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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8220741" data-attributes="member: 16814">Multi-quoting here, I'll try to keep it brief.You've missed my point a bit.  What I said was that you could really tell from the fiction that was generated.  I'm perfectly confident that, in person or on a video/voice only line that you'd pick up on behavior cues that would lead you to your guess.  The point, though, wasn't to say that improv can fool you -- I think this is a silly argument all the way around, the intent isn't there because the goal to fool you isn't there.  That implies that not-improv is a goal, and so improv must be hidden!I also think that a lot of your list requires trying to play in your specific way -- ie, theater of the mind pretty much dispenses with your 1, and can be prepped or not, so that's not a strong argument.  The rest really can happen if I'm constantly checking my notes, or if I'm a tad disorganized with my prep (as can happen with a quick direction change).  Okay, so, here's a truth:  I'm currently running a 5e published adventure path.  It's Descent into Avernus.  It is prep heavy, especially since I make a good number of changes to the module to correct for things that would absolutely derail my group (the ham-handed railroad of the first chapter, for instance, would have seen open rebellion, so I had to make it a subtle railroad that appealed to them).  So, yeah, I'm not zealous in the sense that I think people will play as I do when they realize anything at all -- I still play with heavy prep, railroads, etc.!!!No, instead what I'm talking about is getting to the underlying reasons for preferences, because the ones usually given are hogwash.  You might think that the only way to get a deep, believable, interactive, consistent game world is heavy prep, but this isn't the case.  And, if you're arguing against any of the techniques that can do this without heavy prep, then your actual issue isn't deep, believable, consistent worlds!  It's something else, and you should do yourself the favor of figuring that out, because you might find that you can get at that goal better with some small or maybe large changes.  Or you might find you've already got it down and don't need anything more, but you'll be able to answer these questions more easily!And, as [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER] noted, you actually do this when you start talking about player skill in navigating the GM's key (shorthand).  This is absolutely a worthy goal, and it is well served by heavy prep because heavy prep (theoretically) does the job of making a fair playing field that such skill can be deployed against.  There are still other ways, and you might benefit from looking into them (I'd recommend how Torchbearer does this as at least a look -- it's not too far off from D&D, but it does do some new things).  Again, you assume the goal of a master ad libber is to perfectly recreate a prepped game such that the players can't tell in play.  This is silly.  Why would someone interested in an improv approach put in the work to recreate a different approach?No, the point is, again, that if you read a story hour about each kind of game, you'd be really hard pressed to tell which is which.</blockquote>

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