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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8231605" data-attributes="member: 85870">[USER=6698278]@Emerikol[/USER] -- I appreciate the detailed response. My line of questioning isn't to "convert" you specifically.My hope, I suppose, is that what I say may be of some use to other readers who may be going through a similar situation that I've gone through in the past. I wanted to improve the quality of the games I was running, but the amount of pre-session preparation / notes / fictional "prefabrication" didn't seem to have any correlation to the success of my sessions.I've had sessions where I had little more than a basic scene and maybe 1 rough NPC sketch go off amazingly well. I've had sessions where I had 5 or 6 single-spaced pages of typed notes, with 6 or 7 highly detailed NPC stat blocks, and the session thoroughly bombed. I've had small, medium, and large-sized batches of prefabricated notes where the sessions were just . . . okay.Full disclosure --- even at the height of my "prefabricated backstory" days, I didn't do as much detailed work as you outlined above. And it's clear that as a GM, you find that level of prefabrication necessary to having the experience you want.Right after I finished my Pathfinder campaign in 2011, I realized that though I love the process of GM-ing, the amount of work required to run Pathfinder / D&D 3 was not tenable. Even if I had loved the system itself (which I didn't; it was more of a lukewarm "like"), I simply didn't have the time to bother with it anymore. And this was using the Golarion campaign setting, where at least 30% of the prefabricating of the game world was already done for me.This kicked off my journey to find ways to create satisfying roleplaying experiences that didn't require huge amounts of prep time, and also just find a different experience than the one found in the D&D 3.x family of games (which is all I played from 2000 through 2011).And lo and behold, there was this group of GMs on EnWorld espousing all these crazy ideas like, Let the players have the ability to exert some authorial control, and Frame scenes, not settings, and Play to see what happens, and Say yes or roll the dice, and The fiction is a shared construct; it doesn't have any 'reality' except what is agreed upon.And even though a lot of those GMs were running 4e (which for many reasons was a non-starter at the time), I couldn't dismiss out of hand that a lot of seemingly smart, well-intentioned people seemed to be having success adopting these principles. So I tried Savage Worlds to radically reduce prep time and started trying out some of the espoused principles. And lo and behold, it worked exactly as described. My players were more engaged, they had more stakes in the fiction---holy crapizoid, Batman! Suddenly I didn't have to define every piece of every little bit of the fiction. I could frame my players into the action and trust that they'd find their way.I still did more prefabrication than I'm doing now, but not nearly as much with Pathfinder. And there were still moments where I slipped into "secret backstory" GM-mode more than I should have. But interestingly, the more I let go of the need to prefabricate, the more fun I and my players seemed to have.Now having moved to Ironsworn, combined with my own existing experiences, I can more clearly see the potential "dark side" to prefabricating so much of the game world beforehand. It's very, very hard to let go of something I've created. If I spent the time to create it, there is an accompanying, strong impulse to use it in play, even if doing so doesn't serve the greater good of the fun of the group. It's very, very easy to let prefabricated content become a GM indulgence, justified under the banners of "realism" and "continuity," when really it's just an exercise in self-gratification. And I've very much come around on [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s belief that GM "secret backstory", while potentially "useful" in terms of trying to create "continuity" and "realism" and "intrigue," is very much a danger to stifling player engagement.So again, the question becomes, why do all of that prefabrication? What purpose does it serve? I think this thread has identified a number of useful purposes (reminders, continuity, streamlining gameplay with preset stat blocks, fleshing out characterizations). But it's not a requirement for a game to work, or to feel "immersive" or "coherent."As [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] alluded earlier, all I can do now when someone says, "BUT RPGs SIMPLY DON'T WORK UNLESS YOU HAVE A COHERENT, PREFABRICATED, LIVING WORLD!!" is either surreptitiously roll my eyes and say nothing, or offer a counter perspective.I'm here to tell anyone that will listen that this stuff works---if you approach it from the right mindset and perspective, and are willing to be open to an experience other than what you already know.</blockquote>

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