Everyday gamers CAN make great dramatic scenes — let's find the method.

It can be done.

Making Great Scenes at your Game Table — a series

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

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As I put The Roaring Age into layout (new pages added every day), I’m cooking on my next creative project. It’s taking up so much space in my head that I can’t avoid it.

In my last blog post, I played a session of Follow by Ben Robbins. I had a thesis: Everyday gamers often struggle to improvise cool dramatic “scenes,” and instead of offering great procedures to lead players through the scene-generation process, most games just offer tons of advice and tell you to just… well, do a scene!

It generating Reddit/Discord/Forum/Blog chatter, some agreeing, some saying that what you really need is not a procedure but to develop a complicated skillset, some saying this is an intractable problem, some saying it’s not a problem at all. Many folks offered more advice, which was just my problem to begin with.

Since I have a vision for it, I am going to work on a new project I’m currently calling…

The Scene Kit

The goal with this project will be to provide a fool-proof procedure and series of recipes for everyday gamers to add Dramatic Scenes to their game of choice. The project will be a success if it looks less like a set of good advice and principles, and more like a checklist, flowchart, or Fill-In-the-Blank.

You’ll notice that term: Dramatic Scenes.

Games are already good at developing plots, layout out challenges, building some characters, throwing them into trouble, and giving us ways to resolve successes and failures. Those aren’t the scenes your table needs help with. What a game almost never offers is a strict procedure for Dramatic Scenes — or just “scenes” for the rest of this blog post — scenes where characters have big emotional moments, struggle with one another, make bold choices, and reveal new aspects of their personality or ambitions.

Hell, many games tell you to make powerful character-based scenes, and that these interludes are to be highly desired and valued. But most won’t give you a procedural idea of how.

To use Lord of the Rings, for example: the rules of D&D will tell you exactly how to plan and run Weathertop, or the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But the Player’s Handbook won’t tell you exactly how to do the scene at the start where Frodo realizes the weight of his misfortune, asks Gandalf to take the ring away, leading Gandalf to wearily burst out, “Don’t tempt me, Frodo!” revealing the nature of the burden they share. Or later, when Samwise gets frustrated with Gollum, and tries to make Frodo see Gollum for who Gollum truly is, provoking Frodo to say, “Go home, Sam,” before dramatically parting ways.

Many will say that this isn’t something that you can find procedures for, that this is some complicated skill you must develop through time, instinct, and maybe some research into screenwriting books. But I’m calling bullshit on this. A good scene is a collage of elements, images, and choices. Anyone can make a collage, if you supply them with the right tools.

That’s the goal: a fool-proof set of procedures, elementary, quick, and light, that helps everyday gamers roll out surprising, evocative, meaningful, FUN dramatic scenes.

Some games, like Ben Robbins’ Microscope, tell you when to have a scene, and how many. Most games, like D&D 5th Edition, don’t have any cues at all telling you when to enter a scene. In that last case, game tables should be able to break this procedure out whenever they’d like – “Hey, I feel like… let’s do a scene! Could be fun!” – follow the procedure, and then return to regular gameplay.

What makes a scene fun? Scene are fun because, using your character’s personality and relationships, you can…

• Make a tough decision

• Make an impact on the story

• Change a relationship

• Learn about your own character

Scenes are never about the plot. Scenes are always related to the plot, but the scene itself is about relationships and characters. Scenes are about sticky interpersonal conflicts, motivations, disputes, romances, and realizations. It’s after the scene that we can get back to plot developments and outcomes, which are often direct expressions of how the scene goes.

“The theme of every Golden Fleece [i.e.: adventure/quest] movie is internal growth; how the incidents affect the hero is, in fact, the plot. It is the way we know that we are truly making forward progress — it's not the mileage we're racking up that makes a good Golden Fleece, it's the way the hero changes as he goes. And forcing those milestones to mean something to the hero is your job.”
—Blake Snyder, ‘Save the Cat! ‘

Still, plot has a big role in generating and playing out our scene! Plot can feed a scene full of important ingredients. The plot given to you by Curse of Strahd or Black Wyrm of Brandonsford or your Masks campaign is the garden you go into to pick your ingredients for the meal of your scene. The plot…

• Sets the stage for where our scene is taking place

• Offers topics of discussion and debate

• Interrupts a scene with new developments

• Creates tests and opportunities

• Expresses the results or consequences of a scene

When the plot risks stepping forward – consequences and mechanics come back into play. This is one of the ways we know we can end the scene!

Why do this at all? Why, if you have a great adventure game going, would you add these scenes? Because scenes are fun in a different way than the plot-focused stuff. Even when we have a session where the plot is linear, predictable, or straightforward, scenes never have this problem. A good scene puts a tough decision in front of a player and asks: “So who the hell is this character really?”

This next section is a sketch of how I might introduce a “Getting started” in such a zine.

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What is the bare minimum you need before you start to set up a scene?

Before you begin to make a scene, you need two sets of inputs or prerequisites. These are all elementary — none is superfluous.

First, there’s the plot-related stuff, provided by the game you’re already playing.

The game provides…

• A PLOT HOOK that tells you what the quest is, and usually a resolution SYSTEM for moving the plot along.

• Some CHARACTER PREMISES, an idea of who these heroes are and why they have to stick together.

• Some SETTING and stage dressing for context, what kind of world we’re in.

• CHALLENGES along the way for our characters to address and to build scenes against.

Second, you need characters. The game probably gave you at least a couple of these elements, but probably not all.

Your characters need…

• A name, surely.

• ROLE/Purpose – in a traditional game this is your character class.

• Primary GOAL/MOTIVATION for engaging in the overall story.

• A TRAIT that describes their personality, approach, or demeanor.

• A FLAW that describes this character’s weakness or baser impulses.

• A very basic sense of emotional RELATIONSHIP to at least one other character.

  • Even better: a NEED from another character!

    • Even better: a thwarted need!!

Take five minutes either at the start of the campaign, or at any time later, to make sure you can answer all of these with just a quick phrase or even a single word.

If your game and its characters all have these elements, you have everything you need to start making any scene throughout the rest of your campaign without returning to this initial drawing board.

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Now we have to get started!!!! So… We need to start a procedure for making the scene! We need to SET THE SCENE! I personally think this starts with a Dramatic Action: What is the FOCUS CHARACTER doing to take direct ACTION against the current challenge, perhaps related to their ROLE?

This is the first question not because this action is the focus of the scene, but because the rest of our stage-setting questions like “Where are we?” and “Who are we with?” all flow from out from “What is our central character here trying to get done?” Which is a very different question than “What is this scene really about?” Another thing is that the question is immersive, and doesn’t cross The Line into territory like “what greater struggle is your character going through?”

But all of that is for next time.

I’ve got tons of other considerations:

• Can this be done in a single format that encompasses all scene types? Or do you need to break it into different, more modular scene types, like one process for a Resist the Quest scene and different one for Frenemy Confrontation.

• What is the role of people not in the scene? What kind of stuff can we give them to do to deputize them as a cast of co-directors and facilitators?

• What about other little tools, like having a focus object for a scene? Are these essential, or worked in as optional pieces?

• How do you determine when a scene ends? Can you do it with maybe scene enders or prompt questions or inflection points? How do you put those in a flowchart? How do you know when you’ve given a scene enough room?

I would love to get your thoughts and inputs on this, leave them in the comments.

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Otherwise, I just played a game yesterday of In This World, a game that I love! This time we used “Street Racing” as a subject area, which led to lots of laughs, and lots of creative challenges. Worlds generated included a Miyazaki-esque anime world where high school graduation is determined by street races, and a Westworld-like therapy theme park world where Street Racing is a cathartic narrative exercise. Lots of thoughts, might blog them separately.

‘Til next time!