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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5636827" data-attributes="member: 54877">What I do when I DM is a mixture of these styles. There is some real operational play mixed in, though not nearly to the degree as one would expect in a traditional 1E dungeon crawl. And my "develop in play" style is somewhat of a "just in time" version, but it is "just in time" modeled more after the inventory systems used by modern commerce than straight improvisation on demand. Or if you prefer, it is improvisational jazz rather than improvisational theatre. The key difference is when and how decisions are made.  Let me outline how it works for me, to illustrate: 1. Scene is framed, by me and/or players. Characters are well understood. They have a place to act. Typically, I give them the broad outline, then they fill in details, as they need to ground themselves. They are in small fortified village, poorly maintained, and sloppily guarded. What are the walls made of? I know that one, already, as an image is in my mind. "Wood". How high? I decide--15 feet, but inconsistent, and thus shorter in places. There is a tavern. How does it appear? I ask the player that wants to know to narrate something appropriate. If the thing they narrate isn't entirely a good fit, I'll help them tweak it so that it is. 2. Through a series of events, the party ends up confronting corrupt guards at the door to their fortified barracks. The guards slam the door and manage to barricade it before the PCs can act. One of the PCs, a minitaur fighter (very strong) wants to break down the door. I need to know the DC of the door. No problem. But I also need to know about the floor plan inside and other such details.  3. I decide on the things that need a decision. Then I convey that decision to the players. So before the player rolls, I have a DC for that door. I'm emphatically not changing it to fit with a great roll or poor roll to produce some outcome that I like or want. I know there is a stairwell to the second floor in an anteroom just inside the door, and a narrow hall to the right. When do I know it? Right before the player busts down the door, and I need to describe what they see. There is also a cloak rack in the hall (as I visualize the room), but I don't care about that in the chaos of the fight unless a player states that they are observing more carefully. 4. Players react. The ones that are prone to use scenery are going for the stairs, or asking about other options. The options are then described as decided, not based on what the player wishes for. Sorry, no giant drapes in the anteroom to drop over the guards charging down the hall. Now, as it happens, the above scene took place in an adventure that I got from a module--a rather poorly designed and written module in Dungeon. But I used it the same way I do things myself--I got an impression from it, and then ran the session as develop in play from that impression, rather than the module itself. (I did use the NPCs and monsters more or less as written, same as I would if I wrote them out myself for my own adventure.) This is part of that improv jazz distinction. There are pieces prepared ahead of time. These pieces fit a pattern or impression in your mind. As you need new pieces, you use the impression, tool, techniques, etc. to improv a suitable piece that fits into what has come before. Then you narrate. It's a subtle difference between that and "make up something cool," but it is a difference. What you get is something that does a fairly good job of emulating certain aspects of simulation, without exactly being simulation--same as, unless you really know what to look for, you'll have some difficulty definitely picking out the improv jazz from the fully prepared jazz. Finally, to pull this off, you do need some note taking, but unlike simulation note taking, which demands a high fidelity on details, you are more worried about the fidelity to the impression. The impression is king. In simulation, you might improv a description of a dance by an orc tribe--the point being color, to immerse the players into the world with details, and if it matters later, their ability to use this detail dealing with a similar tribe in the future. Runequest is heavily slanted towards this kind of play, at least by its default presentation. I think some D&D players who value immersion go for it, as well. Whereas, in this impressionist variety, the details of the dance don't matter. The color matters, but in broad strokes. And it matters that these orc tribes have some kind of ritual dance. But the player is not asked to remember details and use them later. The player is expected to remember the impression, and use that later. It is also no accident that my favorite painters are Monet and Renoir. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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