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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8243999" data-attributes="member: 85555">Yes, but these are very different mediums. In some senses it is spontaneous (the way the outcome of a jam session is spontaneous). Part of the problem here is RPGs are their own medium, and the analysis often gets shaped by the other mediums we bring in as examples to understand what is going on. Like I said before, the issue here is this isn't simply an author staring at a blank page and filling it, and it isn't being delivered to a passive audience. The players are reacting in real time to anything the GM says or decides. There is a system that constrains the GM (some systems place fewer constraints, but most have constraints of some kind---in lots of games I can't just decide your sword swing hits the orc and kills it for example, and in many I am expected to allow you to use skills or other abilities, or call on some kind of roll to interpret the physics of something like climbing up a wall in dangerous conditions). So there are the mechanics. Often the mechanics have dice, which throw in a whole random element. And then the GM has the audience reacting in real time. That does constrain what you can do. You can't just announce in the middle of a Forgotten Realms game that a starship descends from the clouds and ET walks out of its hatch. I mean you can try that, but you will be met by blank stares and you might even prompt cries of of WTF. When an author writes a book, they can anticipate that kind of reaction but they don't have the readers there in the room with them when the decision is made. Even today writers of television shows don't have real time reactions from audiences, there is still a delay. But you can see the change and constraints it places on them, the more that distance between creating something and the audience responding is shortened. Further the players actual choices constrain the GM. If you are just zooming in on individual instances of the GM making decisions, this will be lost. But if the players walked to the town of Donyra, that confines what the GM can say is going on. If Donyrya is a landlocked, desert oasis, he can't just announce that the dread Pirate Zabaea and her fleet arrive on the shores and ransack the town. If the players killed Zabaea earlier in the campaign, the GM can't just say "Zabaea approaches you along the road from the distance" (unless she was resurrected or returning as some form of undead: and both of those things are going to be constrained by the setting, the system, etc).</blockquote>

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