjoyable encounter, so if they insisted on doing so he wouldn't offer any shortcuts.

Flags and scene-framing works both ways, and the DM is also a player. If you're dragging the game in a direction that he finds un-fun, then you have a dissatisfied player at your table, no less than if he's pushing in a direction that you find un-fun.

I'm not advocating that he should be able to dictate anything, I'm just saying that reading the signals and making adjustments if somebody's not having a good time is a consideration that people on both sides of the DM screen should have.

 

[Greenfield]

Just for fun, let me throw in another example:

1st Ed tournament game (yes, the same one I mentioned before), an octagonal room with eight doors. Each leads to a corridor, which in turn lead to an outer circle way. Each spoke corridor is guarded by an Elemental or Para-Elemental that you have to pass to move on.

After a bit of thinking we approached the Smoke Para-Elemental and spoke to it using a little-used rule: Alignment Tongue. By this D&D 1e rule, creatures of the same alignment shared a common language.

We asked the Para-Elemental what his orders were. He said that he had been ordered by the Time Lord to guard this corridor.

Noting to the DM that, by the rules, beings like this hated being forced into servitude, and would pervert their orders if they could, my character presented the following argument: "By all means, guard the corridor. It's perfectly safe from us, in that we will neither harm nor steal it. All we want to do is walk through it."

The DM ground his teeth on that one, then agreed that we'd found a way and let us through. Half way. Then he changed his mind, and said that he couldn't let us get through that easily.

In that case he not only changed a ruling, he intentionally dragged out the battle, to add a time penalty. The module, as written, called for a fight, so there had to be a fight no matter what.

Was I being abusive?

 

[Hussar]

It occurs to me that this might potentially have been your DM trying to raise some informal flags that what you were doing was something he wasn't going to have any fun with - that to him, the players hiring muscle to fight their battles for them didn't make for an interesting or enjoyable encounter, so if they insisted on doing so he wouldn't offer any shortcuts.

Flags and scene-framing works both ways, and the DM is also a player. If you're dragging the game in a direction that he finds un-fun, then you have a dissatisfied player at your table, no less than if he's pushing in a direction that you find un-fun.

I'm not advocating that he should be able to dictate anything, I'm just saying that reading the signals and making adjustments if somebody's not having a good time is a consideration that people on both sides of the DM screen should have.

Well, this is a bit of a larger issue though. He set the initial encounter with the grell and we got our asses handed to us. Like I said, one PC dead and the rest of us forced to flee. So, at this point, getting some reinforcements isn't exactly a stretch. But, even so, all we are going to do is make this one encounter easier.

The DM has literally hundreds of encounters to play with. We only have the one that's in front of us at the time. The DM here has to give a bit of leeway. And, note, we were doing something that is a pretty time honored tradition in D&D - snagging hirelings - 1st level warriors/1st level commoners. It was not going to totally blow away the game, nor was it something that necessarily was going to be anything more than this one encounter.

After all, it would be pretty easy for the DM to mop the floor with the troopies so that they don't become an issue down the road. The grell is defeated (which he's supposed to be anyway) and the problem self corrects.

The DM has so many tools in his toolbox for altering scenes and scenarios, that it becomes rather trivially easy for the DM to push the game back in a direction he enjoys. The players lack that overt power and must, most often, settle for using in-game elements to push the game.

And, as a side note, if you look at your objection, "the players hiring muscle to fight their battles for them didn't make for an interesting or enjoyable encounter", it gets back to my point about the DM being invested in how an encounter resolves itself. Enjoyable here refers to the DM. But, a DM should never be invested in how the encounter resolves itself. One way is as good as another, so long as the table is happy. If they cakewalk the encounter, then so be it. It's only when the DM starts deciding that an encounter must be this difficult to be fun that problems ensue.

 

[pemerton]

It occurs to me that this might potentially have been your DM trying to raise some informal flags that what you were doing was something he wasn't going to have any fun with - that to him, the players hiring muscle to fight their battles for them didn't make for an interesting or enjoyable encounter, so if they insisted on doing so he wouldn't offer any shortcuts.

Flags and scene-framing works both ways, and the DM is also a player.

In this situation the GM should just be upfront and say "Sorry, no hirelings for you!" Or another option would be to say "OK, but just be aware that it will cost you XP, because your hirelings will be added to the relevant divisor" - a gamist group can then respond to this clear mechanical signal.

Whereas wasting your players time with tedious crap to "punish" them for trying to get a mechanical advantage against a grell strikes me as just about the worst form of adversarial GMing.

The stuff that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] said in reply above makes sense too.

 

[pemerton]

The first session of D&D I played at university, we (the PCs) fought some kobolds and captured one. Which we then proceeded to interrogate (I think we had a dwarf or gnome who spoke Kobold). We drew a crude map of the city we were in, and asked it where on the map the other kobolds were hiding.

And the GM roleplayed the INT 8-10 kobold (it was a bog standard 2nd ed AD&D kobold) as being too stupid to understand our questions or tell us anything useful about the disposition of the kobold forces.

After (from memory) one more session, we booted that GM and I took over with the first of my long running RM campaigns. Whose got the time or patience to put up with that sort of nonsense from the GM?

 

[pemerton]

In that case he not only changed a ruling, he intentionally dragged out the battle, to add a time penalty. The module, as written, called for a fight, so there had to be a fight no matter what.

Was I being abusive?

I don't think you were being abusive. I think it's tricky, though, because AD&D doesn't really have rules for adjudicating that sort of thing. (In 4e your PC's conversation with the elemental would open up the possibility of a Bluff check, or perhaps a skill challenge, depending exactly how the confict was framed.)

But the GM, having made a decision, should have stuck to it. Presumably the whole point of a tournament is that some people do better than others, including in respct of time spent overcoming obstacles.