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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6729670" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree.  And as a general rule, I'd not assert a book says something unless I had a specific passage in mind.From Gygax's perspective, the DM is free to introduce or not introduce anything he wants.  But he wants the DMs he's coaching to follow the rules once something is in play.  Notably, at one point he mentions that the players will expect him to do so.  I think the idea here is that not having a combat so that you can do something more exciting is a good thing.  But wasting time on a combat that doesn't have a doubtable outcome is a bad thing on several levels.  For Gygax, as much as anything, rewarding players for winning such a combat would be wrong, as it removing value from any of the player's other victories by causing them to doubt whether they'd earned them.Of course, by removing a meaningless low reward random encounter from the dungeon simply to speed the players into the depths for the purposes of a particular expedition, he's still in some since making the whole foray easier.  The wandering encounter might be replaced in play time by an even more challenging prepared encounter, but the prepared encounter would still have been there.  They way to the treasure has has been made easier and purposely so.In that sense, Gygax really is fudging the system for the purposes of promoting what he sees as D&D's core story - overcoming challenges and earning the treasure through wits and skillful play.  Notice the marker he considers to be the important sign that wandering monsters should be suspended - the players have well and skillfully prepared for the expedition.  They got all their stuff together.  They made appropriate plans.  It would it appear be bad DMing to overthrow such well laid plans by mere random chance.Well said.  Equally, Gygax seems unconcerned with when the content is prepared, except that he believes (correctly I'd assert) that creating high quality content is difficult and as such, as much as possible it should be prepared before hand rather than in play.  In the particular passage I quoted, Gygax doesn't say you shouldn't improvise.  He just suggests that until you are experienced, you should not wing it unless you absolutely have to.    Fundamentally, I agree that it is difficult or impossible to avoid bias when a DM improvises.  I'm not a proponent of relying on improvisation.  But preparing things between sessions is not total defense against bias, or against poor quality material, or against DM's trying to manipulate player choices unduly.  From the player's point of view, it's irrelevant whether a room was populated in the DM's head 30 seconds ago, or whether the DM populated it 3 hours ago.  In many cases, it's the exact same mental procedure, and the main thing that has changed is the time pressure that the DM is under.No process of play or preparation can protect completely against bad DMing.</blockquote>

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