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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6041822" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I hope you don't mind but I'm going to break your post out and rebuild a bit as these go hand-in-hand with my commentary.  Absolutely agree with this.  "Key" is almost an understatement here.  For myself and my efforts in GMing, I would change it out for "the primary".  Given that this is "the primary" GM's role, I find that consistently having to play referee (key word here is consistently) and * "fight the mechanics" is not just needlessly burdensome and tedious...it is outright adversarial to the mood, tone, rhythm, and pace of my games and takes away from mine and my players' creative focus.  This is why, more than anything else, 5e's missions statement of "Rulings not Rules" gives me pause.  I don't want a system that outright endorses opacity, transience, selective muteness (as if it were a virtue) in order to provoke arbitration.* in-filling where they are silent, playing arbiter where they are opaque or transient, modulating where they are extreme, seasoning where they are blandI'm going to take the opportunity to subtly disagree (I think...if I'm reading it correctly...may be missing some context) with some of the above.  I believe what I'm reading is that mental and physical preparation is antagonistic toward letting the players dictate Point B "(ie, there is no  Point B prior to the scene beginning)."  I think there is an excluded middle here (and I also wonder that if the excluded middle actually exists in their own minds and they aren't acknowledging it).  It is almost inevitable, and truly natural, for human minds to be curious and to extrapolate ends from beginnings (Point A to Point B above).  As such, it seems to me that a GM will oftentimes (even if merely ruminating upon...not anchoring the game to) consider, and attempt to infer, what will intuitively arise from the genesis of the scene on through the players' driving will to the scene's conclusion.  This pre-realization, GM "scene extrapolation" (to borrow the phrase above) does not then guarantee an inevitable confirmation bias whereby all routes taken by the players' driving will lead to one conclusion.  It is certainly a means to make this possible, but it doesn't guarantee it.  Further, I would say that, just as in combat encounter building, a few "model runs" in the mind of the GM prior to playing out the non-combat encounter (scene) can be helpful to his ability to functionally improvise and react to the players' driving will, thus creating the possibility of even more conclusions (and a higher degree of thematic coherency) than if he did not extrapolate.  Improvisation is mandatory.  However, it is not exclusive to physical and mental preparation.  Further, my guess is that most that think that they are engaging in absolute improv, and thus are guaranteeing freedom from machination-driven confirmation bias, might be fooling themselves.  The human mind is extraordinary.  It can subconsciously behold, process and extrapolate an unfathomable number of things at a blinding pace...all unbeknownst to the conscious surveyor lying behind the eyes.  Point B being considered by the GM prior to the game (or at a blinding pace only moments before it is realized) does not mean that PCs must be merely puppets exploring a scene rather than driving it.  You can have:- Point A to Point B physically and mentally modeled- A scene manifesting as a real and true, objective outgrowth of prior events which- matches the preconception if (i) the pre-conceptions are highly skilled, (ii) the players' behavior is intuitive and stable, and (iii) the shared genre expectations and scenes leading up to it are coherent or- does not match the preconception because any of i, ii, or iii are off or because (iv) extremely swingy narrative variables are present which makes (i) all but impossibleI've ad-hocced (totally off the cuff) extreme "fire-hoses of adversity" yet still have been able to predict where they PCs would go with it and I've run scenes with relatively benign narrative dynamism where two industrious PCs have injected their own, thus taking the game completely off the beaten path into uncharted territory (for the better).I loved 2e.  However, my love for it has nothing to do with the ruleset.  It is entirely nostalgia for that period of my life and that much of my GMing teeth were cut and my skill honed during that era.  We had an extraordinary amount of fun despite of the ruleset.  Not because of it.  And after considerable retrospective, never will I conflate the two.  I would never play it again as my tastes have narrowed and focused considerably (I know what support I want from a ruleset...I know what an imposition that lack of support is and I know how liberating it is to have that support).  But I do look upon it fondly, nonetheless.</blockquote>

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