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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8988419" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, that "generated through some procedure of play" is pretty darn broad.  I concede that there are some procedures of play that are in fact equal to being pregenerated.   An example of this would be purely "procedural generation" in a game like Nethack.  But notice the features of pure procedural generation.  First, the game won't metagame against you.  It is a completely neutral referee in a way that no human can perfectly emulate and certainly no human can emulate if they are creating in response to events.  Secondly, truths tend to be persistent.  The trap is there from the moment you enter the new level.  It doesn't get created as a response to checking for or not checking for traps.  If you go down a stair to force generation of a new level of the dungeon, and immediately go back up, the state of the dungeon stays persistent as an established truth.  If in fact a GM could emulate a computer in this regard, then I do concede that it wouldn't matter to me as a player whether or not the fiction was generated ahead of time or generated continuously.   (There is also the matter that a procedural generator like Nethack is extremely well play tested and has extensive effort put into building it and making sure it is both truly procedural and deep and coherent in a way that most human operated random generators just aren't.)But human GM's can't emulate computers in this regard, either in their ability to be neutral or in their ability to spin up extensive and coherent and detailed fiction without effort and time.   Consider again the experience of exploring the 'Tomb of Horrors' primarily with a Discovery aesthetic of play.  You enter into a new room, and the DM reads a description and then shows you an illustration of the room as well.  This is really aesthetic Discovery!  You feel like a real explorer seeing things for the first time.   Now compare this to attempts to wing it.  The DM needs to come up with a concise and accurate description of the room that leaves out nothing important because without that description how can the players make choices?  And now secondly, we've lost that illustration of the room.  And thirdly, as soon as we recognize the GM is winging it, we've lost the trust that the scenario is "fair" because how do we know whether or not the trap exists ahead of our interaction with it?  We are now in a world of Schrodinger's Trap, where the GM adjudicates on the fly based fundamentally on whim whether or not you stepped on one.  And believe me, from personal experience, you don't want to play in a dungeon with Schrodinger's Traps that are all the time trying their best to evade detection based on how you search or don't search for them.</blockquote>

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