I didn't establish
Joy in the post above, as you had requested (slipped my mind). That one is going to be hard to pin down to be honest as its probably got far too much subjectivity embedded in it. I think I'm just going to be lame, cop out somewhat and just say that, in terms of running any given TTRPG, for my money, I derive joy when the mesh of Agenda, Principles, and Techniques are executed well at the table to provide an entertaining version of the expected experience.
If I'm running Dread, I'm looking for and working toward a very different play experience than if I'm running an old school dungeon crawl versus when I'm running 4e, DW, MHRP, or Dogs. So different Joys for different games.
I think trying to penetrate that deeper might be difficult for me right now. You guys can take a crack at if you perceive it differently.
You suggest that you have a low enjoyment of world simulation, and that you have no favored setting you are carefully constructing as a toy in your mind. And that's probably some variation from me as a GM, because I do have such a 'setting as mental toy', but if in fact 'setting as mental toy' was my agenda, I wouldn't bother to nor need to GM, because setting as my own mental toy to develop is just as enjoyable and if not more enjoyable by world building for its own sake. If I really had this as my agenda, I would build the world but not waste time running the game. Instead, I find that I do very little world building except where I think it intersects my game needs. For example, despite the fact that this setting is now 30 years old, I'd never in that time even given much thought to a sun deity until I had a player say, "I want to worship the sun deity." Only after I had an in game reason for a sun deity, did I begin fleshing out what that sun deity was like.
I don't think "setting as mental toy" is part of your agenda profile for your d20 homebrew game. Regarding your extremely high resolution setting, I think its something akin to what I posted above in the examples. Because I don't know the specifics and only know how it all comes together, and your interests, based off of posts I've read, I'll take a crack at it being something like this:
* Give them a deep and compelling fantasy world, with its own will and machinery, full of struggle, tyranny, and hope so that they may fill their lives with adventure.
Then you'll have techniques that you deploy, each one informed by one principle or another at the moment of choice, which trickle down from those (and the others that make up your Agenda) aesthetic and functional priorities.
As I wrote above. It looks like you (a) enjoy the mental exercise and (b) enjoy its impact on play. So...Joys?
This suggests to me that are real agendas aren't as dissimilar as you might think. I think it is fair to say that once I find an in game need for setting information, I'll pour myself into imagining that setting information and that I prefer to spend a lot of time brainstorming for ideas I think I'll need prior to play rather than hoping my first instincts during a game are the best. From what you've said, I'd guess you prefer to improvise on the fly in response to needs as they come up. But neither of these things is actually an agenda of play, but rather a GMing technique for bringing about the desired play. It isn't clear to me that the sort of play we both desire has divergent features, or that the experience of being a GM in play we both desire is all that divergent. All I hear is you hate to prep and don't think you need it to obtain the desired play experience where as I feel I need to prep in order to obtain the desired play experience because I don't trust improvisation.
Strikes me as more of a function/utility component of agenda rather than aesthetic (although it could affect the aesthetic...but possibly not in this case). Your sense is that you derive your best material for your players to engage in with intensive deliberation. Whereas, I feel the inverse.
However, outside of you and I, here is what I have to say about the potential negative effect of (1) intensive deliberation (heavy pre-game prep or purchasing and imbibing an AP/module that you expect to run stock) and the potential negative effect of (2) half-assed prep/poor improv:
1 - The first precautionary tale is about deep investment. While it can certainly be bested, its perfectly natural to seek to protect and get the most bang for your buck out something you're deeply invested in. As such, that investment (the time, effort, love put into it) can become the primary locus of play. From that, all sorts of other troubles can arise from putting the PCs in a passive position of plot consumption or setting surveyors to (possibly even subconscious) adversarial play to (a) protect canonical elements against too much player infuence or (b) to make sure that the AP's expectant course is not deviated from (because that is where the action is!...and that is what you've deliberated so intensely over and assimilated with your $, time and mental overhead expenditure).
2 - The second precautionary tale is about incoherence. The danger here can be several things:
a) genre incoherence or mash-up that flat out doesn't work
b) lack of continuity and internal consistency of elements that have been established in the shared imaginary space during play (NPC names, goings-on, imporant locales or backstory)
c) not knowing your players/their PCs and how to provoke their thematic interests
d) being tasked with but incapable of providing interesting/fun challenges that properly test skill
This sort of statement strikes me as a misunderstanding, as neither high meta-plot nor high preparation actually requires any of the things you abhor. When you state this as a reason for avoiding the technique, it just suggests to me that part of your problem is that you understand a lot better how to improvise effectively than you understand how to prepare effectively. One reason I say that is I engage in high prep precisely to avoid high reliance on fudging, abridgement of the action/resolution mechanics, and reliance on metagaming that I find is the inevitable result (consciously or unconsciously) of high reliance on improvisation. (See for example my essay on
how to railroad, where I assert that all low prep games are unavoidably railroads.)
I think what you're referring to above (regarding some dangers of heavy reliance on improv) are most often the fallout derived from trying to do so in a system like 5e or AD&D where the process for handling the basic resolution mechanics and then the varying subsystems that interface with them are a mesh of abstraction, precision, and natural language open to interpretation. Heavy improv within such a rules framework, especially when you have specific outcomes in mind that you would like to have manifest in play, can put a lot of pressure on the referee during adjudication (and he has to referee a lot) while simultaneously offering up a fair bit of conflict of interest. The GM
wants this or that to happen...and he knows the players want some of the same things...but they want to feel like they're making it happen...a little bit of massaging play procedures here, a little overleveraging the offscreen there...VOILA. You feel you're good to go so long as the players don't get wise.
This is surely a large part of the reasoning that we all developed our unique AD&D systems (which appears to be happening again with 5e). To hedge against such temptations and pressures, to firm up our play procedures generally and the action resolution mechanics specifically such that we might GM more confidently and rule more consistently.
Alright, that is all I have for now. To post anymore would make the conversation more diffuse than I can handle right now (in terms of time or mental overhead). Later, I'll try to look back through your two posts and find what I didn't answer.
