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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8386122" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Ok, I see what you’re saying. I think, though, that these things are not connected - running a mostly linear story and maintaining the illusion that improvised elements of the adventure were planned in advance are both things that Matt Colville likes. But you can have either without the other.Honestly, I think the idea of trying to create an illusion that improvised content was actually pre-planned kind of… strange? Like, who cares whether it was pre-planned or improvised? Improvising is just planning and executing in a single step anyway. If it’s  richly detailed, it shouldn’t matter if those details were made up on the spot or made up last weekend when the DM was doing their prep or made up a year and a half ago when someone was writing the module. The detail itself is what matters, not when it was made up.I suspect that what Matt might be trying to express here is that, when you are improvising details, you should try to present them with as much richness as you would if it was pre-planned content. If the players can easily tell the difference between the stuff you had planned ahead of time and the stuff you pulled out of your butt in the moment, it can make for a jarring experience - it becomes obvious when you’ve wandered outside the scripted bounds, which can be pretty immersion-breaking. So, ideally, you want the quality of the content to be up to the same level whether it’s scripted or improvised, and Matt, as a DM who likes linear, scripted stories, is framing that in terms of making your improv seem like it was scripted.</blockquote>

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