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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7721899" data-attributes="member: 4937">If you disagree, then you are saying that the person you disagree with is wrong.  I don't see how you can understand disagreement to mean anything else.The dictionary defines the following as synonyms " take issue with, challenge, contradict, oppose, be at variance with, be at odds with, not see eye to eye with, differ with, dissent from, be in dispute with, debate with, argue with, quarrel with, wrangle with, clash with, be at loggerheads with, cross swords with, lock horns, gainsay".   I have absolutely no problem with you doing any of those things.  You'll note just before this, someone else disagreed with me and was worried that I'd be upset with them attacking me.   I answered, "No, by all means, attack way.  I'm not offended by disagreement."There was strong disagreement.   I treated it as strong disagreement, and responded that I strongly disagreed with your disagreement.  That's it.  I am not misconstruing that you disagreed.   If you are triggered by the word 'attack', then fine, let's use the word disagreement so that there will not be any misunderstanding of what I mean by it.What insinuation?  The only fault I find with you is your initial statement was not based on anything I actually had said, and you immediately began this whole thing about how insulting you found my posts.  Then assume that I read every post disagreeing with me as mere disagreement, and therefore an invitation to engage in a debate on the subject.  I don't see what "declaration of wars" have to do with it.  You are willing to charitably describe your disagreement as polite, and yet you do not regard my own disagreement as equally polite.  I don't see how you come to that conclusion.  I didn't respond to you impolitely, and certainly no less impolitely than your statement.  Moreover, your politeness or lack of politeness had nothing to do with my response.   I'd just answered disagreement from another poster just before your own.   Do you think I was impolite then?   If you are of the opinion that I'm lacking in calm or that I overreact to disagreement, what do you think made for the difference in how I responded to you versus how I responded to someone else?I've answered this question at length already, and yes, if your experience as a pasta chef becomes relevant to how you run a game, then that time spent studying pasta becomes important game preparation.   I don't know, maybe in your game world, "Pastamancery" is an important form of magic, and pasta preparation becomes something that is important to the in game fiction.   Naturally, pasta chefs have a huge advantage running a game in that game world.Your intent may be clear to you, but it was not clear to me.   All I had to go on was that you disagreed axiomatically with my definition.I disagree.  Intent is always almost impossible to determine.  Why someone is saying something is the most important and most difficult to discern aspect of any statement.   It's one of the reasons that teaching a computer natural language parsing is so incredibly difficult.   Context and intent are everything.  Natural language does not inherently disclose context, and most especially the intention.I don't agree.   It only implies that the student had at some prior point done the preparation for the exam.  For example, if the class was English Lit, and the test was on Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn", and that prior to taking the class the student - because he considered the story to be one of his favorites, had read the story 4 times - and upon learning that they would read the story in class this sesmester, the student reread it again to once again familiarize himself with the story and to review it from a more mature perspective, then the student would be completely in his rights to answer "Yes." to that question.  That the student and the teacher now have a different mental model of what "Yes" means is very relevant to running RPGs, because GMs have to be very aware when giving descriptions of the different mental pictures the same description may create, but for the purpose of this discussion we are only trying to define preparation - not argue about how to create a shared mental space.There is nothing inactive about unintentional preparation.   Unintentional doesn't imply inactive.  But even passive preparation is still preparation.  You've added now a new qualifier limiting how you define preparation.    Yet, I would argue your qualifiers do not aid understanding, but reduce it.   My answer to, "How do you prepare for GMing sessions and campaigns?", and the answer provided by the original essay, includes both active and passive, and intentional and unintentional preparation - and I believe that this is correct and gives the greatest understanding.Telling them that they can pull form what they know implies that they actually know it.  So if they do not know it, giving them a prerequisite to running a campaign is that they first learn those things that they don't know is in fact extremely good advice.   I don't understand how you draw that conclusion.   If we are disagreeing over something, clearly we both believe that one of us is more right than the other.   People don't disagree over wholly subjective matters.   Exactly how you go from, "Your definition that includes intent is inferior to mine..." to me not arguing in good faith, I have no idea.   But I am still seeing no evidence of your assertion that I insulted you. I believe it is extremely helpful to tell a novice DM that they, if they wish to successfully run an RPG, must do more than just prepare for what they expect to happen in a session, and instead must also acquire system and genera mastery.   If they already have such mastery, it will decrease the amount of preparation the must do because they will be prepared to improvise, but if they do not yet have this mastery they should strive to obtain it and this will increase the preparation work that they must put it.So let's agree to call "doing your homework" part of preparation.   If we can't agree that "doing your homework" is preparation, then we are going to have to agree to disagree, because my main point could be understood as, "doing your homework is preparation".   I consider that trivially obvious.   And in any event, I'm getting really tired of talking about how one ought to disagree, rather than talking about how one ought to prepare for a game.  So can we start confining things to that?Unless you meant to put a "not" there, then I have no idea any more what you are arguing, as I also agree that drawing on what you know is the same as game preparation because all that stuff you learned prepared you for the game you are running.  Either that stuff has to already be there, or you have to actively work to put it there.  The implication is, the more experienced you are, the less you have to prepare to run a successful session. Fundamentally, game preparation is something I consider to be a very complex topic, potentially involving all sorts of different things.</blockquote>

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