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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6781379" data-attributes="member: 27160">Sure. No less a chap than Dwight Eisenhower once said "I have always found plans to be mostly useless. Planning, on the other hand, is utterly essential!"In the way I strategise when I approach games, and when I tackle big issues at work, I find that I can agree with this assessment pretty thoroughly. I don't have "a plan". I have lots of plans all mutating and developing in parallel. Some are preferred scenarios, some are more of a contingency, others are speculative but it turns out the conditions for them never really emerge. I know from conversations we have had that several of my gaming friends experience much the same sort of state of mind.To enable this sort of "ongoing foment", I need to have a few things. Firstly, I need a clear idea of my objectives. In a board game or a war game this will tend to be given, but in a roleplaying game it will come at least partly from the character I'm playing (whether this be my PC or an NPC). This I break down into sub-objectives, and this is where the main requirement arises - I need to know my character's capabilities. Note: this is very different from needing to know what my character knows, which is usually completely impractical in any case. I am personally incapable of picking out the spoor of wild animals and recognising its import in natural surroundings, and it would take far too long to even learn about it to play a game, but all I need to know is that my character can do it either reliably, or not-so-reliably. I need an accurate model in my head of what my character can do, because the character will almost certainly have an accurate model of what they can do - even though their model may take a very different form than mine.Here is where rules really help and relying on what the GM thinks my character's capabilities are doesn't suffice. It comes down a little bit like [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] is describing; my character knows far more about the world in which they live than I ever will - my brain is pretty fully engaged getting and maintaining all I know, never mind all some other guy knows! So I need a proxy, a substitute model, if I am to strategise in a way that feels adequate to me from the character's point of view.This will necessarily involve also having some clear model of how the world outside the character works. To know my capabilities in dealing with the environment, I will need to know something about how the environment will respond.Given these elements of a world model - which is not identical to the character's world model (because getting to that is impossible in less than a lifetime), but is a proxy sufficient for evaluating and moulding plans about the objectives that are relevant to the play in which we are engaging - I can start up the engine to build plans, evaluate possibilities, identify contingencies and so on. If I have to ask the GM for constant clarifications and guidance, this ability simply fails. It becomes a stunted husk of what I think of as true "strategising", where a bare minimum of options and contingencies are evaluated. In the "system thinking" terminology I was using above, much of the evaluation is being done by my "system 1" brain after I have translated the rules into its terms, but it is being guided by the "system 2" brain concerning constraints and objectives, with additional input for any maths required. This is quite hard work, but also fun as I reach a sort of state of buzzing consciousness that's hard to explain, with plans and possibilities forming and reforming as the situation in the game changes.Does that cover the ground you had in mind?Thanks!</blockquote>

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