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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8988462" data-attributes="member: 4937">Enlarging on this there is a technique that has grown up in fiction writing called by some "mystery boxes" where you present the audience early with something very strange and mysterious to spark their interest - "The Truth is Out There".   You as the writer are yourself not supposed to have any idea what is in the mystery box.  Instead, you just put layer upon layer of mystery boxes in front of the audience until at some point later on you the writer pick up all the mystery boxes and try to explain them, often by examining fan theories about what is in the mystery boxes."Bad Robot Productions" and JJ Abrams are one of the leaders in this style of storytelling.And personally I find it absolutely infuriating, to the point that I refuse to watch anything produced by Bad Robot or former alumni of the company.  Because compared to stories where the author has some sort of plan and plays fair and authors the story with a goal, the resulting transcripts are just nightmares that always wind around to some entirely disappointing conclusion with characters whose motivations were always muddled and unclear and whose endings never quite resolve all the contradictions and mysteries in any sort of satisfying manner.  "Bad Robot" has been responsible for so much IP destruction over the years that if memes, narratives, characters, and fiction were people, "Bad Robot" would be serial killers.  It makes me want to pull my hair out.So when I see GM's recommending to novice GMs that they follow the "Bad Robot" technique of inventing everything on the fly and hoping it will work out in the end, I'm appalled.  And in part I'm appalled because I've experienced this crap.  I started a new campaign with this GM who was very vocal about how great of a GM he was and how good he was at improvisation, and it was immediately really clear that he was actually just leaning into our table talk and letting us create stuff and he had as much imagination and idea of what he was doing as a ferret.  A modern Chat Bot could extemporize a better adventure than that.  There was absolutely nothing to discover in that world.  He literally could not have been involved and we could have played the game without him better than with him sitting there.</blockquote>

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