Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8247525" data-attributes="member: 6785785">This is something that comes up a lot, and I don't think is very accurate. Pretty much every game I've ever played or GMed has involved some amount of improvisation. Even the most railroady of adventures still had the players do something that made the GM have to think on their feet and narrate stuff on the fly. And all of those games worked perfectly fine in that respect. The GM having to wing it does not cause everything to fall apart. Now, I do think that any game needs to have some information established as a foundation. I'm not saying that GMs should start at zero input and then expect to craft a world for the players on the fly. But the amount of prep and pre-determination that is often considered &quot;necessary&quot; simply isn't. It may be a preference on the part of a specific GM. It may be something that helps them or that they enjoy doing in between game sessions. But no, when it comes to gaming, something that a GM has already decided days in advance based on 12 pages of backstory that he's written is not inherently more believable than something else another GM made after taking 30 seconds to consider, and making a call. Very often, I find not having to track all that pre-determined history to make crafting believable details much easier. A lot of times, once you commit to a detail, the why of it becomes very clear on its own.So you don't want any kind of meta mechanic or incentive (although I expect you do use XP, or no?) because that would break immersion, but having a world where no one actually suffers from things like alcoholism doesn't break immersion?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="hawkeyefan, post: 8247525, member: 6785785"] This is something that comes up a lot, and I don't think is very accurate. Pretty much every game I've ever played or GMed has involved some amount of improvisation. Even the most railroady of adventures still had the players do something that made the GM have to think on their feet and narrate stuff on the fly. And all of those games worked perfectly fine in that respect. The GM having to wing it does not cause everything to fall apart. Now, I do think that any game needs to have some information established as a foundation. I'm not saying that GMs should start at zero input and then expect to craft a world for the players on the fly. But the amount of prep and pre-determination that is often considered "necessary" simply isn't. It may be a preference on the part of a specific GM. It may be something that helps them or that they enjoy doing in between game sessions. But no, when it comes to gaming, something that a GM has already decided days in advance based on 12 pages of backstory that he's written is not inherently more believable than something else another GM made after taking 30 seconds to consider, and making a call. Very often, I find not having to track all that pre-determined history to make crafting believable details much easier. A lot of times, once you commit to a detail, the why of it becomes very clear on its own. So you don't want any kind of meta mechanic or incentive (although I expect you do use XP, or no?) because that would break immersion, but having a world where no one actually suffers from things like alcoholism doesn't break immersion? [/QUOTE]

Verification