Working from the presentation and discussion at Situation: primary and primal, and drawing upon the game shared in Here comes trouble, now I want to show you exactly what I mean by scene framing, resolution (both successes and failures), and those weird black arrows in
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It seems to be my month for consulting on projects which have hunkered down in people's notebooks for fifteen or twenty years, refusing either to get past a design hump or to yield gracefully into "not gonna do this game" status.
At the Patreon, I began a deeper discussion of my breakdown of "setting" into three more useful terms: backdrop, situation, and scene(s). I presented it first in Circle of Hands and referenced it a lot since then.
Here is the Sorcerer game Day of the Dupes first session. In a previous session after creation, we played the bind as flashbacks. I planed this game a few months ago so I had to remember things about their characters, but they really decided everytghing. First, I discussed about the expectations of the game. I explained that I prepped too much and I should not give the impression that there’s an adventure to follow, or a complex backstory to unveil, but that we are just playing our characters and following the direct consequences of their actions. There will be weird things happenings, cliffhangers, but only because the NPC that appears in the game will have their story, not because the GM is trying to send messages about the adventure. The main issue arising from this actual play is scene framing, in which I struggle while understanding why during the game, and how I used the r-map as a source of interesting informations.
[S1:E2], 16 Feb 2019
Session 1 recap: The adventurers are at Castle Figaryo for the prince’s birthday festival when the Empress shows up with a military escort. She is ticked that her daughter is missing. The adventurers get into some antics and escape the castle, with the prince Sabin.
Looking at the topic of distributing GM-tasks all sorts of different ways, which we all know well, but maybe its widespread use doesn't reflect enough of its potential.