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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1622916" data-attributes="member: 3146">There's a certain level of improvisation that's necessary. I type up a vision and give it to the players. Will they interpret it correctly? Will it yield useful information? Will they seek out aid in interpreting it? I don't know. So, if the paladin decides to go into the cathedral and inquire about the dream and its interpretation, I have to make something up on the fly. I give him a spot check to notice the figure in the stained glass window that matches a figure from his dream. I decide whether the priest he collars will be old or young and given to flights of fancy or down to earth and whether he will take the vision seriously or treat it as someone wanting attention. There's little you can do about that. No matter how many options you anticipate when preparing or writing, you won't be able to anticipate everything the players do.Now, the players accept a quest and begin to search for the mythical Jade chapel. I could throw random hippogriffs at them attempting to eat their horses or pull owlbears out of the wilderness to attack their camp at night. However, essentially random hardships are inappopriate for a Quest. The players' reaction would justifiably be to simply kill or drive off the monsters and hope to get things over with as quickly as possible before fighting griffons, hippogriffs and owlbears gets boring and I need to use feral advanced dire bears to keep things interesting. If I am going to have any unity to  the story and make the journey a journey of development for the characters, I need to engage in a little planning. So, I put a troll under a bridge as a test of courage. The players can leave it alone and ford the bridge downstream but doing so isn't what is expected of a questing knight so that's one failure point for them. (I figure I'm going to determine what the rewards of the quest are by seeing how they react to situations on the way). So, next I give them a celestial eagle and they follow it and see a bandit who killed one of their parents working as a common laborer in a field. It's supposed to be a test of mercy because he'll beg for mercy and forgiveness and then we see what the PC does. After that, they meet a damsel on the road who asks them to escort her because thats what damsels do when they meet knights and there's a rejected suitor who she thinks might be planning on kidnapping her. If they defend her, of course, the damsel leads them to her father's house where, if they are good guests and bring a gift, her father will give them advice about the quest and a gift of a magic weapon that will be able to injure the demon they will have to face before the gates of the chapel.I could improvise the whole quest but it won't be as good as it will be if I put some thought into it. For instance, I could eschew all shame and improvise a D&D version of Chretien de Troyes Knight of the Cart only with a different goal. Start out with the cart, move on to a challenge from a foolish knight whose father doesn't want him to fight and then a moral dilemma when a knight asks for mercy after losing a duel but a damsel asks for his head. Then I could put in the Sword Bridge and a castle where there is a tomb to the best knight in the world and the PC has to open it. However, were I to simply do that there would be several disadvantages. First, I'm not exactly improvising. I'm stealing a structure from Chretien de Troyes and hoping that my players haven't read the story. That in itself is not so bad but if I have to pick a structure at random, I may end up with a structure that isn't as appropriate to the story I'm telling. (The Knight of the Cart would need more than a few changes if it's a quest for a chapel taken out of patriotism and faith rather than a quest for a lady taken out of love. For instance, the battle with Melegaunt and Lancelot's willingness to lose in order to simply continue to gaze at Guenivere couldn't be duplicated if the goal is to storm into the chapel like the man in the vision at the House of the Interpreter in Pilgrim's Progress). Also, while I'm pretty good at quickly throwing together a statblock or two, it's unlikely that my knights will be significantly different from each other if I am improvising everything. No time to make one a mounted combat master with a lance but who must keep moving and charging to be effective and another a specialist in the  light flail who is fond of disarming and sundering. That requires a bit of work before the game. If I'm improvising, I either need stats right there or a simple and obvious set of stats that I only need to write down once. I probably won't be able to structure my treasures to prepare the PCs for future challenges either. And, most importantly, without the benefit of being able to consider and rearrange the order of events, I may not get the order right. For instance, I am planning on taking a trip through a pool into a kind of phantom realm where the chapel will be found. Were the PC to encounter the man who murdered his parents there, in a clearly supernatural place, the dilemma would not be as accute since it's clearly a test that does not actually involve granting mercy to an actual murderer but is a phantom designed to test the character's reactions. So, when I think about it, I move that encounter to the front of the story so that it's clearly real.So improvisation is fine and a certain amount of improvisation is necessary. However, preparation enables one to tell better and more coherent stories than improvisation does.</blockquote>

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