This is a very thoughtful article. As a player, performer and teacher of improv comedy, ending the scene remains the hardest part of improv. In narrative RPGs starting and ending the scenes are both challenging.
The concept of plateaus may be helpful. When the players feel like they are no longer advancing the story the narrative scene has hit a plateau. In an RPG scene plateaus can be detected by boredom, distraction or frustration. [insert excellent example here].
A plateau indicates the exploration has run out of creative juice for the scene members. The routine needs to be interrupted. This interruption can be a hot new idea or by ending the scene.
The biggest enemy of ending a scene is expecting a punch line or pretty narrative bow. Scenes can just "end." This might be a case of not letting perfect get in the way of a literal done.
I think the trouble of switching from a classic TTRPG structure to a narrative structure is that D&D players are thinking about what happens NEXT. The most absolutely difficult thing for me when I started GMing PbtA games was hard cutting. I still think I struggle with skipping straight into the next most interesting scene, as opposed to the literal Next Thing That Happens. And so when you say "feel free to end it," the biggest barrier for us is like "End what? We're just continuing until we get to the NEXT THING."
This is why its great to have a person (rotating/random) be a de facto “director”, in the sense that many times even an arbitrary “cut!” Allows energy to build and a storyline and tension to emerge without the players “thinking” about it. Like a collage, the overall sequence and juxtaposition create its own meaning. Ending the scene works just as well with a timer that goes off at various durations.
Yes, I gotta say, the biggest aid here in "Follow" as a game is the idea that everyone else at the table is deputized to come up with in-scene consequences from OUTSIDE the scene. If I were to write a little zine of scene procedures, it would include a little set of "actions" or "prompts" or "ingredients" that other non-actors in that scene could throw in as they pleased.
Thinking more and more about a scene as a "collage." A collage of what? Reactions? Motivations? Hmmm...
When i was doing more satirical clown and devised physical theater, everything was on the table in terms of storytelling including “meta” actions, genre changes, you name it, many various levels of scale and intensity.
And more dramatic improv acting is in some ways harder, or at least requires a level of listening many in comedy arent attuning towards as much (the masters are though)
(TL;DR - RPGs generally get a bit muddled when it comes to scenes, as they sometimes use the term but don't define what they mean. In games where players frame scenes, I find it really helps to know what my character wants from a scene.)
Whoa, holy shit, ok you've been documenting this problem for a LONG TIME! I'm so glad that you've found so many places and other games that also ask you to have "scenes" but don't really tell you what's going on there. Why is this is ubiquitous and pernicious!? Also, you make me realize that, throughout this project, I haven't defined a scene yet for my own purposes!
I have one huge question, and I think it's a vital one: When you say that players should ask "What do I want" out of this scene, do you mean CHARACTERS should have a want or motivation, or PLAYERS should be asking this? If the former, I agree, and am working on this. If the LATTER... I have thoughts.
Sorry for the delay in replying - I don't check out substack all that often! Thanks for the kind words about my blog.
I've no idea why the lack of scene definition is so ubiquitous. I guess it's because "everyone knows" what scene means - even though some games use it in a very specific way.
And "What do I want?" is my character's desire. (Although a player's perspective might also be interesting, I've not thought about that.)
Haha, it's ok, I'm glad you got back anyhow! As you might have spotted, I've written a LOT about scenes since. I wonder what you might think of it all!
I'm enjoying what you're writing (although it's a little bit fiddly for my liking - I'm a simple soul at heart). And trying to cram dramatic scenes into a a non-dramatic game sounds like hard work.
Interesting! Yes, I did end up creating something fairly... involved? I would check out the last two posts, which really distil the entire process down into
1) A single flowchart for people in the scene to follow, all on one page.
2) A card full of prompts for people off-screen to use to interject more drama and such.
You're not wrong that it takes some getting used to, but in my recent experience running it, players who have gone through it 3-5 times basically start doing it intuitively and reference the page less and less.
I'm surprised you believe that working Dramatic Scenes into a non-dramatic game sounds like work!! You think??
Another interesting comment from the RPGnet player's thread "(some players) are not necessarily worried about their skills, but how the other players will react."
This was one of their first game conventions, so this may have been a factor as well. Not a lack of skill, but fear of the reaction to what they suggested.
Hey Christopher!! I saw your Reddit post earlier today, and thought "Oh shit, ok, this guy is cooking on the same questions here." And it's very cool to see that you're encountering similar stuff in your playtests!
I love what you're doing with Tableau! It seems really interesting and totally ambitious, I'd love to see it play out. Lots of info in a very dense format! I'll have to dig in over the next couple of days, I'm gonna be taking a look at several games that attempt to handle scenes, including Follow, yours, and Orbital, among others. Thanks so much for posting, dude, I'll take a closer look!
And I think this player who you're quoting isn't totally wrong. I think there is a way of asking players to do too much framing of their own scenes -- for me, FOCUS characters should come up with their central action, but their challenges, questions, and provocative choices should perhaps be prompted by either other characters in the scene or, better yet, perhaps other players who AREN'T in the current scene.
It's probably bad form, but I quote here from a note I wrote on this platform a few days ago: "The fewer the prescriptive rules, the larger are the number of possibilities that can be handled by them. From this it follows that what takes time and experience to learn might not be the rules themselves, but the ‘best’ way to implement them. Chess is a useful analogy here. The number of rules in chess would fill a couple of pages at most and one can ‘learn chess’ in half an hour on a wet Tuesday afternooon. But I don’t think we would wish to say that someone who has ‘learnt chess’ in that they understand the rules has ‘learnt how to play chess’ in any sense that really matters."
Most of us - quite rightly - want to expand the circle of play and players; we want the hobby to be welcoming and positive and productive. Great. Moreover, we probably all agree that play styles and preferences are just a bunch of subjective opinions. However, within those preferences, there do tend to be more or less 'objective' ways successfully to instantiate the goals implicit in them. There may be people - inexperienced, untutored and unlearned - who possess to a savantic degree whatever skills or techniques or habits allow improvisational RPGs to flourish but, personally, I've never met one.
To the extent that I have acquired any such capacity, it's taken 40+ years and has featured roughly 20% abstract learning and 80% practice. Perhaps we don't like the idea that, in a hobby that anyone can play and enjoy, there will be for almost all of us a learning curve, a process of improvement. This thought perhaps sits uncomfortably with the otherwise more or less non-existent barriers to entry. To be clear, I'm not talking about gate-keeping of others; I'm referring to self-imposed hesitancy of the kind that anyone with an ounce of curiosity about the hobby (or any other art, for that matter) should have.
1. Totally fine form to use relevant stuff you've already written again. I'd rather you do it than not!
2. I like your chess analogy, but here's my beef with it: If I sit down to play chess, with only a casual perusal of the rules, I will probably not fail to "instantiate the goals implicit in chess." I might play unskillfully, but I will not, at the end, say "I'm not sure what I was supposed to be DOING there," which is a sentence I've heard said in storytelling games in which things like "play culture" are supposed to make up for the text's clarity.
3. When you say "Perhaps we don't like the idea that, in a hobby that anyone can play and enjoy, there will be for almost all of us a learning curve, a process of improvement. This thought perhaps sits uncomfortably with the otherwise more or less non-existent barriers to entry." I am not uncomfortable with this, I'm glad you said it. I like knowing what people believe. I think I believe it, too. I just wonder what more could be done to teach this particular skill. Surely there's something! Perhaps not, though!
I agree that the chess analogy has its limitations and can't safely be stretched much beyond the simple dichotomy of 'small number of rules' versus 'time required to do it well' and you identify a clear difference between chess and TTRPGs that is meaningful.
That said, I do think that - at the risk of torturing my analogy still further - one can, as a complete novice, play an entirely 'rational' game of chess (in the sense that one understand what one is doing and why, up to a point) and even win the game, but it will be a 'bad' game of chess. Someone who has been playing chess for decades and is a serious student of the game will be able to look at a novice's move and say 'that is sub-optimal' even if the novice doesn't grasp why this is so or why another move would be 'better'. In other words, while I accept the point about the awareness of the sense of 'doing it wrong' being different from the objective reality of 'playing badly', I think that the former is an awareness of the latter which is a relevant concern as far as symptom is concerned, but not treatment.
Of course, this is only the case if we can argue (as I think I would) that there is something like an objective standard of 'good' and 'bad' ways to improvise in a rules-lite RPG just as there are 'good' and 'bad' moves in chess. But this, I think, is implicit in your post, which assumes at least some sort of capacity to 'get better'. One can debate what 'better' looks like, but the presumption already exists within the term itself of a move towards something else that is more useful/appealing/effective/whatever.
On the question of what one does to improve, I'm afraid I am going to be as unhelpful and evasive as I was in my previous comment and decline to offer any declarative statement. This is in part because this format of textual exchange is inadequate to the task. And this for the related reason that - as I am quite certain you know - it is not a 'recipe' or a 'list' or a 'formula' but rather a Rube Goldberg machine of ludicrous complexity. For me to offer some crass '5 Rules for Great Improvising' is the sort of discourse around the hobby that I despair of (not that I am suggesting that this is what you were looking for).
It feels 'gate-keepery' to say this because the popularity of the hobby - particularly over the last five years or so - has been built on the (largely true) assumption that there is no 'right way to play'. This is an incomplete sentiment which could, I think, be more accurately rendered as 'Play however you want, but some forms of fun are 'plug and play' while others are more complex'. This manages, I hope, to underscore my belief that these things are just different, not objectively hierarchical, though I accept it runs up against the cultural presumption that 'complex = clever = better'.
This is a very thoughtful article. As a player, performer and teacher of improv comedy, ending the scene remains the hardest part of improv. In narrative RPGs starting and ending the scenes are both challenging.
The concept of plateaus may be helpful. When the players feel like they are no longer advancing the story the narrative scene has hit a plateau. In an RPG scene plateaus can be detected by boredom, distraction or frustration. [insert excellent example here].
A plateau indicates the exploration has run out of creative juice for the scene members. The routine needs to be interrupted. This interruption can be a hot new idea or by ending the scene.
The biggest enemy of ending a scene is expecting a punch line or pretty narrative bow. Scenes can just "end." This might be a case of not letting perfect get in the way of a literal done.
I think the trouble of switching from a classic TTRPG structure to a narrative structure is that D&D players are thinking about what happens NEXT. The most absolutely difficult thing for me when I started GMing PbtA games was hard cutting. I still think I struggle with skipping straight into the next most interesting scene, as opposed to the literal Next Thing That Happens. And so when you say "feel free to end it," the biggest barrier for us is like "End what? We're just continuing until we get to the NEXT THING."
This is why its great to have a person (rotating/random) be a de facto “director”, in the sense that many times even an arbitrary “cut!” Allows energy to build and a storyline and tension to emerge without the players “thinking” about it. Like a collage, the overall sequence and juxtaposition create its own meaning. Ending the scene works just as well with a timer that goes off at various durations.
Yes, I gotta say, the biggest aid here in "Follow" as a game is the idea that everyone else at the table is deputized to come up with in-scene consequences from OUTSIDE the scene. If I were to write a little zine of scene procedures, it would include a little set of "actions" or "prompts" or "ingredients" that other non-actors in that scene could throw in as they pleased.
Thinking more and more about a scene as a "collage." A collage of what? Reactions? Motivations? Hmmm...
When i was doing more satirical clown and devised physical theater, everything was on the table in terms of storytelling including “meta” actions, genre changes, you name it, many various levels of scale and intensity.
And more dramatic improv acting is in some ways harder, or at least requires a level of listening many in comedy arent attuning towards as much (the masters are though)
Yes, scenes as collage, 100%
I've had a few thoughts about scenes in RPGs recently, and your post prompted me to reflect a bit more on them. This is where I ended: https://fourlettersatrandom.blogspot.com/2024/09/scenes-in-rpgs.html
(TL;DR - RPGs generally get a bit muddled when it comes to scenes, as they sometimes use the term but don't define what they mean. In games where players frame scenes, I find it really helps to know what my character wants from a scene.)
I'm enjoying your followup posts as well.
Whoa, holy shit, ok you've been documenting this problem for a LONG TIME! I'm so glad that you've found so many places and other games that also ask you to have "scenes" but don't really tell you what's going on there. Why is this is ubiquitous and pernicious!? Also, you make me realize that, throughout this project, I haven't defined a scene yet for my own purposes!
I have one huge question, and I think it's a vital one: When you say that players should ask "What do I want" out of this scene, do you mean CHARACTERS should have a want or motivation, or PLAYERS should be asking this? If the former, I agree, and am working on this. If the LATTER... I have thoughts.
Thank you for pointing me to your blog!
Sorry for the delay in replying - I don't check out substack all that often! Thanks for the kind words about my blog.
I've no idea why the lack of scene definition is so ubiquitous. I guess it's because "everyone knows" what scene means - even though some games use it in a very specific way.
And "What do I want?" is my character's desire. (Although a player's perspective might also be interesting, I've not thought about that.)
Haha, it's ok, I'm glad you got back anyhow! As you might have spotted, I've written a LOT about scenes since. I wonder what you might think of it all!
I'm enjoying what you're writing (although it's a little bit fiddly for my liking - I'm a simple soul at heart). And trying to cram dramatic scenes into a a non-dramatic game sounds like hard work.
Interesting! Yes, I did end up creating something fairly... involved? I would check out the last two posts, which really distil the entire process down into
1) A single flowchart for people in the scene to follow, all on one page.
2) A card full of prompts for people off-screen to use to interject more drama and such.
You're not wrong that it takes some getting used to, but in my recent experience running it, players who have gone through it 3-5 times basically start doing it intuitively and reference the page less and less.
I'm surprised you believe that working Dramatic Scenes into a non-dramatic game sounds like work!! You think??
Another interesting comment from the RPGnet player's thread "(some players) are not necessarily worried about their skills, but how the other players will react."
This was one of their first game conventions, so this may have been a factor as well. Not a lack of skill, but fear of the reaction to what they suggested.
In a thread on RPGnet https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/did-you-once-hate-to-set-scenes-why-how-did-you-overcome-it.922269/ about this topic from the player perspective, there was an interesting quote:
> As a player, I am looking to explore the scenario/setting and have an immersive experience.
> For me, being required to set the scene or otherwise take on an authorial stance detracts from (or even prevents) that.
I wonder how much with your players they just don't want to break their immersive context, as opposed to theatre/improv experience?
-- Christopher Allen
Hey Christopher!! I saw your Reddit post earlier today, and thought "Oh shit, ok, this guy is cooking on the same questions here." And it's very cool to see that you're encountering similar stuff in your playtests!
I love what you're doing with Tableau! It seems really interesting and totally ambitious, I'd love to see it play out. Lots of info in a very dense format! I'll have to dig in over the next couple of days, I'm gonna be taking a look at several games that attempt to handle scenes, including Follow, yours, and Orbital, among others. Thanks so much for posting, dude, I'll take a closer look!
And I think this player who you're quoting isn't totally wrong. I think there is a way of asking players to do too much framing of their own scenes -- for me, FOCUS characters should come up with their central action, but their challenges, questions, and provocative choices should perhaps be prompted by either other characters in the scene or, better yet, perhaps other players who AREN'T in the current scene.
Thinking a lot about this.
Sorry I missed your September comment via Substack. I’m at ChristopherA@DyversHands.com.
I've started parallel threads related to this topic both on r/gmless https://www.reddit.com/r/gmless/comments/1f89wxu/new_tableau_accelerated_core_rules_and_explore/ and on RPGnet https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/my-experience-with-teaching-scene-setting-in-recent-tableau-playtests.922267/
It's probably bad form, but I quote here from a note I wrote on this platform a few days ago: "The fewer the prescriptive rules, the larger are the number of possibilities that can be handled by them. From this it follows that what takes time and experience to learn might not be the rules themselves, but the ‘best’ way to implement them. Chess is a useful analogy here. The number of rules in chess would fill a couple of pages at most and one can ‘learn chess’ in half an hour on a wet Tuesday afternooon. But I don’t think we would wish to say that someone who has ‘learnt chess’ in that they understand the rules has ‘learnt how to play chess’ in any sense that really matters."
Most of us - quite rightly - want to expand the circle of play and players; we want the hobby to be welcoming and positive and productive. Great. Moreover, we probably all agree that play styles and preferences are just a bunch of subjective opinions. However, within those preferences, there do tend to be more or less 'objective' ways successfully to instantiate the goals implicit in them. There may be people - inexperienced, untutored and unlearned - who possess to a savantic degree whatever skills or techniques or habits allow improvisational RPGs to flourish but, personally, I've never met one.
To the extent that I have acquired any such capacity, it's taken 40+ years and has featured roughly 20% abstract learning and 80% practice. Perhaps we don't like the idea that, in a hobby that anyone can play and enjoy, there will be for almost all of us a learning curve, a process of improvement. This thought perhaps sits uncomfortably with the otherwise more or less non-existent barriers to entry. To be clear, I'm not talking about gate-keeping of others; I'm referring to self-imposed hesitancy of the kind that anyone with an ounce of curiosity about the hobby (or any other art, for that matter) should have.
1. Totally fine form to use relevant stuff you've already written again. I'd rather you do it than not!
2. I like your chess analogy, but here's my beef with it: If I sit down to play chess, with only a casual perusal of the rules, I will probably not fail to "instantiate the goals implicit in chess." I might play unskillfully, but I will not, at the end, say "I'm not sure what I was supposed to be DOING there," which is a sentence I've heard said in storytelling games in which things like "play culture" are supposed to make up for the text's clarity.
3. When you say "Perhaps we don't like the idea that, in a hobby that anyone can play and enjoy, there will be for almost all of us a learning curve, a process of improvement. This thought perhaps sits uncomfortably with the otherwise more or less non-existent barriers to entry." I am not uncomfortable with this, I'm glad you said it. I like knowing what people believe. I think I believe it, too. I just wonder what more could be done to teach this particular skill. Surely there's something! Perhaps not, though!
I agree that the chess analogy has its limitations and can't safely be stretched much beyond the simple dichotomy of 'small number of rules' versus 'time required to do it well' and you identify a clear difference between chess and TTRPGs that is meaningful.
That said, I do think that - at the risk of torturing my analogy still further - one can, as a complete novice, play an entirely 'rational' game of chess (in the sense that one understand what one is doing and why, up to a point) and even win the game, but it will be a 'bad' game of chess. Someone who has been playing chess for decades and is a serious student of the game will be able to look at a novice's move and say 'that is sub-optimal' even if the novice doesn't grasp why this is so or why another move would be 'better'. In other words, while I accept the point about the awareness of the sense of 'doing it wrong' being different from the objective reality of 'playing badly', I think that the former is an awareness of the latter which is a relevant concern as far as symptom is concerned, but not treatment.
Of course, this is only the case if we can argue (as I think I would) that there is something like an objective standard of 'good' and 'bad' ways to improvise in a rules-lite RPG just as there are 'good' and 'bad' moves in chess. But this, I think, is implicit in your post, which assumes at least some sort of capacity to 'get better'. One can debate what 'better' looks like, but the presumption already exists within the term itself of a move towards something else that is more useful/appealing/effective/whatever.
On the question of what one does to improve, I'm afraid I am going to be as unhelpful and evasive as I was in my previous comment and decline to offer any declarative statement. This is in part because this format of textual exchange is inadequate to the task. And this for the related reason that - as I am quite certain you know - it is not a 'recipe' or a 'list' or a 'formula' but rather a Rube Goldberg machine of ludicrous complexity. For me to offer some crass '5 Rules for Great Improvising' is the sort of discourse around the hobby that I despair of (not that I am suggesting that this is what you were looking for).
It feels 'gate-keepery' to say this because the popularity of the hobby - particularly over the last five years or so - has been built on the (largely true) assumption that there is no 'right way to play'. This is an incomplete sentiment which could, I think, be more accurately rendered as 'Play however you want, but some forms of fun are 'plug and play' while others are more complex'. This manages, I hope, to underscore my belief that these things are just different, not objectively hierarchical, though I accept it runs up against the cultural presumption that 'complex = clever = better'.