Aggressive Scene Framing – An example in play

Easy AdSense by Unreal

A few weeks ago we got together to play the second session (my first though) of a game one of my friend’s running. It’s based in a setting he’s created himself which is pretty traditional high fantasy (including elves, dwarves, and orcs) but with a slightly more gritty feel to it and a different magic system. We’re using the new Green Ronin Song of Ice & Fire RPG rules, with the GM’s own magic system bolted on which seems to fit the feel and style of the game we’re aiming for pretty well – we want something that’s a bit more character & story-driven, where action is meant to serve the story rather than function as the focal point of the game.

The premise of our campaign is the following: We are members of two affiliated houses (House Thorn & House Storm) which have been tasked with hunting down a rogue wizard.  I’m playing an orphan who was adopted by House Thorn, and trained, from the age of two, to be an assassin. While he’s scary good with a knife, my real interest in the character is playing his black & white view of the world – his morality is based entirely around whether an action benefits his House or not; for example, slitting someone’s throat or drowning a child, is entirely fine, if it benefits House Thorn.

Warning: What follows is contains some critiques of our game session. It is not meant to a direct critique of the GM, although inevitably it’s going to come across that way. My main goal of this article is to use what happened and show how aggressive scene framing could have improved the game.

While I had fun during the session, our game can be summed up by the old adage “20 minutes of fun wrapped up in 4 hours of play.” The issue, for me, was that we spent an enormous amount of our session time dealing with minutiae: We obtained rooms at inns, ran through menus at taverns, and spent a lot of time just riding horses on a road along a river. We discussed traveling times, and distances between towns; prices of meals and entry to a town; what time we went to bed and what time we wanted to start traveling the next morning. Minutiae. The game was also plagued by those words I myself dread using as a GM “So what do you do now?” as we moved minute by minute through the lives of our characters.

During that time a lot of detail about the mundane elements of the world (the number of people in the town, the architecture of the buildings, the types of boat on the river, etc) was provided. It was a nice touch in trying to bring the world to life but, at least for me, fell kind of flat because they were all stuff I could have filled in with my own imagination. We also did a lot of “crawling along the map” in which the map of the world was shown to us to mark our progress – again, while that’s a nice attempt at illustrating what lies where, it’s best handled given the nature of this game by some hand waving and general description rather than plotting out daily movement distances.

These types of things highlighted my major issue with the use of an original setting – the GM ends up spending an enormous amount of time and energy trying to fill in all the details so the group has some sense of what’s special about the setting. Thus, you hear about how “orcs are orange” or get a run down of all 22 deities in the pantheon to which I always have to stifle a yawn. I mean, I am interested in the world we’re playing in, but would much rather define such things as a group during play (or during a “world burning” session), rather than being inundated with a lot of details I either won’t remember or will never use. Better yet, restrict the details to the immediate area and situation and push all that other stuff to the background. However, this issue is probably left for a future article.

So what happened during the session?  Here’s the condensed version of what occurred:

I got off a barge and discovered bargemen dress funny. I went to an inn and got a room. I met with my contact (another PC) and we had some not-so-friendly banter (my character sees him as a bureaucratic, know-it-all who’s invited along questionable allies and who probably won’t get his hands dirty when the real work starts). We went downstairs and ordered food. Our wizard asked some questions of merchants while our warrior-mage went whoring. We went to bed. We got up and rode our horses. We arrived at another town. We got a room and ate some food. We talked to some more people in the tavern. We went to bed. We got up and rode some more, arriving in another village. We went to an inn. We ordered some food. I broke into some fellow travelers’ rooms (we kept meeting them along the road & they were traveling in the same direction as us) and found out nothing except they wear armor and have crossbows (I already knew this). We talked to those travelers and found out they were mercenaries. We went to bed. We got up and rode some more. We arrived at our destination. We noticed a strange sigil at the gate and a bird that seemed to be following us. We found an inn.

At this point 3 of our 4 hour session had gone by and not much had occurred. Here’s where things finally started getting interesting though:

We go to meet a possible ally within the town and discover that his whole family is gravely-ill. Our wizard concludes that they’re under the affects of a curse and advises the family to get out of the house because it is what bears the actual curse. Our ally points us in the direction of the suspected wizard (who is supported by some other major merchant families within the town) and we head to his house. He emerges on to a balcony and tells us to go away because he’s summoned the town militia & has powerful allies within the town. We discover the mercenaries we met on the road were hired by him as guards. Our fighter-mage burns down his front door and I draw my knives and prepare to go in the back door – kill them all and sort it out with the militia will be my approach.

And that’s where we ran out of town – we ended on a cliff hanger (a good thing). Unfortunately, we did so because most of the session was filled with pretty pointless activity and a lot of inching along the road. Had the GM instead aggressively framed scenes we could have skipped along, cutting between important scenes, bridged by interstitial ones, and finished off the session on a real bang. Here’s how I would have set up the scenes:

• Scene 1 – My arrival at the inn and meeting with the wizard – run this as free roleplay (like we did). Forget about all that shit about the barge because it was meaningless.
• Scene 2 – Introduction of the other team member at breakfast the next day – Have the whoring fighter-mage wander in as we’re getting ready to leave; that would allow his wenching to be introduced without involving asking each player “so what are you going to do now?”
• Scene 3 – Arrival at the first village – Introduction of the travelers (foreshadowing for the guards) could take place here and include a run in with the merchants who then come up later. This would be a quick paced, scene with no real events planned unless the PCs generate some.
• Scene 4 -  Wizard talking with the merchants – reveal the movers & shakers within our target town, introduce some rumors, and provide some opportunity for the wizard to use his impressive social skills. Perhaps start this one with a Bang! by introducing some sort of controversial information or starting right off with the critical info and letting the roleplay go from there rather than having the PC(s) trying to dredge up the critical info first.
• Scene 5 – Next town – once again our fellow travelers show up.  Allow some exchange of conversation or introduce an event that hints that these guys are skilled mercenaries; or not.
• Scene 6 – That night in the inn – let the fighter-mage talk to the mercenaries while I rummage their room. Include something in the room, or the conversation, that hints that we might end up on opposing sides with these guys because otherwise it’s just a weird coincidence when they turn out to be the wizard’s guards (also, why didn’t he have guards earlier?).  This is an optional scene though, based on what the players decide they want to do.  This is one of those situations where I would ask the players if they had something they wanted to do in town – if so, I set up those scenes. If not, I move on to the next scene.
• Scene 7 – Arrival at the target town – spot the sigil & bird. Find out about the sick ally right away.
• Scene 8 – Meet with ally – leave this scene exactly as it occurred in the real game.
• Scene 9 – Showdown with the wizard – Kick down the door…. burning down the house….

Now, if you just read through all that, you’ll notice that essentially all of the same events occur in my version as the original ones. The difference is that in the aggressive scene framing approach, you cut directly to the scenes and bypass all the other stuff with some hand waving and a few sentences of narrative. You cut to what’s important. Some of these scenes would have only been 5  minutes long, leaving more time for the important ones like the showdown at the end. There also would have been a lot less “chewing scenery” which simply isn’t fun, at least for me.

By the way, just because you’re aggressive framing scenes, doesn’t mean you railroading players: They can go in any direction they like (you just frame those scenes instead). It also doesn’t mean that you can’t have more free roleplay between the party members – those take the form of interstitial scenes, some of which occur while a particular character is having a spotlight scene with the GM. If an intra-party exchange lasts for a long time…. so be it. If the players are having fun, let them continue. Once the conversation starts to lag, bang! Move on to the next scene. The main point of the whole approach is simply to keep things moving and pack in as many meaningful scenes as possible rather than simply filling game time with a lot of stuff that does not matter or which simply is not fun.