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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7721885" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, I'll assume I was misreading your intent.  However, even without the emoji your statement reads: "I suppose, but that also makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human."What did you mean by that if not throwing down a rhetorical gauntlet concerning a point you wished to debate?It was short.  It was an attack that made no attempt to justify its position through explanation.  I still think the term is applicable.  I concede you may not have meant it as such, and may not have intended it as such, but I don't know how else to describe it.I ask you to review the statements I made and find the insult.  I believe my response was certainly no more strongly worded than the original terms of the debate you initiated.  I believe my response was measured and considered.  I believe at no time did I insult you or engage in any ad hominem attack.   I do not understand how you feel insulted, or why you feel I was not calm.  I believe you are totally mischaracterizing my posts.   While it is certainly true I verbally attacked right back, the attack was clearly made against your strongly worded thesis, namely "[your use of the term perperation] makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human" that you advanced and was not made against you.  This exaggerated claim that I am insulting you and that I am not calm is simply, in my opinion, at best well-poisoning a discussion, and if not an open attempt to weaponize the admins against a position you don't like.   If you really feel insulted, even re-reading my posts several times, I do not understand how unless you consider my disagreement insulting, and if you do consider disagreement itself insulting and you want to hold to a standard like "politely asking for clarification before assuming the worst and going on the attack" why did you write, "that also makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human." and nothing else to clarify your intent with?I protest that my posts have been filled with question marks, and yours have been rather lacking in them.And if you believe I'm mischaracterizing your intent, well and good.  Please explain your intent now and why you drew those conclusions, so that I can try to understand whatever it is that seems so reasonable and obvious to you, but which I'm baffled by.While we are on the subject of clarity, please avoid introducing compound terms without explaining what you mean by it - if only because it is leaving me confused as to your intent.  I still do not know what you mean by the term "basic human" or "basic human being", and both are so rare that searching for them returns this conversation fairly high up in the search results.   I don't think either term is clarifying, nor do I think you know how such terms may be understood.I likewise do not understand what you mean by "off remark".   Do you mean it was an "off the cuff remark", meaning that you gave it little thought when you made it, or do you mean that it was a remark that came off wrong, meaning that you are acknowledging your intent was not clear, or that the remark has metaphorically spoiled, or do you mean something else entirely?Anyway, to return to the subject at hand, your point seems to be that something only is game preparation if it has the intent of being game preparation, and that if I study something without the intent to use it in a game, but later use it in a game, I shouldn't count it as game preparation.And I still disagree.  I do so on several grounds:1) Intent is a very hard thing to judge, and as much as possible I prefer to judge things without needing to judge their intent.  This is because intent is hard to judge without knowing a person's mind, and because people's minds can be complicated.  While there are many things that I study for pleasure and would study for pleasure regardless, it is nonetheless true that ever since I became a GM, everything I study is evaluated for its usability in a game and a great many things that I now study for pleasure began from the need to apply them to my game world with the intent of improving my game.  The examples I offered earlier weren't drawn completely at random, but from my own experience.  It is a mischievous but somewhat true statement by me to say, "Everything I know I learned from Dungeons & Dragons."   I was a far better student at most things because I could apply it to my gaming than I ever was because it could further my scholastic achievement.   The former I cared rather greatly about, and the later I neglected until much later in life than I should have.2) Your definition that includes intent is inferior to mine because it may and probably does confuse a novice GM about the nature of running a game "without preparation".    In my opinion, the most important idea to communicate to a novice GM is that to improvise successfully they must "prepare to improvise".   Imagine the situation where I ran the session in a pseudo-Roman bathhouse drawn from my memories of studying Roman baths for like 16 hours - videos, articles, books, etc.   By the definition you just advanced, the only part of this that was actual preparation was the quick sketch I made in my head when I discovered or decided that at that moment a game in a Roman bathhouse would be fun.   Using your definition, a novice GM might believe that that could similarly improvise a similar game in mere moments, and perhaps they could.  But if they could, it wouldn't be because you can actually improvise a game in mere moments with no preparation, but because they had done the heavy lifting to prepare to improvise.   By my definition, the studying of the Roman Baths retroactively becomes game preparation as soon as I rely on that knowledge to play a game, regardless of my original intent, just as a lifetime of intently reading DC comics and obsessing over the characters and plotlines serves as preparation to run an RPG in the DC universe even if it was done without that intent.  From my vantage, a gaming definition needs to have practical value and needs to clarify.   I would not want to introduce a definition that might confuse a novice GM, and in my opinion the definition that includes intent fails to explain to a novice GM why their "low preparation" DC supers roleplaying game is failing, when that of a GM that has spent a lifetime intently reading DC comics is not.   As a practical matter, all that comic book reading was preparation, regardless of intent.3) And I would also note that the definition of preparation that I'm offering is in agreement with that of the original essay, which I suppose - because I rather admire it and consider it important - I ought to find the time to review and explain why I like it so much.   At the very least, this would only be fair to the writer, considering how critical I've been of some of his other essays I disagreed with.</blockquote>

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