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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6093038" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's just so vague I have no clue what you are talking about.  How do you recognize these short cuts?  How does a player mark that he wants the scene reframed?  Is there ever negotiation on that point?  How would the DM counter-offer?  How would a player go about counter offering?  How does the table resolve issues like a feeling that one player is grabbing too much spotlight? That's just a MASSIVE difference.  Talk about validating Celebrim's Second Law.  I have the exact opposite stance.  Everything in the game world exists independently of the PC's or thier actions.  It's there.  Even if I haven't previously written it down, if you ask me to think about it I can churn out a detailed description of just about anything.Ok, so first let's define 'scene framing'.  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." Now the players can start interparty role play based on this scene.  Or they can query for more information about the scene like, "What's for breakfast?"  To which I can respond, "It's late winter and so fresh food is pretty scarce.  Most people are having cold curds, toast with butter, and salted fish.  Some people have oranges, probably imported in from Irendi, a nation to the south Amalteen is allied with."   Or they can start to interact with the environment based on the information, "I'd like to throw some bits of toast to the sea gulls."  Ect.To make it even more concrete, this is how I scene framed the entire campaign:So that's 'scene framing' and it should be pretty darn clear that in your average D&D campaign, players never talk like that or read prepared descriptions like that.  But equally it should be a very familiar technique, because every time you walk into a 30'x20' room the DM has to tell you its dimensions and what it looks like and whether there is a jabberwocky about to eat you.  D&D tends to rely mostly on continious scene framing without explicitly doing it except at the beginning of adventures or sessions, but sometimes you have more explicit scene framing in long journey's when encounters are or interesting locations are infrequent.So, what is scene reframing?  Well, it's not for example starting a fight in a tavern.  It's not conjuring a few fiends from the lower planes and siccing them on the commoners walking along the port.  It's not deciding to teleport away, though that will probably immediately lead to the need for new scene framing.  To propose that any of the players actions caused scene reframing would be to suppose that there was some fixed purpose to the scene, and that by changing the purpose you've changed the scenes.   But purposes and goals are entirely the domain of players.  As a DM I'm not wedded to any particular outcome of the scene.  Whatever the actors decide to do with the scene is there business.  Hopefully its entertaining.  But it can't really change the scene.  Now, an actor could say in effect, "I want to walk off stage left and see what's there.", and now I need to frame a new scene.  But again, the act of declaring your intention to walk from here to there is separate and distinct from the game master now narrating what there is like.   The intention to walk from here to there is merely a proposition.  The narration of what you find is the scene frame.So back to scene reframing.  Scene reframing is when you renarrate the scene in responce to new important information presenting itself.  No, again in D&D, scene framing tends to be continious.  Players may occasionally get into an intraparty mode where they just go with each others flow for a long period, but some groups never do that and most groups stick to the party caller/DM responce model of play described in the 1e DMG as default.  So scenes tend to subtly be reframed over time without any real need to mark this or have special terminology for it in my opinion.  If you were going to call it something from cinema, I'd call it a 'tracking shot'.  The camera moves continiously with the PC's.  But sometimes in D&D you really do have a big scene refrain.  Here's how I reframed the current campaign about 15 minutes into the first sesson of the game (skipping over some smaller but important reframing that actually occured in the session for dramatic effect):Something important is happening.  The scene has changed from a normal pleasant though not quite tranquil morning in Amalteen harbor, to something more mysterious and ominous.   Now imagine for a second you are a player in a typical game, and you just decide to say to the group the above scene reframing peice.   The other players would look at you like you are crazy.  The DM would be like, "What?  Wait a minute?"   Heck, I reframed that scene and my PLAYERS were like, "What?".  My players went into shock. Imagine if a player took on that narrative authority.  How would you adjudicate a player doing scene reframing like that?  You've claimed that players have that inherent authority to scene frame, and I'm struggling to grasp how that works.So there is to my mind a really big difference between a player saying, "I conjure a giant centipede.", which is a proposition, and a player saying, "Ok, I conjure a giant centipede.  It has a 40' climb speed and can climb over any obstacle so we can just go in a straight line and I can forced march it until it dies.  I figure thats about 60 miles a day, so in three days we get to the Witch Kings tomb on the other side of the desert."   The second is the classic outcome as proposition gambit by a player, and the novice DM falls into its trap by taking it on its own terms and trying to argue with the rules interpretation.  The skilled power gamer smiles and argues and argues until he gets a satisfactory rules explanation, and then the DM realizes he's just agreed to reframe the scene to the Lich King's tomb and he's wondering what just went wrong.  What went wrong is that everything that the player said after, "I conjure a giant centipede" was not only irrelevant but broke the social contract.   Players get to offer propositions.  They don't get to offer outcomes or scene reframing.First of all, the original scene wasn't a climb down a cliff.  That's something undertaken by the actor.  The original scene was a road, a cliff, and three watchposts.  There is no climbing in the scene until the actor acts within it.  The actor deciding to climb, or fly, or walk down the road isn't seen reframing.  The scenario hasn't changed.  It's still a road, a cliff, and three watchposts.  There is no such thing in an RPG as a framing a scene as a dangerous climb down a cliff.  The DM isn't writing a script for crying out loud. The players can just come to the cliff, take one look at it, and say, "I'm not going that's way.  Let's go back to town and get a beer."   And that doesn't reframe the scene either.  That is the scene.  But careful.  Where do players get the right to a 30 second narration of what happens, and how it works, and what the outcome is?  Players can only describe their actions.   Now if it is a good plan, and there are no factors they weren't aware of, and nothing happens to interupt the plan, probably they'll just get a series of affirmations from the game master validating the plan so far and eventually they'll probably need the GM to scene frame.  But they can't just say, "Ok, I arrive at the gate.", just because they think its a good plan.  If the players can just say, "Ok, we accomplish what we want to accomplish without hassle.", you don't need a DM.</blockquote>

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