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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6093146" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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. <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">Here</a> is a pretty good one - about half-way down the page, under the heading "The Standard Narrativistic Model".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.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.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.</blockquote>

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