Scenes in RPGs

I started roleplaying in the 1980s, went into a deep freeze in the late 1990s and didn’t come out until about a decade ago. “Scenes” were one of the new things indie games brought to TTRPGs, and I still find them tricky.

It doesn’t help that many RPGs don’t explain scenes properly. It seems like “scene” has become a specific piece of TTRPG terminology that is subtly different from its usual meaning. And everyone assumes that everyone knows what is meant when they talk about “scenes”.

As a result, it can be a bit of a muddle. This is my attempt to unravel that puzzle.

Dictionary definition

According to Google, there are two meanings to scene:

• The place where an incident in real life or fiction occurs or occurred.
• A sequence of continuous action in a play, film, opera, or book.

The first definition is straightforward, but when you start thinking about the play/film/opera/book definition, it gets a bit trickier.

Back when I helped out with the local pantomime, everyone knew what scenes were. Scene one was the big opening scene. Scene two took place in front of the “greys”, the grey curtains pulled across the stage that hid the backstage crew changing the scenery. When scene two ended, the greys opened to reveal scene three. And so on. A two-hour pantomime might have no more than nine or ten scenes.

In movies, scenes are often shorter. So rescuing Princess Leia in Star Wars becomes many scenes: the room where Luke persuades Han to rescue her, the turbolift, the detention centre, Princess Leia’s cell, and so on. Again, these are all location-based as they are different sets.

But in a roleplaying game?

Well, they vary. Some use scenes, some don’t. Some use scenes in a specific way, some use the term but don’t really define them.

Trad and other games

Broadly, in RPGs, trad games don’t use scenes. They might mention them, but they’re using them in the sense of the first dictionary definition: they’re a place or location.

So in Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Liminal, D&D, Runequest, ALIEN, and the like, scene doesn’t have a particular meaning.

Scene-based games

Some games build scenes into their mechanics. Many of these are GM-less, and the term ‘scene’ is used when a player controls what’s happening.

(I’m sure many other games use scenes. These are the ones I am familiar with.)

GMless games

Games without a GM often use scenes as a way for each player’s character to have spotlight time. Other PCs may be in those scenes, but everyone at the table knows who the spotlight is on during the scene.

Fiasco: Each character gets four scenes where they are in the spotlight. Fiasco confuses things because players can decide whether to “establish” their scene (set it up – who is there, what’s going on) or “resolve” the scene (decide on its outcome – the other players establish the scene). Much as I enjoy Fiasco, I find this fairly counterintuitive in play – particularly when a player chooses to resolve.

Follow and Kingdom: Ben Robbins uses scenes in his games to “… shine a spotlight on your character to see what they think and do…” In both games, the player decides who is in the scene, where it takes place, and what’s going on. Then, you play to find out what happens.

Unfortunately, these games don’t clearly state the one piece of advice that I find makes a scene really sing: to know what your character wants from the scene. (They may not get it, of course.)

GM-ed games

Hillfolk and Good Society both use scenes.

Hillfolk has a strict player turn order. When it’s your turn, you create a scene involving your character. You establish it as with other games (where, when, who and so on) – and if it’s a dramatic scene, you decide on the emotional reward you want from another character.

(Hillfolk also has other types of scenes, but dramatic scenes are the main ones.)

Good Society uses scenes for roleplaying, but fails to explain clearly what they are or how to manage them. As a result, scenes felt directionless and saggy and dragged on too long.  I talked about this when I played Good Society.

Most Trusted Advisors uses “scene” liberally throughout the text, but it doesn’t explain what they are. However, from my experience of running Most Trusted Advisors, I think it would benefit from more rigorous scene discipline.

Tips for scenes

So for these types of games, these are the questions that whoever is establishing the scene needs to consider:

• Where is it?
• When is it?
• Who is present?
• What is going on?
• What do I want?

And for me, the last point is the most important in helping to keep scenes punchy. If you know what you want going into a scene, it’s much clearer when the scene is over. (And I find it helps to tell the other players what you have in mind, so they can react accordingly.)

Games that get muddled

Some games use scenes liberally in their text (e.g. Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week), but they don’t have much of a mechanical effect, so the fact that they’ve not defined what a scene is doesn’t matter too much.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for other games.

Fate Core defines a scene as “A scene is a unit of game time lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour or more, during which the players try to achieve a goal or otherwise accomplish something significant in a scenario.”

Scenes are important in Fate mainly because a character’s stress boxes clear after each scene. But what is a scene? That’s left to the GM, and isn’t always clear, despite the advice above. I don’t know if rescuing Princess Leia from the Death Star is one or many scenes in Fate. Is rescuing the princess enough of a goal? Or can you break it down into smaller scenes? (Such as blagging our way into the detention centre, escaping from the detention centre, and getting back to the Falcon) As far as recovering stress goes, this difference could be critical. (I might do it either way, depending on the tone of the game.)

Lady Blackbird allows characters to refresh their dice pools by having a “refreshment scene” with another character. Lady Blackbird doesn’t explicitly say what these are but suggests that they’re quiet moments with other PCs. (I really like these as a way to encourage roleplaying between characters – it’s such a lovely design.)

Going back to Star Wars, Leia’s moment with Luke aboard the Millennium Falcon just after Ben Kenobi’s death is the sort of thing I imagine when I think of a refreshment scene. (And Luke has clearly refreshed his dice pool as he mans the Falcon’s gun turret and blasts away at the incoming TIE fighters.)

And it’s not just me

And it’s not just me! This recent post on substack and this thread on RPGnet suggests others are thinking about this as well. I had already earmarked this as something I wanted to reflect on after playing and running Good Society and Most Trusted Advisors earlier in the year. These posts have, however, prompted me to finish this post.

Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is the easiest published one-shot I have ever run.

Lady Blackbird is in disguise on the run from an arranged marriage and is fleeing to secret love, the pirate king Uriah Flint. However, she and the crew of The Owl (her hired smuggler skyship) have been captured and are now held in the brig of the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow.

And that’s where we start…

What you get

Lady Blackbird is a one-shot scenario expecting to last 2-3 sessions for (ideally) 4-5 players. It was written by John Harper and you can download it for free here.

The whole adventure is 16 pages long:

• One cover
• Two pages of background (the general background, and the PC’s spaceship)
• Five one-page character sheets (half of which is devoted to the rules)
• One page on running the game
• One page containing extra traits that the PCs can spend experience on
• Six more pages – one for each character and a blank for the GM to use. But I didn’t use these, so Lady Blackbird is really only 10 pages

I ran it online using Facebook Messenger (for video chat) and Google Drive (to hold documents). We rolled real dice and trusted each other.

So definitely not too many words.

Characters

I’ve mentioned before about how important it is to get the characters right in a one-shot game. I believe that 50% of the fun comes from having great characters. And the characters in Lady Blackbird are perfect – all with goals and drives (called ‘keys’) that move the scenario forwards.

• Lady Blackbird wants to find her secret love
• Naomi Bishop is Lady Blackbird’s bodyguard and hates the Empire
• Cyrus Vance is captain of The Owl and is in love with Lady Blackbird
• Kale Arkham is the loyal first mate
• Snargle is the wisecracking goblin sky-pilot

While Lady Blackbird’s main goal of reaching Uriah Flint drives everything along, the other characters are neatly interwoven and react well together.

The scenario

As you may have noticed, there’s not much in the way of a traditional scenario. No complicated dungeon maps, no monster stats, no detailed NPCs. In fact, there’s barely what I would normally think of as a scenario at all – simply a few ideas for obstacles between the brig and finding Uriah Flint.

I was fine with this – I didn’t need complicated deck plans, or city maps or stats for monsters. Although I would have liked some colourful NPCs for the PCs to meet. (I can make them up, but having them there means I don’t have to.)

In terms of flavour, Lady Blackbird feels very diesel punk. (I’ve heard that it’s set in the same universe as Harper’s Blades in the Dark, but I’m not sure.) In terms of inspiration, it feels to me to be in the same spirit as Christopher Wooding’s excellent Tales of the Kitty Jay series. At least, that’s how I’m imagining it.

System

The system is explained on each character sheet, and takes up less than half a side. The section is titled ‘Rules Summary,’ but that’s misleading: these are the entire rules. There are no more.

The system is a dice pool system, with success being 4+. (It doesn’t explicitly state this, but we’re using six-sided dice. It would be weird if it was anything else.)

The system is a great example of rewarding the behaviours you want to see.

• First, experience points are earned by taking actions that further your keys (your goals and objectives)—and double points are earned if doing that takes the character into danger. So they rapidly ramp up, and there’s lots of new things to spend the on.
• Second, you get more dice by having a ‘refreshment scene’ with another character. This promotes in character chat—something I like to see in my games.

The only problem I’ve seen with the system so far is that it’s too easy. Despite setting challenge levels as recommended, during my first session the PCs failed none of the rolls. (They did fail rolls in later sessions, so maybe that was just luck.)

The refreshment scenes are inspired, though. They work well in play—it's a pleasant change to have a mechanic that rewards the players for actually roleplaying.

So how does it play?

Lady Blackbird is easy to run, provided you don’t mind thinking on your feet. The combination of the system and keys makes the characters very proactive, so as a GM you’re reacting to their plans and thinking of obstacles. We start in media res with the PCs locked up in the brig, but the are resourceful enough that it’s not long before they’re out causing havoc.

As I said above, 50% of the fun in roleplaying games comes from having great characters, and Lady Blackbird gets them very right indeed.

I ran it over four 2-hour sessions, using Facebook Messenger for video chat and Google Drive for the documents.

Session 1 Prison Breakout: The PCs escaped the brig, sabotaged the Hand of Sorrow and reached the hangar where The Owl was held.

Session 2 Goodbye Hand of Sorrow, hello Succulent Grub: The PCs dealt with the guards, refuelled The Owl and fled the Hand of Sorrow. They made their way to the Succulent Grub bar in the city of St Judasberg on Haven, where Lady Blackbird believes she can find a route to her lover’s lair in the Remnants.

Session 3 The Fight: Westor Snow (owner of the Succulent Grub) proposes a wager to the PCs: directions to Uriah Heap’s lair in exchange for the The Owl, to be settled with a pit fight between his champion (The Humungus—inspired by Mad Max 2) and the PCs’ champion. Naomi is the champion, and the PCs undertake a madcap scheme to rub a sedative ointment into The Humungus’ skin, boosting Naomi’s chances. It all works, and Naomi beats The Humungus.

Session 4: The Dark Promise. The PCs make their way to the Remnants, which we’ve learned are the remains of an ancient civilisation (their sorcerers reached too far…) and contains a graveyard full of derelict spaceships. The PCs find Uriah Flint’s pirate ship, Dark Promise, and a bounty hunter ambush… The bounty hunters are defeated, the Dark Promise stolen, and our heroes head off into the wild blue with a new career as sky pirates…

I found Lady Blackbird a lot of fun to run. I found my players were coming up with loads of mad ideas I mostly had to respond to. It was a very collaborative experience—much more so than many other games.

Given the very minimal prep I did, it did at times feel like I was walking a tightrope without a safety net. But that’s only in my mind—everyone approached the game in the right spirit and I’m sure that we could have dealt with any problems that might have arisen.

The dice pool system and lack of stats/attributes/hit points worked well. Rather than a blow-by-blow recreation of the PC’s attempt to bluff their way into the pit fighter stable and rub ointment into The Humungus (yes, really), I reduced that down to a single (difficult) roll.

Rolling the dice less often made the dice rolls much more important—and raised the tension. It also meant that we crammed a lot into our two-hour sessions. Instead of chipping away at The Humungus’ hit points over twenty minutes, we resolved the battle in a single dramatic roll of the dice.

Improvements

I wouldn’t do much to improve Lady Blackbird. I’d get rid of (or explain) the blanks at the end of the game as I’m still not sure what they’re for. And I’d like to see a few more NPCs, places and creatures described—yes, I can make them up, but it’s also nice not to have to.

Overall

Of all the published scenarios I’ve run so far, Lady Blackbird has been both the easiest to run (almost no prep required) and also the most fun.