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When you’re playing roleplay-heavy D&D, what does a scene look like? Since the game doesn’t give you much in the way of tools for doing so, are you framing scenes intentionally or just kind of letting them happen? And if the latter, is that serving you well?
You very well might be, but I’ve become obsessed lately with how we frame scenes in roleplaying games, and today I want to talk about a mechanic that does so very firmly: spotlight scenes, a procedure in which each player in the game gets a turn to say what they want the next scene to be.
To do that, I’m joined by Mo Turkington, designer of many great structured freeform larps including the well-lauded Rosenstrasse and her latest release Lumberjills. We get into the history of spotlight scenes, the pros and cons of including rules for framing and ending scenes in your game, and how even a mechanic like this one that feels so structural and procedural, when used int he right context, can have a beautiful, thematically resonant message in it about agency and self-actualization.
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Further Reading
Lumberjills by Moyra Turkington
I Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil Edland
Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo
Rosenstrasse by Moyra Turkington and Jessica Hammer
Montsegur 1244 by Frederik J. Jensen
Red Carnations on a Black Grave by Catherine Ramen and Juan Ochoa
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Moyra’s games on itch
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take one mechanic, stand back, and shout timber! My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co host today is Moyra Turkington.
So here's something I've been thinking about lately. When you're playing roleplay heavy Dungeons and Dragons, what does a scene look like? You know what I mean by a scene, like, we shop for heist supplies, or we sneak into the castle, or we accuse the king in court. In D& D, because there aren't any rules for deciding when a scene starts and ends, I've found that it's really hard to skip anything. We can't just say, I buy new heist supplies. We have to meet the shopkeep, because what if something interesting happens while we're there? We can't just skip the three months of travel from our small town to the big city, because what if something happens along the way?
And, that could be totally fine. In a dungeon crawl, where exploration is the point, and the environment is bounded, game that's about that three months of travel with tools to make it interesting, or with a skilled table that just knows how to meet that shopkeeper and move on quickly if nothing's happening, you can have a great time without any kind of tools for framing scenes.
But at tables where I haven't been intentional about this, I've found you can end up almost pressured into a style of play that's glacial and directionless. Compare that to a "standard" LARP. The game hard frames one big scene, and then the LARP starts, and then we're in that scene until the runtime is over. It's a compelling and effective framework, but it's also very limited. What about trying to tell a story that takes place over the course of days or years?
So I've become obsessed with this idea of how scenes get framed in role playing games. And today, I want to talk about a mechanic that does so with a very firm hand. Spotlight scenes. A procedure in which each player in the game gets a turn to say what they want the next scene to be. And to do that, I'm joined by Mo Turkington. Like a lot of my co hosts in this LARP miniseries, Mo's got a foot in both the tabletop story game world and in the Nordic larpr scene.
And she's designed a whole bunch of structured free form LARPs, including her new release, Lumberjills, a game about women during World War II who took to the forests of Scotland to chop down trees there for the war effort. We get into the history of spotlight scenes, in particular the LARP I Say a Little Prayer that Mo first borrowed this mechanic from, the history of the Lumberjills themselves, the pros and cons of including rules for framing and ending scenes in your game at all, and how even a mechanic like this, one that feels so structural and so procedural when used in the right context, can still have a beautifully thematically resonant message in it about agency and self actualization. Mechanics are so fucking cool.
So let's get into it. Here is Mo Turkington with Spotlight Scenes.
Mo, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder.
Moyra: Thank you for having me! It's a while since I've been on a, podcast, so I hope I do well.
Sam: so I wanted to start with you know, normally when I'm bringing people onto this show, like I'm so embedded in the tabletop scene that I know the people pretty well, and a lot of my listeners know the people pretty well, and I think you are not not in the tabletop scene, but I think you are better known in the LARP scene. And so I would love to hear sort of your background there, where you are coming from, what kind of context you're bringing into this.
Moyra: I'm one of those people that doesn't put hard delineations between different genres of games, and in fact I kind of tend to try and melt the delineations between different types of games. And so I would say to you, I've, I've probably never not been involved in LARP because I see, you know, childhood games and playing pretend and tabletop games as an extension of LARP, especially the way I play them, which is generally pretty emotional.
But um, also I have a theatre background and so my, I guess, formal introduction to something that we would now consider a LARP, but we didn't have that language for it was a, theater piece that was a improv theater soap opera about a dystopian future where I acted on stage and we did improv gaming, essentially, but for a live audience that came back week after week to see the next installment. And so my style of actual play, even sitting in a tabletop game around the table, tends to be pretty actorly, I guess, is probably the best way of putting it.
But historically I worked with those kind of LARPs, I did the Vampire LARPs in the 90s. I've also extensively been involved in tabletop. I played D& D as a kid. Paranoia as a teen. I came to Vampire and especially Changelings, and I spent extensive times on Mushes in the 90s and early aughts.
Sam: God, mushes. I did a, I did a, little mushing briefly when I was far too young for it.
Moyra: it's, so did I, it's a, it's a, it's a lost art too, right? Like, it's a, it's an interesting way in the way that we cross over role playing games. And fiction in that we, we spend lots of time acting out in expressive ways that we don't get to do at a tabletop table or in a LARP for that matter.
Sam: Now that I'm thinking about it. I think what is a mush? I'm thinking maybe I meant a MUD.
Moyra: A MUD and a MUSH are very similar things, so I played both. MUDs were And there's going to be a purist out there that are going to tell me that I'm wrong, but MUDs were, in my experience, more D& D like experiences where there was a lot of coding that gave you, that acted in the place of GM, essentially.
So you would walk into a room and all of a sudden something would attack you, you would go do that, but there would be like lots of casual play back in the tavern. Right?
Sam: Yeah, and this is like a digital experience right like a
Moyra: it's a totally digital experience and mushes are entirely a digital experience. very similar but they were more open worlded. You wandered around them. You did to wander around a map, but more wandering around the map had to do with interaction with other people in role play than it had to interacting with the world as it was.
And mushes were cool because you could code your entire space. Like you could add to the map. And you developed locality in a weird kind of way. So like if you were from this neighborhood you interacted with the people in this neighborhood, but you could go to other people.
So they were very very popular from about 95 to about 2002 There is still mushers out there. You can go and have fun with them But yeah, we played a lot
Sam: that episode next.
Moyra: Yeah
Sam: Yeah
Moyra: So I did a lot of those I did a bunch of tabletop writing with the game Tribate that most people don't remember these days. But back in the day in the early part of the century. and then I came back to LARP with a vengeance in 2011, 2012. I joined back in with Nordic LARP, which is the big 360 blockbuster kind of experiences and most specifically with the big blockbuster Nordic experiences that are around serious and historical games.
And so my very first exposure to that was Mad About the Boy, which was a big three day LARP adaptation of Y the Last Man, and basically was about dystopian society where we believe all of the men of the world have died out and we're trying to decide how to face the future. It was a intensive game and it brought me right back to all my theatre roots. And at that time there was also Fastival and an American Freeform scene that were putting up. But I started to design very quickly after that.
So I've been in the space for Ever, but also in the design space of like, probably 12, 13 years at this point.
Sam: Yeah. So I'm really excited to talk to you though about scene framing and the particular scene framing mechanic.
I find scene framing to be something so important, underrated, and under proceduralized in tabletop RPGs, in the part of the hobby that I run in, at least.
And I want to start with an example, because that's what I like to do. So, asked you about this topic, and you brought in the spotlight procedure. Do you want to first talk about like, what is this procedure and how it works?
Moyra: So the procedure is a way to frame a scene with the cooperation between the person who's running the game and the player who's being spotlighted. So we think about a spotlight like a person standing on stage with the spotlight directly on them. And that's exactly the energy of this mechanic, which is like, I'm gonna put you in the spotlight and let you tell me the terms of the kind of story that you want to tell right now.
So the first thing that the facilitator would do is just who's the scene going to be about? And what this does is define very clearly for everybody whose story we are talking about right now.
And then the next thing is the facilitator will turn to the player of that character and say we need a goal for the scene. And that goal should expose something about your character or develop something about your character it is about authoring something that we haven't seen on screen yet, right?
So that could be, I have a difficult history with my dad that is playing out in real time for here. I am really struggling with my sexuality and I want to understand what these dates are meaning to me.
This is putting the player in the driver's seat and it is asking the player to either direct the scene, so like either I know exactly what I want out of the scene or I have no idea what I want out of the scene and I need help discovering it. And then the director, and maybe all the other players at the table says, well, what about this? I really like this about your character. I saw you struggling with this. Is that a good question? And eventually a goal gets formulated and it happens pretty quickly.
So once you have the goal, then we're like, okay, so what's the scene that's going to make that goal come to life? So who's going to be in the scene and this is specifically important because then everybody else in the game acts as a support vehicle for the support scene.
So it might be that I want to conjure up an NPC like there's a foreman here who's a misogynistic jerk who doesn't think I can do it and he's been condescending and I want to see the moment where he realizes that I'm just as good as any lumberjack. So that kind of thing.
And then you you say, who's going to help you with that scene? So I need that foreman. And Sam, I want you to play that foreman for me. That's, that's the character. So your whole goal then, is you know it's my scene, is you're trying to hit those notes for me and get me emotionally there.
And so then now you're setting the scene, right? And then you go in and you play it. And everybody knows what they're doing. Everybody knows what you're trying to do. Everybody's feeding directly into the IV of what you're looking for, and you've already said what the goal is.
So it's that. Which character are you doing it? What is the goal that they're playing? Who's going to help you get there? Tell them what you need from them and then set the scene and play it.
Sam: Perfect. Okay. So did this mechanic come from? Like, in some ways I feel like this is like a practice that's probably as old as like storytelling itself of like going around and trading off who's telling a story, but like in this context of LARP, can you tell me a little bit about the history of this mechanic and like where you first encountered it?
Moyra: I was introduced, So I like to talk about where mechanics came from, especially in the Nordic scene because it's so organic, as a design genealogy. So, I learned this mechanic through the Nordic scene. I specifically learned it through I Say a Little Prayer, which is a game that was premiered at Fastival and it's by a designer named Tor Kjetil Edland, who wrote, well, one of the designers of the big Nordic LARP blockbuster Just a Little Loving, which you might have heard about.
And it is, I Say a Little Prayer, is kind of like a mini version or an accessible short form version of the Big Lung LARP. And so it explores the AIDS epidemic and the way that people, communities had to come together during the AIDS epidemic and the environment of neglect that was happening. And so how communities face death.
And in it, it was used specifically to get to player reactions to to scenes and to kind of create what they in the Nordic scene would call kind of black box techniques, which was allow you to highlight something about your character.
And the cool thing about it is it's kind of a cinematic take of things, right? Which is like, it doesn't have to be in the linear chronological context of the game that you're playing. You could do it as a flash backwards, or a flash forward, like I'm worrying about something that's happening in the future and now we're going to play out the scene that's happening in my mind.
Or it could be that person who just died, I want to play a scene with them, reckoning with the moment that I'm having right now. Or it could be like, I just had this interaction, and I want to do this other interaction that could be disruptive to the game, but it's a critical thing for my character to explore.
So I, I Say a Little Prayer, put this in, but I Say a Little Prayer I do not believe it's the first game that did this. It came, I believe, out of the Nordic jeepform environment, but it could have origins beyond that. That's why I tend to go to genealogy. I like, where did I learn this? from versus where did it come from? Also because each person who touches it and uses it, uses it in a slightly different way and evolves the formation of that mechanic. Right?
So it was incredibly powerful in, I love, I say a little prayer. I think I am the person outside of the designer who has run it most in the world, in the world. And it's, it's incredibly powerful.
And I think for me, one of the reasons why this technique hits so hard is I come from a theatre background, and so I've got a background in dramaturgy, right? So, and that's exactly what this is. It's just like, rather than being a GM and telling you what you're gonna do, I'm going to step out and say, I'm going to facilitate you understanding where your character needs to go, and I'm going to do that with your input, not with mine. How do we make sense, or how do we make a narrative of how your character feels? Or what your character desires, or what your character wants, or what your character is reacting to.
And so that's where that hits hit hard for me. It's a beautiful, wonderful game. I highly recommend everybody play it.
So then it was a natural inheritance to go into my game Lumberjills, which is the newest game that is part of my Warbird series, which is a series of games about women on the front line of history. So the majority of these games have been women's contributions and experiences in World War II. But it's also kind of grown beyond that. So it's like little forgotten histories where women had more of an impact than we tend to think of them, and it's kind of shining a spotlight on their experiences to bring that history to life.
Lumberjill specifically is about the women of the Women's Timber Corps and the Forests of Scotland. So British women who volunteered for service during World War II who went to the woods of Scotland to replace lumberjacks. Which is a kind of a daunting thought, right? If you're a 17 year old girl in London and you've never left London, going out to the woods in Scotland to chop down forests are fascinating.
And wood for the war effort was massive need and so they needed a lot of these women to go and replace lumberjacks. And they also, at the same time, imported a lot of lumberjacks from a number of different places, but the majority of them came from Canada. And I am a Canadian, so that, that also kind of hit me hard.
And when I read about the Lumberjills experience more than a decade ago the thing that struck me about the first party narratives, so the interviews with the Lumberjills, was they said like three things that were part of their experience. They were like, I didn't realize what I was signing up for and all of a sudden I was in the middle of this forest and I was cutting down ten ton trees. And I didn't think I could do it and I learned very quickly that I could, that I was far more physically competent than I'd ever dreamed I could be. Everybody had already told me I was a girl and shouldn't be doing this kind of work. People mocked me on my way and all of a sudden I was doing this work.
And then the next thing they talked about often, they talked about their friendships. They talked about all the people who became lifelong friends that they had met over the course of it. All of these women had this massively intensive experience together and stayed in touch.
Um, And, the third major thing was, it made them think about what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Because it broke so many ideas about who they were and what they should do, it opened the question of what could I be differently in the world?
And then as a side note, one of the other things they always mentioned was there were these dances so that you would be six days a week, you'd be chopping down trees, getting grubby in the forest, going to bed exhausted, and then one day a week you would pile into the back of a big old pick up truck and go to a dance. And because there were so many lumberjacks from all over the place, didn't matter who you were or how you had considered yourself as attractive beforehand, you were the hottest commodity. Your dance card would never not be full.
And that they felt even in the midst of doing this very masculine work, they felt loved and desired and attractive more than they ever had in their entire lives.
Sam: Listeners will not be able to appreciate the sort of coy look that you gave when you first said they felt uh, it was yeah, totally, totally
Moyra: And so that, right there, that nexus birthed the whole game for me. It's a game, it's a romance game. But it also like talks about who do you want to be, right? Who are you gonna be? Everything that everybody's ever told you were your limitations are no longer your limitations. You've broken through that reality. You could do anything with your life. You could love anybody that you wanted to. You could be anything that you wanted to. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do? Who do you want to love? How do you want to do that?
And so the game requires players to really seize their agency, right? To really feel the game and feel the way that the game changes them or opens them up to the narrative. And then also make decisions.
And sometimes, especially coming from a lot of short form games like this, or what we would call Structured Freeform LARPs they're very attractive to players who are curious about LARP but come from tabletop backgrounds and they're often players, who are used to playing characters where they sit at the mercy of the GM so that the GM will drive their story. And it's often hard to suddenly have someone turn to you and say, so you can have anything here, what do you want to do? Like, that's a, unusual space to be in.
And even the other way, if you're a big 360 LARPer, you're used to being dropped into a three day event. You might get some questions early on, but then you just play as a person for that entire time.
So the spotlight scene is a natural mechanic for this game because it allows the facilitator, who is more of a director than a GM, to say to the player, okay, now we're going to focus on your, we're going to zoom in on your story right now, and act as a dramaturg to help that player shape the story that they're going to do in the same way that their lumber Jill is choosing their future.
Sam: That is so cool. The thing that immediately stood out to me when I read I say a little prayer and lumberjills was how both have quite a lot of very strict structure Before you ever get to the spotlight scenes.
Like in lumberjills you're showing up and you're doing Sawing scenes where you have a partner and you're sawing trees down and there's a whole like dance kind of thing that you're doing there while you do that and then you're going to the dances and those are regimentally structured around like who you are Dancing with and what that looks like and so forth.
And it's only once you've done a couple of rounds of those that you finally open up the choice of okay now here's a blank page; do whatever you want with it. And My experience with LARP and with story games is that, like, it's only because of all that structure that I feel equipped to handle that much freedom once I get to it.
And the fact that, as you just described, like, that is also a thematic and a character moment, not just sort of a player moment, that the characters in the game have also, through this environment and context, become equipped to think about that and do that is really cool. That is so
Moyra: and it, and it really, and people sometimes do struggle a little bit with it because they, it's hard thing to do, but also the characters in the space are struggling with it because they're in a new world that never asked them before what they wanted. And I specifically wrote this game to be accessible to tabletop gamers and also to be accessible...
I , I'm not a comfortable GM in a tabletop environment. I don't like it, hate it in fact being a gm. But being a facilitator of a larp? Oh yeah, hands down will do it all day long because it shifts me from the GM position of having to create the story, deal with all the uncertainty, pull people into the same. It's a very different thing than acting as the dramaturg in the course of a structured freeform.
And so I really wanted people to be able to pick up this game and run it, that's an important piece of the way that I design. To be able to pick it up, run it, have the game do most of the work for them, give them the structure they need to do it, and also to help players develop skills they never really had the chance to develop before.
Uh, Which I really, I really like too. Cause I feel like a lot of these structured freeform games have a lot of keys to do that with that my tabletop games never really afforded with. For the most part there are games that, that do stuff like this on, on a different edge cause there's no differentiation, right?
Heh, heh, heh,
Sam: Yeah. We've sort of touched on this, but I want to say it explicitly too, that it's, I think, beautiful that you many players coming into this game, like the Lumberjills, will have never been asked what they want out of this experience, or out of a lot of experiences in their lives. And it is really cool that you are asking the players that, not just asking the characters
Moyra: Yeah, and the game is structured, so this isn't the only mechanic in the game that does that specific thing. Like the sawing mechanics are what we would call somatic mechanics, they help your body understand the transition between I am way in over my head to I'm a competent lumberjill. And so they give you a piece of that.
The, Dancing mechanics and the, it's kind of like speed dating a little bit, but speed dance dating, I guess is a better way of putting it, where you get to flirt with a number of people who you pick based on their first impressions and you get to know them a little better and you make decisions about how you love them.
And part of the core of the game is around what I would call support play, which is you are in the driver's seat for the character that you are playing, you have a responsibility to other people at the players to support them in their own storytelling.
So, when you are dancing, other people who are your fellow Lumberjills in their own PCs are playing your NPCs who are romancing you. And their job, 1000%, is to woo you. Like, to woo you unabashedly. Like, the goal of being a dance partner in this game is to make you feel seen and loved and present a possibility of a future to the other person.
And so that's also a thing that we lack in a lot of role playing games, that we tend to test hard negative consequences, not open wild possibilities.
And the game opens wild possibilities that there are no wrong answers for. You don't get punished in Lumberjills for any choice that you make. You are, in fact, rewarded to follow them with all your heart.
And Lumberjills is a little bit, personally, as all designs, for all designers, teach themselves about the way they play and experience games. And Lumberjills, for me, taught me a lot about the things I felt lacking in a lot of role playing games, whether they were big larps or tabletop games. This big, open, wild possibility, this being in the driver's seat, the being free to pursue a possibility that isn't presented by the game necessarily but that comes directly out of my emotional interaction with it.
Sam: What a wonderful alternative framework for storytelling than conflict,
Moyra: Yes. Yes.
Sam: To the sense that there's conflict, it's like, what do you want? But as you say, like, Conflict implies like someone's getting hurt, I
Moyra: Yeah, I, literally, the game has a, so there's a set of principles in it that are in design genealogy from playing by the apocalypse games, right? Which are like, one of the principles of this game is that you never introduce conflict into somebody else's story. People could have conflict in their game, but they, like, I can say in my spotlight scene I want to have a drag out fight, or I want to have a brutal moment. But they bring it in, if they want it, because it's a desired thing.
It's not conflict, it's complication. Like, choosing between complication is its own conflict, but it's not interpersonal conflict. It's not conflict with the world, and it doesn't result ever in the idea of losing. It just results in the idea of moving forward differently.
Sam: That, your depiction of, like, expansiveness in your description there really hit me. Yeah.
Moyra: it's something we leaned, really, really hard into partially because that's the story of the Lumberjills too, right? Like that, that expansiveness is what they went through and I wanted players to feel in this microcosm the same way.
Sam: Right.
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So, I want to talk about scene framing as a structure for games, as opposed to what I think of as the, like, default Dungeons and Dragons thing where you sort of aren't allowed to skip any moment, because what if something happens in that moment?
And also, in contrast to what I think of as the standard LARP thing where it's sort of the run time begins and then we're in character and then the run time ends. It's sort of like one scene that gets framed.
Moyra: Yeah.
Sam: Like what do you see as the pros and the cons of a scene based game
Moyra: so scene based games , or we would call it structured, free form games. would allow you to tell a more tailored story. So rather than having the organic kind of sandbox y, playbook y way of being like, this is a big open world, go ahead and explore it, we'll give you conflict or challenge as it comes along and we'll see what story comes out of that. And we'll pursue story really hard, but we'll pursue story really hard based on the moment to moment interactions of how we do things.
And it really comes out into this idea of we're going to do a movie, we're going to do a series. We're going to do, I like to think of a lot of it, not, it's not media emulation, but it gives the same kind of satisfaction levels of like, if you put me into a sandbox y kind of role playing game, I will pursue all the different relationships and emotions and actions that happen. And also I tend to do that deeply. And so like when I play tabletop games that are ongoing games with the people that I normally play with, our games are long. Like we had a 10 year campaign of Unknown Armies at one point.
And we might not accomplish very much in the course of a short span of time. When you are dealing with stories that have an arcing narrative, freeform games, structured freeform games allow you to get through an arcing narrative together in a cohesive timeline. It gets everybody on the same page to understanding what they want, and it gives them a set of mechanics that help them do that in ways that they can't do when they're just kind of openly playing playing, if that makes sense.
And it also takes a lot of the weight off the GM to be like, I am the person in charge of making sure that everybody has this satisfying story. The game itself provides a structure for people to do it. So those are, those are like real core benefits to the way Structured Freeform works.
And so if you don't have the luxury of playing a 10 year game with your loved ones, or even a, you know, a 10 episode game with your loved ones. If because role playing games are so wide and expensive, and we have players in the European scene and in the American scene for us, and there's actually very few people locally for us, the vast majority of our, you know, favorite people to play with are like far away, and we only get to see them in short bursts. And so we don't have a luxury of those long times.
And so being able to feel like we've done this thing, we've told this full, broad story that was meaningful to us, that allowed us to access something that we hadn't done before that feels like a major event, it's not unlike going on a big trip with people to a thing. It feels like a big, broad, fuller experience when you have time constraints in that way.
And also, as someone who works a lot in serious games, like Lumberjills is a very lovely, love oriented, full possibilities games. But many of my games are also extremely serious games about very serious topics. Structured Freeform allows you to insert some control into the game to make sure that players don't have to be fearful about playing them. First of all, so how do you play a game about the Holocaust where player just is not afraid to start? Or more importantly, a director is not afraid to offer the game and because the structure of the game can help avert crisises that could happen in the game. And Structured Freeform allows a game structure to tell you who's responsible and what's allowed to happen at the table.
And so Structured Freeform often says who's responsible? The game is responsible. What's allowed? The game tells you what's allowed. And that allows you to have the freedom and comfort to be able to pursue really difficult things in short time frames, and gives you a set of procedures that says like, here's the box that is the safe box to explore this. If you don't want to hurt other people that you're playing with, or you don't want to create outcomes that you think are irresponsible outcomes, the game will help you get there. It's a little like training wheels on a bicycle. So that's one.
And it also allows you to tell things through time, right? If you have a scene, I can tell, like, Lumberjills is a game that takes place over the span of however many years? It doesn't define time uh, explicitly. Rosenstrasse was a ten year time period, and you're playing in four hours. So it allows you to skip things like that.
And it allows you to get to hard hitting moments over the span of a period of time. More organic play, like the big 360 LARP play where you're playing moment to moment, or for many people sandbox play allows you to get little nuances in relationships to understand how they work over time.
It allows you funny little moments that you won't get in a structured scene. It's like clips that would be great in the director's cut, but would hit the editing floor when you actually get to the movie. Right. And those can be beautifully expansive in the way that they, not just representing the story, but how they manifest as emotions to the character.
Like, I played Just a Little Loving, and in Just a Little Loving, I had a scene that started off with other people, but ended up with me in a room alone for half an hour. That was just continuous play with me alone in a room sitting with my feelings about what had just happened. That was one of the most powerful moments of the game for me, and it changed how I felt about everything. But nobody else even saw it, right? It didn't become, if you took the story of what I just played in the game and made it into a movie, it wouldn't have made the cut. Uh, You would have maybe had a couple of scenes over a musical montage, right? yeah. exactly!
And, and so, in as much as role playing games are feeling games or that role playing games are social games between the characters, not just the players you get a wider sense of verisimilitude, or emotional depth, or social depth when you play moment to moment, sometimes, but also they can derail other things in the game.
And so, it's really about what the aims of the game are looking to do, and how time and focus serves the players at the table and the story that they're telling.
Sam: Yeah, I think I would add that clear responsibility of like whose job it is to frame a scene or cut a scene I have found makes like the pacing of any game a lot better because no one is sitting around going like, okay who's who's doing the thing next? I don't want to like step on any toes or whatever when you actually give authority to someone when you make it someone's clear job to do the thing, then everyone turns to them, they know they have to step up, and we can actually move forward instead of all just like sit around wring our hands.
Yep, absolutely.
Okay. So I want to go to the idea of cutting scenes, too, because I have found that many games don't provide any tools for framing scenes in the first place. And of the games that provide tools for framing scenes, many also don't provide tools for cutting
Moyra: Yes.
Sam: or for ending scenes. And I think that that's, Fine, you know, like it's often clear when a scene is over. It's maybe a less important tool, but I've also ended up in Structured freeform kinds of scenes where we're like in the scene and we're doing the thing and everyone's kind of like Is this it? I don't know that we like found the thing. Like, should we call it? Do we need to keep pushing and searching?
And I hate that feeling. Like, so I also really love the idea of handing responsibility for ending a scene to someone. And I'm curious to hear from you about whether you agree what the benefit, the pros and the cons are of handing out that responsibility versus leaving it open. And also whether you have any examples there of games that do that.
Moyra: Yeah. So I would say I think it depends on the game. I think there's always generally a person who gets that accountability at a table, that it's very rare for that accountability to float. It usually is it's a fascinating space. space, right? Like, we as players all have different, I used to, I wrote a blog years and years ago where I used to talk about sockets, and like the way that we, the things that we plug into game with, or the reasons we plug into game.
Because like, you and I, we're talking about games like we play the same games or are the same players, and we are probably not, right? Like, I'm a highly emotional, high context player that's deeply immersive, that doesn't really care a lot about conflict. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of different things like that.
And I have a huge tolerance for meander, right? One of my favourite scenes from a very long range game that I played a long time was an entire four hour session that was the live moment to moment play of a date. That was not related to anything that happened. Right. So I'm a very different player than a lot of other players.
And so back then when I, this is like post Forge, diaspora on the Blogs, like the very blogger era of role playing game theory. I talked about sockets and said that every player comes to a game for different reasons.
They get different emotional satisfaction out of playing a game and that informs what they will tolerate and play, what they like and play, what kind of games that they'll play, and how they will successfully play with each other. And for me, I'm a highly emotional, I'm there for the emotions of the game, and so it's like I'm highly immersive. So I want to be in that character. I want to feel like that character is real and I want to experience the emotions of that character regardless of what genre or whatever I'm doing.
Other people are very mechanically oriented. They really want to feel the crunch of the game and how it does. They want to feel like they've beat it or they want to feel like they're with it or whatever it is that it is like, there's no, and to me, there's absolutely no wrong answers in all of these things, right? And it can be a most likely a combination of these factors, that the socket is really where you plug into that game.
And so my experience of things generally is if you do not make someone responsible for scene cutting, it's always the person with the tightest context, the person at the table who has the strongest desire for, for, it's not brevity it's like what the Forgites would have called a bang, right? This is the moment where it happened. Like we got to the point, let's move on. Like the, and the least tolerance for meander.
And so, what usually end up happening is, there's usually a person who organically steps in, and it's like, you've exceeded my tolerance, I think this scene has probably ended. And then, over time, we do that for a while, and then the person with a really high desire for meander says, can we just extend this for a little while, or, and then there's some fight and negotiation, that is all, not fight, but like, there's some negotiation at the table for people who are playing long term with each other.
Whereas, and that often, I think, If anybody who's been part of a gaming community that played long form games for a long time, has had at least one experience of a campaign that blew up because needs of the table were neither defined by the game nor were they able to be resolved between the players of the game.
And so the benefit of having scene framing and scene cutting mechanics in a game is everybody knows what they're signing up for beforehand. And so everybody gets to point back to it. It has drawbacks and benefits to the same things. But as a person who's, that's an ongoing conversation in my life because I tend to play with tighter framed people than I tend to be as a person.
Also when you move the idea when I go from tabletop games to structured freeform games to structured freeform LARPs The endeavor is different, right? So if we're trying to get this movie out in four hours, we all know we have to cut. We don't have time for meanders. So we're all in with the urgency in the moment and we're all we all are, are signed up to get the hit of the note, the emotional that we're trying to do so that we can go on because we know we have a responsibility for everybody else at the table.
It's back in that old social contract world of, it helps us all shorthand what we're here to do and how we're going to do it so that we can get to the good stuff as quickly and without as much conflict as possible.
And I like, in my games, especially my Warbirds games, you'll see a lot of games where there's almost always what I would call it, I have taken to calling, and it's kind of twee, I know, but calling it a director rather than a facilitator or a GM. And largely it's because that's what they're doing. They're doing a structured freeform game, they're directing like a movie, and what they're trying to do is maintain the overarch of the story.
But then a lot of the things that are traditionally part of a GM are absent from the game. They are structured freeforms, agency is often controlled or opened up, very controlled in Rosenstrasse, very opened up wildly in Lumberjills. But usually because the director is a director, it's the director who has the moment of, this is the moment the scene ends but also usually help with things like,
For example, the dancing scenes or flirting scenes, right? It's, it's, it's how am I going to make you love me? And how am I going to make your heart flutter? And how am I going to make you feel like you're the prettiest girl in the world? And then that scene is going to be ended by the end of the song. Right? You know that because you're in a dance. That's the way this works. And so you relieve some of the pressure of cutting a scene too early. And maybe in that moment, because it kind of facilitates this feel of your life, cutting that scene at the end of the dance is a little like real life. It makes you wanting more. It doesn't feel like you've been cut off.
Whereas we have this thing in Rosenstrasse and it's covered a little bit. in Lumberjills is about getting to the heart of the scene, right, especially when you're talking about the spotlight scene. Where it's really like, there's a point to any scene that we're playing in a structured freeform, whether the game gives you that point or whether you as a player are asked to define that point.
And so the getting to the heart of the scene was a, a beautiful framing by my Rosenstrass co designer Jessica Hammer, that was like we had had lots of discussions about it, but she coined this term, which was like, how do we know that the aims of the scene that we have put forward have been met, and that the players feel it, and that the players are no, are neither wishing there was a lot more, nor wallowing in the outcome of it. Where we have exactly what we need to carry forward, both for the comfort and the safety of a player that's playing it, especially in a game about the Holocaust.
And so the heart of the scene is, I think that One of the goals of the games is often to, like there's an extensive instruction in it for the director of Rosenstrasse, which is about, like, watching body language, having every scene in the game expressly articulate what the point of the scene was so that the director can watch for it land, and then watch players for satisfaction in its landing.
And I think those are skills that we kind of, in tabletop gaming worlds, we just assume that a GM is going to be able to do it. And anybody who's been playing in a GM world has encountered GMs who have no idea how to do it, and some of them who have no desire to do it.
Like, and so, yeah. And so, So this kind of scene, I love this kind of mechanic, because spotlight scenes could be just lifted out of any of the larps that they're in and put into a regular game, like, say you're running a game of Apocalypse World and you've been playing sessions over and you have a break and then you do your your love letters to your players, and then you don't want to transition right back into the game because you're doing a time lapse. You really want to understand how that love letter hit the player. You could say, hey, let's do a spotlight scene about the content of what happened. You know, we're leaving this section of the game behind. You as a player probably have feelings about things that you're behind. Or you want to signal to me that you're putting stuff out that's important to you. So this is your chance to articulate where that scene will come from, what it will mean to you.
And it doesn't have to interrupt the flow of the rest of the game. It can be done on its own, on a Thursday night before your Friday game, right? Or it could be like in the moment of a tabletop game where people's needs are being cross matched. So like, a GM and a player are clearly not happy with the situation of the game and they're not sure how to proceed. Pulling out a spotlight scene and doing it can help facilitate that moment really usefully. In the same kind of way that, like, the X card is an overlay mechanic that talks about safety, the spotlight scenes can be used, and I've used them in my own personal at home tabletop games, as overlay mechanics that talk about narrative calibration. What's important to the player? What's important to the GM? How do we meet those needs better together? And move forward. Or how do we clarify what's at odds here? I think it's a really helpful mechanic for that.
Sam: Yeah. I think it's really interesting how much focus there is spotlight scenes on What the players want
Moyra: Yes. Mm
Sam: I'm like writing a game right now where I've like noticed this distinction
Moyra: hmm.
Sam: needing to like call it out very specifically and also then like reading a lot of other games how rarely it gets called out and I think like thought through the different implications of like are we talking to the characters right now or are we talking to the players?
And I think that that it's really really important to make that differentiation to all get on the same page
Moyra: And I do think that there's this really interesting thing that happens where there's a whole breadth between that, right? Because some players will organically kind of know what they want for their characters and so are really making that from a character focused point of view. Some players want to see, like I'm a kind of person who wants to betray my characters, right? Like I, I love having characters who come in with set ideas that get broken down in the course of play. And so that's a fun place to do it.
And so saying what I want also includes how I want to prioritize what gets wanted, right? I want to do that through the lens of the character. Sure. Cool. Good for me. I want to do that through my lens of my player. That's good for me too. But in it all we're asking you to act as a player. And we're asking you to act not just not as a character, not just not as a player, but as a player in charge of your own story. I think we do that too little in games.
Sam: What a great safety tool also, right?
Moyra: Yes.
Sam: to just like let people calibrate their own experience like that.
Moyra: Yeah, absolutely.
Sam: Yeah. I've got a whole other episode about safety
Moyra: I can talk about it for three hours too. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Yes.
Sam: uh, Yeah. Cool. We've covered everything I wanted to talk about and like a ton more, uh, but I, is there anything else that you want to make sure that we are able to get to here before the end of our conversation?
Moyra: I think the big thing I would say, especially since your podcast is aimed at tabletop players, is a strong, strong encouragement to try structured free from LARPs. I think A it'll give you new insights into the way things can play, B, new tools to be able to use them.
I think you'll find them, especially structured freeforms like from the fastival world, where many of them are not LARPs, they're just structured freeform games. Like, a great example of that is Monsigeur was originally a fastival game, and out of that came Red Carnations on a Black Grave. That came out of it, that's the same Danish freeform history.
So those games give you tools. They're far more accessible than you think they are. They do a whole different kind of a feel towards games. And I highly recommend people just take a chance and leap into them and have some fun.
Sam: has been the thesis of my whole fucking like
Moyra: Yeah.
Sam: series here. Like this is why I'm trying to interview people like you. I like totally co sign. I think your games in particular, I'm third party endorsing them as like,
Moyra: Thank you.
Sam: good introductions to this kind of game and form for people who are coming from the tabletop kind of background.
Randy Lubin and I recorded a whole episode about Ghost Court in
Moyra: Yes. Yes.
Sam: this context of, like, that being a great, like, jumping in
Moyra: Jump. Great. Jumping in place.
Sam: I really think Lumberjills is right up there with it, right? Like, it's a little bit longer, it's a little bit more emotional, but also, like, A lot of people prefer that kind of play to, like, silly five minute party
Moyra: Yes.
Sam: is a great, great, great first step.
Moyra: Oh, I do have one other thing I'd like to say. And that is, if you're a dude who are like, Lumberjills and romance and no, I don't think so. I have to say that some of the most surprising fans of Lumberjills are dudes. Are dudes because it gives men access to things that are traditionally ever only afforded women, right?
You're gonna have clear ability to woo the hell out of someone without feeling like it'll go wrong. You're gonna have somebody tell you you're lovely and beautiful and they want you, want to love you forever.
I have had more men come to me after Lumberjills and say, I didn't think I was going to like it, but I want to play it again right now. So I encourage dudes to try it, please. Even if it sounds like romance might not be your thing, or even if it sounds like it's too touchy feely. I think it gets to the heart of a bunch of stuff that you might actually enjoy.
Sam: I'm gonna be thinking for a long time about your description of this game and the Lumberjills experience as a place for people who felt like they had one role in society to
Moyra: Yes.
Sam: find out the expansive world of possibility that was open to them. And that feels like a really universal human experience, kind of regardless of your background.
Moyra: absolutely.
Sam: Mo, thank you so much for
Moyra: This has been a lot of fun!
Sam: so good.
Alright, fellow students, our homework this week is to write down three to five different methods you've used to frame scenes in a role playing game. Maybe this is five explicit procedures from different games, but try to focus on methods that aren't explicitly specified by the game in which you used them. Are the ones you derived yourself a result of your table's culture of play? Are they implicitly given to you by the system in which you used them? Or did they come from somewhere else entirely? Then, report back to me, because I want to hear all about these.
Thanks again to Mo for being here. You can find Lumberjills now at Indie Press Revolution or on itch.io/unruly games.
As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder, or on the dice Exploder discord, and you can support the show on Patreon. Thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon, and my games are available at s dun wall.itch.io. Our logo is designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads Bama, boy, Travis Tesser, and thanks to you for listening. I will see you next time.