Developing RPG Table Skills: Framing and Cutting Scenes

There’s a lot of advice for GMs out there, but I believe an underserved topic in rpg blogging, writing, and YouTubing is identifying and practicing at-the-table player skills1. I mean this especially for a definition of player that means “a non-GM player in a GMed game,” but really I mean any skill that’s going to be used primarily at the table rather than during prep and used by many or all people at the table. In this series I’m going to identify some player skills I’ve focused on improving at over the past few years and write down some techniques I now approach them with. The target audience here is people at a ~201 level. People coming in fresh may be better off focusing more on basics like getting comfortable with how this medium works at all and tracking rules. I’ll be approaching this from my perspective as someone who plays a lot of story games and has more moderate experience with larp and adventure games (think OSR stuff, Mothership, etc). When I’m playing, generally my…