Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7338185" data-attributes="member: 37579">Yes, I had seen that. My point was that in the session where the mage was decapitated, the existence of the tower had been previously established. (I am making the assuming it wasn't created in the same session, as the linked post was from 2014.) For the session where the PCs returned to the tower, it had effectively been pre-authored. It was established. It was an element of the world. There was continuity.For the purposes of that session, it doesn't matter if you had created the tower personally, it was the result of a random roll, if it came from a published campaign product, or even if it had been generated by a player not currently at the table. It's source was moot and had no impact on the unfolding of the plot or the challenges of the story. It didn't modify any roles or alter the choices of the players. I have run multiple sessions entirely on the fly, thank you very much. My current 5e campaign began with notes on a fight to start the session in media res but the rest of the session was entirely improvised. I've done dungeon crawls through randomly generated dungeons created by websites. And I've done completely spontaneous games planned off the seat of my pants while hanging with fellow gamers when someone has said "hey, we should do some gaming!" But I've also done several pre-published campaigns, running two Paizo APs and the Dragonlance adventures. I've also spent several years running pre-published modules for organised play. And I've done a number of homebrew games with various levels of scripting and preparation. I've run campaigns set in Ravenloft, the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Golarion, the 'Verse, a galaxy far, far away, and a half-dozen homebrew settings of various degrees of fantasy or modernity. I've been a part of a zombie apocalypse game set in my hometown. And I've collaboratively built worlds, where each player takes turns adding towns, regions, factions, and similar world elements as the need arises, creating a mosaic world. I disagree. Which is the crux of my point, which keeps apparently going over your head. I'll try again...The question I tease earlier is: why does it matter when the GM does so rather than anyone else? Unless you're playing with telepaths who can also see your notes, players don't know the source of a piece of the setting. If they see a giant fey tree filled with sprites at the edge of their vision, they have no way of knowing if that tree exists because they failed a travel check, if it's a random encounter from a table, if it's a planned encounter prepared by the GM, or if it's a scripted encounter part of the pre-published module. The different illusionary. And irrelevant to the players so long as they have a choice with how to interact with the tree. That's what matters: the freedom for players to choose how their character interacts with the elements of the adventure. The source of the world details has zero impact on session itself.Having watched many, many episodes of <a href="https://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/" target="_blank">Critical Role</a>, I have no idea which social encounters and NPCs were planned well in advance and which ones were created spontaneously because the players decided to go into a random store. Because it doesn't matter to the flow of the story. To hammer the point home, what was the source of my example? The giant tree covered by sprites. Which published adventure was it from? Or was it really from an episode of a streamed game? Or was that from my homegame? Or was it just something that popped into mind? Couldn't it also have equally have come from multiple sources, since few people generate ideas entirely in a vacuum? After reading several of your threads over the years, I don't think anybody looks at RPGing just like you do...</blockquote>

Verification