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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6115232" data-attributes="member: 4937">To be perfectly honest, I think that the confusion is that we are even using the terms 'Action Scene' and 'Transition Scene' at all.   I'm not sure that I agree that there are only two types of scenes in an RPG.  I'm not sure that I agree that the term 'scene' has as much meaning in an RPG as it has in a movie or play where we can speak concretely about the existance of a static set or of a length of film which was recorded.  I'm fairly sure that in a movie or a novel there are more than two kinds of scenes, and they aren't 'transition' and 'action'.  I'm not sure that even if the terms 'Action Scene' and 'Transitiion Scene' have real meaning, that the meaning is really all that relevant.  If there turns out to be 1 type of 'Transition Scene', and 8 types of highly distinct and diverse scenes we are lumping into the 'Action Scene' category that this claim that 'Transition Scene' is the one thing that is not like the others is either valid or interesting.  I think that they may be a distinction like 'Tragedy' and 'Comedy' which sounds really good on the surface, but turns out in practice to oversimplify things (Shakespeare riffs hard on the possibly wrong headed desire to label everything into simplistic categories in Hamlet) or maybe even misses the point (is all of human emotion renderable down to happy/sad?).   And heck, I think 'Tragedy' and 'Comedy' just might be _more_ useful as a way to talk about things than 'Action' and 'Transition'.It's not a distinction I find particularly useful for describing the way I game.  It's not something I have in mind when I'm creating or preparing.  It's not a distinction that the players draw about the scenes that they are in.  I can go along with it because I think I understand the intent, but I'm not sure that once the conversation gets sticky, that part of the problems in understanding aren't the results of the arbitrary way we've tried to label things.  Labels should clarify; they shouldn't serve to obstruct understanding. I believe that having been provided that as a framework, some tables do think about scenes as transition scenes or action scenes and as part of their table social contract agree implicitly or explicitly to treat those scenes differently.  And I believe that they find that framework useful.  But when I look at that, at some level I find how those scenes were labelled completely artibitrary and the real distinguishing factor between them is in fact that they were so labelled.   I don't accept that there is some deep fundamental truth to the labels.</blockquote>

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