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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5408028" data-attributes="member: 26473">Words mean things.I can call a tin cup a gold nugget, but that doesn't make it worth $44.62 a gram.I think there is much more consensus than not among actual practitioners.I find that most of the disagreement comes from gamers who do not run status quo, 'sandboxy' settings; some of the disagreement comes from lack of familiarity, some for reasons on which I won't speculate.Methods are one of the tools by which we achieve results, particularly replicatable results. I'm not a FoRE*-player, but I believe this is one of the reasons 'System Matters' is a part of game theory.One can prepare a complete world and not run a sandbox game (e.g., the AD&D Dragonlance modules). One can run a sandbox and prepare only a very small portion of a world (e.g., Keep on the Borderlands). One can empower player decisions without running a sandbox (e.g., pemerton's game). And one can run a sandbox without empowering player decisions, I suppose (Celebrim's 'rowboat,' perhaps?).Prep to improvise: A lot of my preparation is focused on improvising during actual play. I begin by getting a good handle on the genre; I want actual play to capture the feel of the source material. After that I immerse myself in the setting; for historical games that means studying the relevant history and geography, for fictional settings it means inventing the same. Finally I prep lots of npcs, from bare stat-skeletons for generic recurring figures like a barman, a guard, or a merchant to fully-fleshed-out unique npcs.This allows me to set scenes and roleplay characters on-the-fly in response to what the adventurers are doing; perhaps more importantly, it allows me to use simple encounters ("2D6 bandits") as a tool to reinforce both the setting and the genre (the infamous highwayman La Capuche Noire and his band of vile miscreants, or a family of Auvergnat 'hillbillies', frex).Random encounters are the 'living' setting: Random encounters are in media res situations the adventurers face in the course of the game. An encounter with "2d6 guards" isn't six guards walking down the street; it's the sieur de Boisrenard, sergeant to the provost-marshal of Paris, and five archers dragging a man out of his house in manacles while his lovely young wife pleads for mercy.One of the elements of genre-emulation that's difficult for me to reconcile with a status quo setting is coincidence; coincidences are a regular feature of cape-and-sword stories, but I don't want to force coincidences on the adventurers. My way around this is to make coincidences a function of the environment of the game, by plugging unique npcs into various encounter tables, so that a coincidental meeting is something of a genuine coincidence generated by the dice in the course of actual play.* FoRE = Friend of Ron Edwards</blockquote>

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