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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 7100253" data-attributes="member: 2656">In my early days in the hobby I idolised the totally prepared style of play as a goal to strive for ie. fully prewritten material that the PCs explore and the players learn about. I can't remember the first time I encountered referees with a different style, a more improvisational style with few or no maps and limited preparation, where the referee riffs off the players actions and comments and improvises an adventure and a setting. I had my doubts about this style originally, seeing it as lazy and slapdash and potentially badwrongfun. Contributing to my poor impression of this style is that I was objectively worse at playing in that style, as it's harder for a player to prep for a improv-based game, and there's a lack of precendent to fall back on.I've got a lot more comfortable with improvisation over the years, tho I still feel more comfortable with a moderately prepped game.But the recent mention of the spell "Passwall" in recent thinking got me thinking. The Passwall spell as written is for an old fashioned game with detailed maps and secret rooms full of loot. It's much less useful in a improvised game where the map might be some names of buildings or encounter areas with lines drawn between them indicating possible routes, only a mental map, or even no map at all. In improvised game I've seen referees treat spells like Passwall as a plot coupon to transit from one scene or location to another, as supported by the fiction. They could even draw a new line on their network diagram if they wanted to. Referees were more amenable to such use in improvised games because they were looking for an excuse to transition the game from one scene to another and the spell use gave them that excuse, and involved expenditure of a limited resource, a fairly high level spell that the rules suggested should accomplish something concrete in the gameworld.And when you can treat a spell as a plot coupon like that, its easier to consider using other skills and resources to accomplish equivalent things in producing scene transitions. Most narrative games have plot points, drama points or fate points etc for expending on such declarations and mechanics to adjudicate them.Secondly,  the discussion on player-driven/narrative games and illusionism may have driven onto the rocks. I've never played any of those games, but it's obvious to me that if the point of a game is the addressing the motivations of the PCs and the dramatic goals of the players, the players are primarily invested in the game constantly moving to address those dramatic goals. The scene setting and verisimilitude of the gameworld are less important considerations, and only need to be sufficiently plausible to satisfy the participants. Most social contracts would deem it bad form to poke at the setting with the intention of disrupting it, or showing the setting is "only a film set with no substance". From a different play styles perspective this is true, but from the PoV of players primarily invested in their PCs exploring dramatic goals, irrelevant.Technically, the PCs could be floating heads suspended in a void and still conduct the game so long as they had appropriate dramatic goals and means of addressing them. As the arbiter of whether a PCs dramatic concerns are being addressed is the player themselves, it's impossible to apply illusionism in a game like this to prevent pursuing relevant dramatic goals without that player noticing and presumably objecting. (Other sorts of illusionism might well be possible without immediate discovery, but not illusionism to frustrate the player's dramatic goals)No style of play can survive being played in bad faith, every style of play has downsides that people downplay or ignore for the sake of the game and the other participants.</blockquote>

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