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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5454625" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, in the case of a gameworld, you don't need fictional elements until the players engage with them at the gametable. So "just in time" GMing means coming up with those elements when they're needed, ie, during the course of play as the players engage with them. In a D&D game, that engagement mostly happens via the PCs.The point of just in time GMing is that the gameworld that results is one that is highly responsive to and engaging of the players. This is achieved because the gameworld is built by the GM around the players' activities at the table (including especially the things they do with their PCs). The quote from Paul Czege that I posted upthread gives an example of this. So does the actual play report from my own game that I linked to. At the forefront of this approach is that the game is a game - it is not the players exploring a pre-existing world, but rather the players and the GM playing a game together in which the story of the PCs is created. (Of course in this sort of gaming there can be a type of experience of "discovering" rather than "creating" the story - but that is just a metaphor, as when an author says of a book that "it wrote itself". The literal truth, at which the metaphor gestures, is along the lines of the creation being a less-than-fully conscious process.)Just in time GMing can also save on prep time, but not necessarily very much- I find that I spend a lot of time planning and tweaking and revisiting situations, thinking about the direction the next few sessions might take and making notes on possible permutations and developments. And because the parameters for all this change after each session, there is always room to come back to this stuff and revise it. (In some ways, this is not unlike the way in which a sandbox GM might have to make notes after each session to make sure that any on-the-fly decisions made get incorporated into his/her formal setting notes.)I had in mind both of your disambiguations (4e is not the best "no myth" RPG ever, but is I think the best "no myth" edition of D&D), and I don't agree that this is not a point of distinction.Many of the features of 4e that you seem not to like - the linking of mechanical difficulties of challenge, for example, to metagame considerations like encounter level rather than to ingame considerations like armour worn; or the skill challenge structure for resolving conflicts out of combat - are in my view precisely the ones that support "no myth" play.They do so in more than one way.First, these structures set a baseline that gives the players a degree of confidence in putting their PCs forward without engaging in the sort of operational world-exploration that characterises classic dungeon play. In a classic D&D game it is generally regarded as madness just to set off into a dungeon without checking for rumours, scouting out, having a clear objective to which the party sticks, avoiding wandering monsters etc. (All the stuff Gygax discusses at the end of the 1st ed AD&D PHB.) If you don't want your game to feature this sort of operational play, you need to offer the players some sort of reassurance that not scouting out won't get them killed. The more-or-less railroady solution is the notorious Dragonlance "no death" rule. An alternative solution is the 4e solution - a metagame understanding about the way challenges are constructed, which leaves the players in charge of decision-making and risking their PCs, but makes clear where and how those risks will be located. (Robin Laws' second edition of HeroQuest does something similar with the pass/fail cycle being used to set difficulties.)A second but closely related point is that "no myth" play isn't just about winging it as a GM. It's about presenting the players with situations that will engage them from the start, and keep engaging them as they (via their PCs) resolve them. This is an obvious feature of the 4e combat mechanics, which are very carefully engineered to give combat a certain dynamic, of the PCs starting on the ropes but then, if the players play cleverly, coming back to win as they gradually deploy the various resources to which they have access. But the broader encounter-build mechanics of 4e, including page 42 and it's cousins, provide tools that help get good results in pacing, engagement, challenge etc across the whole game, and not just in tactical combat encounters.Third, and still related, once you have these sorts of mechacanics in play, activities can be handled in multiple mechanical ways (a bit like HeroQuest's distinction between extended and simple contests). For example, if the players want to have their PC's scout in order to increase their chances of survival, but no one at the table thinks that there is any profit in actually playing out the scouting - for example, the players don't care about the actual lay of the land except as a means to the end of being better prepared for any fights they get into, and the GM doesn't have any situation to initiate based on the lay of the land - then you can simply make a Nature or Stealth or Dungeoneering or Perception check (as appropriate) and award a bonus or penalty to future action on that basis (eg +2 or -2 to the next initiative check). Thus the players still get to engage with the fiction, and the PCs get the benefit of that engagement, but it can be handled at the table in a way that reduces its prominence in relation to the overall content of a session of play.Fourth, and building on the third point, the "looseness of fit" between mechanics and gameworld - that is, and as discussed in the previous paragraph, on any given occassion there can be multiple mechanical options for resolving something within the fiction, and similarly any given mechanical subystem can have different ingame meanings from instance to instance - opens up greater flexibility in scene framing and scene closing. A very simple example - when resolving overland travel using a skill challenge, it is easy to have a result like one in my most recent actual experience of this, where as a penalty for failure the PCs are denied the opportunity to get an extended rest. This in turn enabled multiple days worth of combat encounters to be combined into a single "day" of adventuring - in the sense that, having failed to get an extended rest, the PCs hadn't recharged their powers, surges etc. In Rolemaster this would be much harder to handle, because overland travel is treated purely on a "miles per day" basis, and the only way to interfere with the PC's rest would be to work out, in detail, the conditions of the ground, the difficulty of falling asleep in a boggy hollow, etc etc (and I'm sure some RM player somewhere has come up with a "Getting a good night's rest" static action table) or else interrupting them with an overnight attack. But the first of these options is not interesting for me - like the example of scouting, it gives an element of the gameworld undue prominence in terms of time taken at the gaming table - and the second option would undo the whole point of balancing verisimilitude of encounter frequency with availability, to the players, of their PC's daily resources.For me, these differences aren't just theory craft. While reading and thinking about RPG design theory has helped me crystallise them, I experience them regularly when I GM my 4e game, and compare it to the GMing of my previous RM game. My reason for switching to 4e was that, based on reading about it design in the lead up and then subsequent to its publication, I thought that it would deliver what I wanted better than RM: richly characterised PCs, with mechanics that reflect this (so far 4e is no better than RM), with action resolution mechanics that will regularly produce experiences at the table that reflect and build on those characters (I think 4e is marginally better at this than RM, but it's a pretty close call - if 4e wins here, it is for its non-combat action resolution), and with an approach to scene framing and scenario design that helps, rather than hinders, building encounters that will bring all these mechanical features to the fore (and here is where 4e is a huge win over Rolemaster).And after all this, you're wondering why I don't just play HeroQuest - which is, in turn, better for No Myth than is 4e, because it has no real tactical element at all in its encounter design - the answer is one that I gave upthread: me and my players enjoy a game with crunchy mechanics and tactical options. The only other FRPG I know that combines indie game play with crunch to satisfy RM players would be The Burning Wheel. But for better or worse, I run 4e instead.Have you read what I've posted upthread about "just in time" GMing? Or the example of play that I linked to? What has any of that got to do with DDM?</blockquote>

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