Joe does it again with an excellent OP over at Buried Without Ceremony, this time exploring a couple of my front-burner play-preference issues like a flaming vorpal sword of awesome that slices right into my chest and tugs at my soul.

Plugging in Scenes and System via Buried Without Ceremony.

I love the concept of looking at play preferences in terms of sockets, which I first encountered by reading Mo Turkington’s blog and later scratched the surface of discussing with Rich and Chris on Canon Puncture #52. And scene framing is also a big subject of exploration for me, so Joe’s thoughts on how systems help us engage scenes through sockets is very useful to my musings on how to get more out of play and help my co-players get more out of play, too.

This is my favorite paragraph, because it clarifies so many things for me about how scene framing relates to “pushing conflict”:

It’s a common misconception that the way you do aggressive scene framing well is to frame to the moment of pregnant conflict, that you open with an opposed situation that must be diffused. I’m going to take a step back from this idea and offer a suggestion: scene framing should work to engage our sockets in a meaningful way, skipping that which doesn’t satisfy our engagement and energy. In other words, if we all have Conflict/Plot/Choice sockets, then and only then is it appropriate to frame to moments of intense conflict. If we all have Setting/Aesthetic sockets, then we should be framing with interesting and evocative images, and use scene framing to move us to those images. – Joe McDonald

I encourage you to go over to BWC and share your thoughts and ideas in the thread, and hopefully we can have a fruitful discussion that takes this topic to even more interesting levels.