I just watched a really fun video about how the Cyperpunk 2077 intro montage is entirely rendered in engine rather than pre-recorded and the tricks used to make it work.

(This is the first time I recall trying to embed a youtube video in a post

One of the bits is a shot that feels like it’s on a crowded city street, but the effect is generated with only 4 NPCs on screen. This is very recognizable to a variation on framing a shot so it tells a different story than you might see if you were there.

Part of why this immediately resonates with GMing for me is that we face a similar challenge and use similar tools. That is, we cannot describe EVERYTHING in the environment, so we select the small and manageable number of things that we can describe to suggest the bigger whole.

We aren’t bound by RAM or loading time, so we can technically put an infinite number of “assets” in the game. However, we have a throughput limitation – we can insert a million people, but we can’t describe them all. So, different reasons, but similar limitations.

Normally, this is where I’d start noodling on the techniques that can be applied to this effect, but I’m going to take a sharp left turn here, because this framing has offered me an insight on a difference in taste in RPGs which I feel is worth digging into.

Baked into this framing is an assumption that one of the GM’s responsibility to make the world feel complete. This is a common assumption, but not a universal one. At more collaborative tables where everyone is contributing to content, they also are (ideally) sharing this responsibility.

I say “ideally”, because there’s a pattern here that can come out of collaborative play which can be kind of rough. You will sometimes see games where players are empowered to contribute, but where the responsibility for maintaining coherence falls to the GM.

This is not automatically bad, but it requires clarity on roles and rights. If the GM has a veto, or some other tools to keep a contribution from breaking everything, then it’s fine, but that is often at odds with the reasons people have gone to a collaborative model.

This is one more reason why I encourage thinking about GM and Players as contribution roles, not in terms of power. In this case, a GM veto is authority which is tied to a specific responsibility (maintain coherence), not some sort of general assertion of power.

(Also, this whole thread only matters if a sense of setting verisimilitude matters to the table, and it may not. I’m going to proceed as if it does, but I want to acknowledge that)

There’s no criticism of collaborative play here, and if anything, I think it’s a nice illustration of the fact that collaborative is not a monolithic ides. EVERY game with multiple players is collaborative – we are merely negotiating the shape that collaboration takes.

Or rather, we are HOPEFULLY negotiating that. The only real failure state is thinking there is only one correct way to do it and that it’s not up for discussion.

All of which is to say that the job of maintaining setting coherence is not anti-collaborative. The job can exist within high or low collaboration, but it’s also not necessary provided that some other system is put in place (or it’s decided it’s unnecessary).

If coherence is the table’s responsibility, there is no need for framing or similar tricks, because everyone is always in a position to be seeing everything. We just need to agree that the street is crowded, and we’re good to go.

And this is where we come to the rub: these different arrangements generate different experiences, and the experience are what we all come to the table for.

From this perspective, I do not think it’s controversial to state that you should pick arrangements to produce the experiences you want.

When players are looking for the experience of feeling like the city street is crowded, then they may well voluntarily sign up for a situation where the GM needs to manage information for effect (which is a fancy way to say they use tricks like framing.)

And all this matters because “managing information for effect” is also a very nice way to say “deceiving the players”.

I can absolutely hear the hackles rise at that framing, but I ask for a little bit of patience here.

Because this is true in the same way that “fiction” is a very nice way to say “lies”. And “art” is often a nice way to say “manipulation”.

More hackles, I know.

So, I think art and fiction are good, and lying and manipulation are bad, but I also think they’re the same thing. How can that work?

For this, I can only point out that words are not math, and equivalent and transitive properties don’t really work the way they should.

Ok, so, look, the act of deliberately eliciting an emotion from someone is an act of manipulation.

If that emotion is “fear” and the act is my threatening you, that’s pretty shitty.

If the emotion is “joy” and my act is writing a song, that’s awesome.

So, it’s about the emotion? Well, no.

If that emotion is “fear” and my action is creating a horror movie, that’s also awesome.

Now, there’s a nuanced point to be made here that art may not necessarily be created to elicit a specific emotion, and that it may just be created to elicit a reaction, with the specific emption depending on the viewer. This is true, but is still manipulation.

The problem is that we really don’t have words that distinguish the positive and negative version of these things, but the negative version is sufficiently negative that we tend to use the (nominally) neutral word to describe the negative version.

Normal stuff, but it muddles conversation.

Anyway, I could go through a similar exercise with deception, fiction, and good and bad lies, but the pattern is virtually identical, so I feel ok treating them as a pair.

So, even if that’s true, what’s the point?

The point is (and prepare your hackles), this is why I’m entirely comfortable with a GM lying (in the agreed upon context) to be able to run a better game, but that comfort is with the tools of deception, and offers no approval for the misuse or abuse of those tools.

And I am similarly comfortable being lied to (again, within contexts), and much of what goes into my opinion of a GM is tied to my opinion of THEM and my trust in their lies.

None of which is to say that everyone SHOULD be comfortable with that!

If you are not comfortable with that, then absolutely don’t. And don’t tolerate anyone insisting that you should.

But by extension, do not assume that the experience you expect is the experience that others are seeking or having.

There’s a magic word that I mentioned in passing, and that word is “trust”. There’s a whole other thread to be had about how much trust games require and how much they SHOULD require, but in short, it is much like collaboration – there is no answer, only arrangements.

Trust is certainly required to a certain threshold – trust that everyone will follow the rules and not cheat, at the very least – and for many non roleplaying games, that threshold is pretty much a binary switch. But for RPGs, there are RANGES of options.

And I say “ranges” because it’s far more complicated than a simple spectrum. “High Trust” play can take a wide variety of forms, and there is nothing which demands that trust be equally applied across all elements of play.

I am not in a position to fully unspool that, but I mention it to make it clear that – in the context of RPGs – “Trust” is not a simple thing, and treating it like it is simple ends up being kind of deceptive. 🙂

All of which is a huge amount of layout for why I can say, with no trace of paradox, that my preferred style of play could be described as “High Trust, High Deception”.

(And to reiterate: This is what I like. I merely mention it to seek to validate it as an OPTION, not as any kind of mandate.)