RPGaDay: Frame

Something that I've learned from RPGaDay is how much our frame of reference shapes the way we look at things.

Forests, for example.  I wrote about forests from my own frame of reference.  I live in Britain, so to me, forests are largely tourist destinations, shaped by their industrial history.  It's hard to get truly lost in a British forest - worse case scenario you pick a direction and stick to it and you'll be out in a few hours, tops.  Probably less as you're likely to run into a village, or at the very least a road, long before that.  Britain's biggest forest is Galloway Forest in Scotland, at just under 300 square miles, and it's riddled with trails and peppered with tiny villages, and even at it's most remote you're never more than a day's walk from a major road.  And Galloway Forest is three times the size of England's biggest forest, the New Forest.

The presence of humans is stamped all over British forests, and that affects how I see them. American forests, on the other hand...

Google tells me the largest forest in the USA is Tongass National Forest in Alaska.  It's about 90 times the size of Galloway Forest, and about 0.5 times the size of England.  Looking at it on Google Maps, it looks like logging and tourism has barely nibbled at its edges.  It's wild in a way I can't even begin to imagine.  You could walk for days in that forest, and even then you'd be more likely to find the sea than a road.  And, of course, unlike a British forest there are probably bears in it.  And wolves.  And moose.

Frames of reference are something I'm having to be more aware of when playing RPGs online, since I'm now frequently playing with people from other countries.  The scenario I'm currently running is based around Bournville in Birmingham, and while most Brits will have some idea what kind of a place Birmingham is, and instantly associate Bournville with the Cadbury chocolate factory, that's not always immediately obvious to people who didn't grow up here.

Even without the geographic differences, different frames of reference are likely to show up.  Age is a big one, as I realised last night when half the PCs were singing a song from 1979 that I'd never heard because it's older than I am.  (I know some 70s music, of course, but the song wasn't the kind of music my parents were into, so didn't feature in their vinyl collection.)  Gender is another.  A recently kickstarted game, Troubleshooters, takes a lot of inspiration from Tintin.  I barely know anything about Tintin, because those comics are part of a genre of adventure stories that were written both about and for boys.  I've never read them, for the same reason that most of the people I game with have never read Barbie comics.

And then there's things like the Same Page Tool, the purpose of which seems to be making sure everyone is looking at the game from the same frame of reference.  That does require at least one person to be aware of the game's frame of reference, which was not a thing when we played The Sprawl.  Attempting to play a PBTA game through the frame of Cyberpunk 2020's extreme simulationism was...well, I had a great time, but ultimately the game only lasted three sessions because trying to play it that way just didn't work.

On a more meta note, it's been fascinating to see how different people have approached the prompt words for RPGsDay through their own frame of reference.