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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9759315" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't have a lot of tolerance for illusionism either.  For one thing, I don't like it as a player and I always strive hard to be the GM I would want to have as a player.  But take a figure like Seth Skorkowsky whose work I admire and in whose discussions about prep I see someone who has very similar aesthetics to my own and who doesn't in the slightest have that "I can improvise!" arrogance that has come to have a really bad taste in my mouth. This is a guy who is seriously talent and seriously experienced and he never is like, "I can just wing the game."  He often has to improvise, but he's doing it in the context of someone who has prepared really hard for play.  In short, I have a lot of reasons to trust his judgement based on the fact he seems to be a really good GM producing the sort of games that I also strive to produce.And yet he's very open about the fact that he sometimes has to use illusionism and railroading techniques to make the game fun, and he's out putting this out there saying, "And at this point I had to use some GM force to make the situation better than I had prepared for or deal with some situation I hadn't prepared for, or just coral my confused players back toward the fun", and he's got players.  Players that seem to very much enjoy what he does for very obvious reasons.  And I to find myself in situations where I'm like, "Is it really better to not introduce a fortunate coincidence here?" or "Is it really better to not just pretend this monster has 20 hit points less than what I wrote down?" or what have you because I'm not perfect and sometimes it's best to just take that hit and reconfigure on the fly.</blockquote>

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