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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9455174" data-attributes="member: 75787">Although I understand where you're coming from, I'm not sure I'd agree that there is a hard dividing line between a board game and an RPG. As a thought exercise, let's imagine a one-hour game with defined characters where the goal is to break into bank. Modern day spy genre.I could make a choose-your-own adventure book for this, with various options and branching logic as per usual. If the book was 20 pages long, most people would feel very constrained and not like an RPG. But suppose the book was 1,000,000 pages long and covered any reasonable in-genre choice. It might be completely indistinguishable from a real GM to most players.Now suppose that we augment our million page book with an LLM interface that responds to unusual inputs, builds a short scene and then points back into the book. Pretty easy to write even with current tech. Is the LLM improvising?This again I am not sure of. The defintion of improvisation I am using is "creating content without having planned that content". If in Nethack I dig a hole in a floor and drop a monster into the shop, and then confuse it -- then that situation was not specifically planned for in the code so isn't the games reaction then fitting within the definition of improvisation?You could argue that although the coders didn't plan for that exact scenario, they did plan for all the parts and how they would interact, but the isn't that the same for me when I run a game? I have learned rule on how the world works, how the genre works and how the specific game rules work and I combine them with some randomness thrown in?My experience does match yours in that I personally enjoy a game with more and deeper planning. Where I think we may differ is that I don't think that is a universal truth.As a final thought, maybe the scale of the experience is worth considering in this discussion. I've much preferred the 6+ session arcs and year+ campaigns I've been in where the GM prepped strongly to those where they just followed the campaign book script with little extra work. But for indiviual sessions, I've had a lot of fun with no-pren sessions WITHIN a planned campaign. And I think we'd both agree that scenes that are completely improvised can be very good.Which is why improv actors are a ton of fun for a 10 minute skit, but we don't see improv 3 hour character dramas very often.</blockquote>

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