Not a ton to say today and I’m single-dadding it so not much time either.
Super short version: I think scene framing is a really smart technique depending on the game and players, it means different things for different games, and it’s not a universal best practice for all games everywhere.
NB I’m not at all surprised, reading some other folks’ posts today, that there’s a range of understanding of what this even is. You need to buy into the idea that narrative situations matter and can have urgency. I would not, personally, treat a dungeon problem description as “scene framing” of any kind — no scene, no frame, different paradigm. So, to me, trying to fit all gaming into that technique is to treat the technique as so vague as to be useless. Lots of functional roleplaying has nothing to do with scenes or framing.
I tend to do a mix of lightly framed scenes (mostly me, as GM, editorializing about what I feel like are the important things to focus on in the scene) and minute-to-minute coverage at home. More aggressive framing (more urgency and context) in one-shots and at conventions because we need to get shit done and fast. Nothing bugs me more as a player than sitting down and fucking around with irrelevant and uninteresting content.
Anyway, yay scene framing! Sometimes!
I’ll have more time tomorrow. Sorry for the short one today.
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It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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Aggressive scene framing is another one of those gems I’m eternally grateful to the Forge for popularizing.
I am entirely happy to be doing it wrong. Like, to me? A dungeon problem is admittedly a weak prompt to action, but it’ll do if that’s all that’s needed, since the goal is to keep the action going to interesting places.
Scene framing with a dramatic goal other than that feels overly-directed to me, like a clever railroad built on theme instead of plot or some shit like that.
Levi Kornelsen yeah I’m not a fan of explicit dramatic goals either, unless we’re talking intent/consequences type resolution. Assuming we’re both talking about the same thing.
I realized recently that the biggest problem with the sessions I GM is that I sometimes only half-frame the scene, which leads to players (and even their characters) just sitting around discussing what to do next.
It’s fascinating to me how much of the conversation around this ends up being about action orientation as the presumed natural default of games.
Also, how much of it is in table-top standard. Like, how much this changes when you are talking FATE vs. Montsegur vs. Fiasco vs. Microscope.
?
If I understand the term, it’s crazy broad. If you try to talk about it in general, I can see why it would default to something that’s a bit action and a bit trad. It’s a broadly shared experience, and it leads to a broad discussion (maybe too broad).
I think.
Tore Nielsen oh totally agreed. And I don’t know that I read Brand’s comment as criticism, just acknowledgement of where the center of gravity is.