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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6093172" data-attributes="member: 4937">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: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.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 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: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.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.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.  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.  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).</blockquote>

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