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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6803198" data-attributes="member: 177">Pardon if I have missed this somewhere in the mix...One major benefit of pre-authorship is pre-design.  Sometimes, you actually want to make sure what you are presenting is really thought through before players encounter it.Games that are tactically deep typically need fairly carefully considered design of the tactical challenges, resource depletion rates, and the like, to keep them challenging, but not overwhelming.   But, you can't pre-design the tactical challenges without knowing what's going to come up - that means you need pre-authorship of much of the material.  IMHO, nobody should be "winging it" for mid to upper level D&D 3.x play focusing on combat, for example.  Meanwhile, a game like FATE, or Cortex+, that isn't so tactically detailed, can be authored on the fly easily, because the number of tactical bits needed to make a worthy challenge are far fewer. Cogent mysteries also need a fair bit of pre-authoring.  If the goal is for the players to use reasoning to figure out what amounts to a big logic puzzle, you have to pre-author that puzzle, or you are likely to become either inconsistent, or not put in enough information for the players to work out the puzzle, both of which will lead to highly frustrating play experiences.Note how both of these are situations where play has a significant center around use of logic.</blockquote>