Go to Part 1

Now that you know what the scene is about and the bang you’re using to launch it, you need to fill it with content. (Although, to be fair, the distinction we’re drawing here is not a hard-and-fast one: By the time you’ve set the agenda and the bang of a scene, you probably already know a lot about it.)

The process of filling a scene with content is an artistic one. And, like most artistic processes, there’s a virtually unlimited variation in the methods people use to do it. I’m not even particularly consistent in how I approach it and I actually think it’s a mistake to treat it as something that can be hard-coded. So I’m going to toss out a whole bunch of ideas that I personally find useful. Maybe you’ll find them useful, too. But regardless of that, you should poke around and see what other people have to say about it. And you should give yourself permission to experiment and really play around until you start getting a feel for what works for you and for your players.

First, however, there’s an all-important maxim:

You may know where the scene begins, but you don’t know where it ends.

You’re not writing a book or filming a movie. Unlike a traditional author, you may know where you’re starting off, but you’ve got no idea where the journey will end. Viewed from one perspective, this is a major limitation. But if you look at it from another angle, it’s a major opportunity.

ELEMENTS OF A SCENE

Here’s my basic philosophy: Take all the elements of the scene – the who, what, where, when – and fill those elements with all sorts of toys that both you and the PCs can play with.

(You could also think of these as “tools” that you use to build the scene. But, personally, I find the imagery of the toy – a thing which is meant to be played with; which becomes the focal point for a liberated imagination – to be far more evocative and, thus, useful.)

Hand-in-hand with this philosophy is the idea that the more flexible these toys become the more useful they will prove. If you include something which only has a single utility, that’s pretty good. But if you include something that can be used eight different ways, then you’re really cooking with gas.

(The good news is that your players are probably a gaggle of creativity: If you let them, they’ll take even the most boring stuff and spin it in ways you never imagined. But the key here is if you let them: Remain open to the players twisting or even completely inverting the people and things you include in the scene. Don’t let yourself get locked down on a preconceived notion of how things are “supposed” to work out.)

LOCATION: This is the “when” and the “where” of the scene. It’s the immediate environment for the actions of the scene and it can be either claustrophobic (“the back room at Bill’s”) or absurdly panoramic (“the highways of Texas”), depending on the nature of the scene and the characters in it. Ideally, remembering that minimizing contextualization makes for a better bang, you want to keep things short and sweet while simultaneously maximizing the number of toys that your players can grab.

A few rules of thumb that I use for crafting evocative descriptions as a GM:

Three of Five: Think about your five senses. Try to include three of them in each description. Sight is a gimme and Taste will rarely apply, so that means picking a couple out of Hearing, Smell, and Touch. (Remember that you don’t actually have to touch something in order to intuit what it might feel like if you did.)

Two Cool Details: Try to include two irrelevant-but-cool details. These are details that aren’t necessary for the scene to work, but are still cool. It’s the broken cuckoo clock in the corner; the slightly noxious odor with no identifiable source; the graffiti scrawled on the wall; the bio-luminescent fungus; etc.

Three-by-Three: Delta’s 1-2-(3)-Infinity talks about psychological research demonstrating that repeating something three times takes up the same space in our brains as repeating something infinitely. Thus, once you’ve hit the third item in a sequence, any additional items in that sequence are redundant.

Extrapolating from this, for minor scenes you can describe three things each with a single detail. At that point, you’ve filled up the “infinity queue” in your players’ brains and their imaginations will impulsively fill in the finer details of the scene you’ve evoked. For “epic” scenes, use the full three-by-three: Describe three different elements with three details each.

CHARACTERS: This is the “who” of the scene. I find it useful to conceptually break the characters present in a scene down into three categories: Leads, Features, and Extras.

Leads are the major characters in the scene. They’re the characters who are most affected by the agenda of the scene or who are capable of having the greatest impact on the agenda of the scene.

Features are the supporting cast of the scene. They wield an influence over the Leads; or provide crucial information; or are important resources in whatever conflict is being fought.

Extras are scene-dressing. They might find themselves being taken hostage or appealed to for mob justice, but they can usually just be thought of as part of the location instead of as active agents in the scene.

PCs in a scene are almost always leads. You may find it useful to think of some PCs as being the leads in the scene and the others PCs as features (because the agenda of the scene is primarily of interest to the former and of less interest to the latter), but if you’ve got a scene where none of the PCs are leads you might want to take a moment and triple-check what you’re doing. Unless you’ve got some amazingly good reason for side-lining the PCs, it’s probably a good idea to find a way of reframing the agenda of the scene.

(Off-hand, the only example I can think of is a situation where the PCs are deliberately not participating in a scene. For example, maybe they’re eavesdropping on a conversation. Although even then you should double-check and make sure that a secondary agenda in the scene isn’t about the PCs avoiding detection. And then triple-check to make sure that the scene isn’t really about something like, “Will the PCs stop Roberta from confessing her love to Charles?”)

CONFLICT vs. COLOR: The “what” of the scene is largely encapsulated by the agenda of the scene, but in actually running the scene I often find it useful to categorize the scene as either being primarily about conflict or primarily about color.

Conflict scenes are about two or more characters who want mutually exclusive things. The result might be a firefight, a formal duel, a boardroom takeover, a political debate, a psychic assault, or a torrid argument. Whatever form it takes, though, heads are going to butt and (in a roleplaying game) dice are probably going to be rolled.

Color scenes, on the other hand, are about exposition, planning, and/or preparation. They’re a time for character development; for showing what the PCs are like (and how they relate to each other) when fireballs aren’t flying at their heads. They’re the scenes when your crew studies the blueprints and calls in their favors. They also provide a valuable contrast – a negative space to highlight the positive space; a moment of calm to emphasize the frenetic chase.

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, color scenes are also where the facts get established which will allow you to minimize contextualization for later bangs. (For example, if you know a character’s long-lost brother is going to show up on their doorstep next week it’s more effective to seed information about the brother into a series of scenes leading up to that bang instead of trying to communicate the full meaning of the bang in the same moment that the brother arrives.)

With all of that being said, most of the time you’re going to want your scenes to be about conflict: Conflict is usually interesting and meandering exposition is usually boring, so try to find ways to build your exposition into conflict. (For example, you might have a scene where the PC’s mother is angry because she feels like the PC has stopped caring about his missing brother.) This frequently allows you to have your cake and eat it too.

Addendum: How NOT to Frame a Scene (Starring Harlequin)

Go to Part 4: Closing the Frame

Go to Part 1

Once you start skipping empty time it becomes necessary to frame the scene you’re skipping to: The continuous and relatively steady flow of events experienced in a classic dungeoncrawl is replaced with something inconsistent, noncontiguous, and possibly even non-sequential.

In HeroQuest, Robin D. Laws defines three different types of “time” in a roleplaying game – abstract time, now time, and slow time. These can be useful ways to think about the pacing of your session and to them I’ll also add the concept of a sharp cut.

SLOW TIME: According to Laws, this is where critical events and extended contests happen. It’s the place where people want to fine-tune their intentions and their actions, and as a result it’s a place where either more rules or more attention (or both) gets applied. The narration of events in slow time generally takes more time to resolve in real time than it does for the characters to experience it. (The D&D combat system is an example of slow time.)

NOW TIME: We could also refer to this as being “in the scene”. This is typically where the majority of our playing time is spent: The players are making every decision for their characters and there isn’t any empty time being skipped over.

ABSTRACT TIME: Abstract time is a soft method of moving over empty time. It generally takes the form of what I think of as “eliding narration”: “Several days pass as you cross the Great Plain…” or “You leave the Docks and head across town…” (This is the method I most often use for moving between scenes, largely because it never fully disengages from the players: With practice it becomes easy to read a table’s reaction to eliding narration and “know” when you need to drop out of it and back into a scene. I also find it very conducive for the sort of non-linear scenario structures I use, because it allows the players to continue providing input even as we move rapidly through the game world’s clock.)

SHARP CUT: Finally we have the sharp cut. Here we jump directly from the end of one action to the beginning of a different action without explaining the transition or relationship between them. For example:

Player: Okay. I head to bed.

GM: You fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. And we cut to – the sharp pain of the goblin’s sword biting through your chain and deep into your arm.

Obviously a lot of scene transitions are going to take the form of either sharp cuts or the eliding narration of abstract time. But even if there’s a relative consistency of “now time” between sequences, you may still find it useful to conceptually break the action into scenes and use scene-framing techniques to structure them.

Whatever the case may be, however, you will need an understanding of both how to open a scene and how to close a scene.

THE AGENDA

Flipping the pages of a diary. Fast-fowarding through a video. Cutting sharply to a fresh moment. How do we decide when to stop flipping? Or push the play button? Or what to cut to? How do we decide when a new a scene begins?

There are several ways that you can think about what it means to “open” a scene, but I generally think of it in terms of rapidly establishing the moment (the who, what, where, and when) and then applying a sharp impetus which creates action.

(I say “rapidly” because if the entire idea is to skip the empty time between meaningful decisions, then you should be trying to eliminate as much of that empty time — to cut as close to the next meaningful choice — as possible. You also generally can’t go too far wrong by keeping the focus on your players; by engaging them constantly in the process of making meaningful choices.)

First, identify the agenda of the scene. Why are we here? Why is this moment important? Agendas don’t have to be portentous, but if you’re cutting into a scene there must have been a reason why you’re doing it.

(Let’s take a moment to imagine a scene without an agenda. Remember that sequence from Vampire: The Masquerade where a PC decides to drive downtown? Okay. The GM cuts away from the house and decides to open the next scene.

GM: You’re sitting at a red light on the corner of Chicago and Franklin. What are you doing?

Player: I wait for the light to turn green.

GM: The light turns green. You continue driving downtown.

End of scene. Without an agenda – without some reason for focusing on the events at Chicago and Franklin – that was clearly a pointless waste of time. Fortunately, this GM at least had the common sense to cut the scene off and move on. Sometimes you’ll see neophyte GMs continue to linger in these sorts of pointless exchanges for painfully long periods of time.)

The types of agendas that are prioritized, the methods used to select them, and the way they’re presented is another place where the motivations and techniques of an individual GM are strongly expressed. But, in general, I find it useful to think of the agenda in terms of the question which is being answered by the scene. Another way to think of this is in terms of the scene’s stakes. (Literally, what’s at stake in the scene.)

For example, if we’re dealing with a standard dungeon crawl we might think of each room as a separate scene. Let’s say that one of these rooms contains an ogre. We might say that the agenda of this scene is to answer the question, “Can the PCs kill the ogre?” (At stake are the lives of the PCs and the life of the ogre.) But you could also radically alter the character of this scene by asking a different question: “How are the PCs going to get past the ogre?” makes the scene more open-ended. “Can the ogre convince the PCs to help him fight the goblins?”, on the other hand, would change the scene entirely.

Non-dungeon examples might include things like: Will Billy take the heroin? Can Sherlock find the bloody handprint? Will Gunther betray the Jewish family living in his secret attic? And so forth.

(If you’re railroading, then you may have already predetermined the answers to these questions, but the questions are still being asked. If you’re not railroading, then it’s very likely that you’ll find the agenda of a scene changing after it’s begun. But there’ll still have been some initial or intended agenda that made you frame the scene in the first place, and that’s what we’re interested in at the moment.)

THE BANG

Now that you’ve framed the agenda, you need to actually start the scene by zooming in or refocusing or painting a verbal sketch (or whatever other procedural descriptor seems most appropriate to you).

What you’re looking for here is the bang.

The bang is the thing which forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices (or at least provokes them with the opportunity to do so). It’s the explosive force which launches the scene and propels it forward.

Let’s keep it simple for the moment by looking back at our dungeon scene with the ogre. Assume the PCs have failed their Stealth check. Does the scene start when the ogre jumps out and snarls in their face? Or does it start when they’re still approaching its chamber and they can hear the crunching of bones? Or when they see a goblin strung up on a rack with its intestines hanging around its ankles… and then the deep thudding of heavy footsteps fills the corridor behind them as the ogre returns for its meal?

Each of these is a different bang, and you can see how changing the bang can dramatically shift the nature of the ensuing scene (even if all the other elements of that scene remain the same). Choosing the “right” bang is usually more art than science.

Outside of the dungeon, bangs might look like this:

“Cut to Thursday afternoon. You’re cleaning your son’s room. You’re shifting around a couple of his well-read comic books when you find a syringe. A used syringe.”

“You’re only about halfway back to town when the full moon fully crests the Blue Hills. Sharp lances of pain dance down your limbs and arc across your back as fur erupts from your skin.”

“The cop hauls himself out of the patrol car. He’s wearing a food-stained sheriff’s uniform. He’s got a ring on a chain around his neck. You recognize your wife’s wedding band.”

You’ll often find that bangs require contextualization. (In other words, you might need to start a scene a little before the bang in order to properly set up the information necessary to understand the bang.) You may also find it useful to multiply or escalate the stakes of a scene by using a sequence of multiple bangs.

For example, consider the scene featuring the “wedding band” bang above. You might open that scene by saying something like:

“You’ve been on the road to San Antonio for the better part of four hours. Heat is glimmering off the endless stretch of tar in front of you and the air conditioner is straining to keep up with it. Your gas gauge has dipped below a quarter tank now and you’re keeping a sharp outlook for any sort of service station to top it back up.”

(This is all context. Or exposition. It’s establishing some key facts about the scene that’s about to happen: The character is in the middle of nowhere. They’re low on gas. Et cetera.)

“You’re pulling past the long-faded billboard for a bait shop when the red-and-whites of some country cop blossom like a cherry tree behind you.”

(This is the first bang of the scene: Bam! There’s a cop. Do you pull over? Or do you try to outrun him? If the PC has nothing to hide from the cops this is probably a pretty weak bang. But if there’s a body hidden in the trunk, for example, then it’s got some potential.)

In this case we’ll assume that the PC decides to pull over. And that’s when we deliver the second bang (featuring the wedding band) which escalates the scene.

In conclusion, it’s time for a personal value judgment on my part: Generally speaking, the shorter the contextualization and the larger the number of interesting choices that can be made in response to a bang the better the bang is.

You don’t always need rich, complicated scenes, of course. Sometimes you want the short, brutal simplicity of someone swinging an axe at James Bond’s head. (That sort of change-up with a clear-cut choice can be vitally refreshing in a campaign mired with complex dilemmas.) But nine times out of ten, you’ll make your campaign richer and more rewarding if you make your bangs more evocative.

Go to Part 3: Filling the Frame

(A final note: The term “bang” was coined by Ron Edwards with a very narrow definition that applied it only to Edwards’ preferred style of “narrativism”. I’m very deliberately genericizing the term so that it applies to any style.)

Roleplaying games are a relatively new medium. And like most fresh-faced mediums, this means that a lot of advice given for creating and using the medium is being borrowed from existing mediums. It also means that most of this advice is wrong because the similarities between the old and new mediums is usually a lot more superficial than it may initially appear. (For example, it took decades before screenplays fully stopped mimicking theatrical scripts.)

At the moment, the subject of pacing in RPGs is a good example of this. A lot of the GMing advice you’ll find for pacing right now revolves around borrowing terms and concepts directly from film or television. Like a screenplay written using the techniques for live theater, some of this stuff works, but a lot of it doesn’t because film pacing is primarily about controlling the presentation of predetermined action and RPGs don’t (or at least arguably shouldn’t) have predetermined action.

(If you want an extreme example of this, consider Christopher Nolan’s Memento: The pacing of that film is entirely based on the careful presentation of information known to the writer / filmmaker. I can certainly imagine mimicking a Memento-like experience in an RPG, but the techniques you’d use to achieve it would be radically different from those Nolan used in the creation, filming, and editing of Memento.)

Understanding film pacing (as opposed to theatrical pacing) requires one to understand one of the fundamental principles of film as a medium: The ability to cut the film and splice it together.

Similarly, understanding pacing for an RPG requires one to understand the fundamental principle of the RPG medium: The conversation of meaningful choices.

THE CONVERSATION OF MEANINGFUL CHOICES

As I’ve said in the past, a roleplaying game is self-evidently about playing a role. Playing a role is about making choices as if you were the character. And those choices are made as part of a conversation.

As D. Vincent Baker said in Apocalypse World:

Roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize. All fine.

Or, to put it another way, the fundamental interaction of an RPG can be boiled down to:

GM: What do you want to do?

Player: I want to do X.

GM: When you try to do that, this happens. What do you want to do?

In actual practice, of course, the GM’s question is often implied, the conversation isn’t tidy, multiple players are involved, the rules can reshape the structure of the conversation, and so forth. But that’s the heart and core of everything that happens in a roleplaying game: The GM presents a situation; the players respond to that situation by making a choice; the GM adjudicates the outcome of that choice (and thus presents a new situation to which the players respond).

Regardless of how you try to fancy that interaction up, it’s fundamentally a loop. And the GM’s ability to control pacing sits specifically at the moment of his response (“when you try to do that, this happens”).

EMPTY TIME

Although the art of pacing in a roleplaying game is unique compared to other mediums, in practice it can be remarkably simple. The GM must identify and then eliminate, conflate, or (in advanced techniques) manipulate what I’m going to refer to as empty time: The gap between one set of meaningful decisions and the next meaningful choice.

Or, to put it another way, you want to skip over the “boring bits” where nothing is happening. And the trick to doing that is moving the players efficiently to the next moment in which they can make an interesting and meaningful choice without taking away such choices by skipping over them.

I find it most convenient to think of the treatment of empty time as a continuum. At one end of this continuum, for example, you have gameplay like that found in a pure, old school dungeoncrawl: Essentially no time is skipped and every action is catalogued because the density of meaningful decisions is incredibly high. (In by-the-book OD&D, for example, a wandering monster check is made every single turn. Because of this, even if you ignore the high density of geographically-significant navigation decisions being made, the decision to take or not take a single action remains incredibly significant.)

This, by the way, is another reason why dungeoncrawls are such an effective scenario structure for new GMs: They basically eliminate any need for the GM to think about pacing. It’s an entire body of techniques that the GM can simply ignore while running the dungeoncrawl with confidence.

Once a GM leaves the dungeon, however, they’ll quickly realize that this technique doesn’t work. For example, imagine we were playing a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and I decided to handle the process of leaving my house and driving downtown like this:

GM: What do you want to do?

Player: I want to head downtown.

GM: How are you getting there?

Player: I’ll drive my car.

GM: Okay, you pull your car out of the garage and start driving down the alley. Do you want to turn left or right at the end of the alley?

Player: Left.

GM: Okay, you go half a block down to 10^th Street. Which way do you want to go?

Player: Straight.

GM: Okay, you go another block down to Elliot. Which way do you want to go?

Player: Straight.

GM: Okay, you go another block down to Chicago Avenue. There’s a stoplight. It’s red. What do you want to do?

Player: I’ll wait for the light to turn green and then turn right.

That’s self-evidently moronic. None of those decisions are meaningful. Nobody is having fun. And that’s how we end up with interactions that look like this:

GM: You’re at the city gate. What do you want to do?

Player: We go to the Tavern of the Lonely Wench.

GM: Okay. As you walk through the doors of the Lonely Wench…

Whoa. What just happened? We skipped over a whole bunch of stuff and – BAM! – we’ve suddenly framed a new scene at the tavern.

INTENTIONS vs. INTERRUPTIONS / OBSTACLES

We’re going to be taking a closer look at what it means to frame a scene later, but first I want to focus on how the new scene was selected. We’ve moved slightly up the scene-framing continuum here by skipping to the intention: The players said they wanted to achieve something and the GM skipped to the moment at which they’d achieved it.

If you’re the GM, this basically involves asking yourself two questions: What is the current intention of the PCs? And does anything interrupt that intention?

In this example, identifying the intention is really easy: The player told you, point-blank, what they wanted to achieve. Interruptions (which you can also think of as obstacles standing between the PCs and their desired outcome) could take any number of forms: Do they get ambushed by assassins? Or run into an old friend? Or have an opportunity to pick a rich nobleman’s pocket? Or spot a rare tome of lore at bargain basement prices?

In determining these interruptions and obstacles, we begin to see the motivations and techniques of the GM coming into play: Does the interruption happen because you’re using a random table of simulated events? Because you need to key the next plot arc? Because the next event on your prepared timeline is due to occur? Because you have a creative whim? Because you want to activate a tag on one of your PCs?

So, to sum up:

1. Identify the intention
2. Choose obstacles
3. Skip to the next meaningful choice

In the Art of Rulings I wrote that, “When in doubt, look for the meaningful choice.” And the same principle applies here.

As we continue moving up the continuum of scene-framing, what basically happens is that the threshold of interest required to frame the next beat is cranked up. For example, if we nudge it up just a tick:

GM: You’re at the city gate. What do you want to do?

Player: We go looking for a tavern.

GM: Okay, you’re in the Tavern of the Lonely Wench.

Spot the difference? The GM decided that the choice of which tavern the PCs wanted to go to was irrelevant, so he skipped it, picked the tavern for them, and started the next scene. If he’d decided not to frame the scene quite so hard, he could have asked, “You want an upscale joint or a downscale joint?” Or offered them a selection of different taverns and allowed them to choose. (Or both.)

(And, conversely, by asking those questions, the GM is basically saying, “Either you or I or both of us care about whether the tavern is upscale or downscale.” Either because that choice tells us something interesting about the characters; or changes the amount of gold they will spend; or determines the likely encounters they’ll have there; or makes it easier to spot the spies tailing them; or any number of other possibilities.)

The harder the frame, the higher the level of interest needs to be before we stop fast-forwarding (and the more decisions get skipped). For example, maybe the GM decides that the tavern is completely boring and instead we get:

GM: You’re at the city gate.

Player: We go looking for a tavern.

GM: You party long and hard into the night, so you’re still a little hung-over the next morning when you’re shopping for supplies at Dink’s store and spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket.

And we can keep cranking:

Player: Okay, we’re done at the dungeon. Let’s head back to town.

GM: It’s two weeks later and you’re shopping for supplies in Dink’s store. You spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket. You shout, “STOP THIEF!” and he starts running for the door. What do you do?

The more you crank it up – the harder you frame the scene – the more latitude the GM has for expressing their creative agenda and the larger their influence over the course of the game becomes. This is because the decision to skip “empty time” is hiding a railroad… it’s just that you’re “railroading” past decisions that everyone at the table agrees are irrelevant.

The risk, of course, is that you skip past a decision that is important to someone at the table. The Smallville RPG, which advocates for strong and aggressive scene-framing, offers this advice:

If, despite your best efforts, you skip a little too far ahead and a player says, “But I wanted to—“ just hand him a Plot Point. Tell him to spend it on revealing his planned preparations in the middle of the scene. With luck, he’ll surprise the rest of the table with an unforeseen turn of events.

This sort of solution is not unusual. In fact, the more you crank it up, the more typical it becomes for the game or the GM to start introducing more STG / narrative control mechanics and techniques: The GM is taking so much control away from the players that it becomes necessary to compensate by giving them back control in other ways.

Of course, in actual practice GMs will vary the pace of their scene-framing considerably depending on context and circumstance. But basically “skip the boring stuff and get to the next meaningful choice” is all you really need to know about pacing in an RPG.

The difficult part, of course, is putting that simple maxim into effective practice.

Go to Part 2: Scene-Framing

THE ART OF PACING
Part 2: Scene-Framing
Part 3: Filling the Frame
Part 4: Closing the Frame
Part 5: Advanced Techniques
Part 6: More Advanced Techniques

SUPPLEMENTAL READING – THE ART OF PACING
Film Banging: The Avengers
Film Banging: Alien
Film Banging: The Matrix
The Art of Pacing: Prepping Bangs
The Art of Pacing: Running Awesome Scenes
The Art of Pacing: How NOT to Frame a Scene