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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7338589" data-attributes="member: 37579">Yes.I have played in lots of different games with lots of different DMs, and watched games online, and read blogs by DMs about their game, and listened to podcasts about DMing & DMs and no one runs a game just like you...Your argument can be reduced to:"I (think/ know) my players can tell when I'm improvising or using pre-planned ideas. Therefore, all players can tell when all DMs are using pre-planned ideas rather than improvising. And that's a big ol' "no".  Again, I direct you to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtJTqLSzXaM" target="_blank">latest episode of Critical Role</a>. Watching the episode, the PCs go to several locations and meet several NPCs and which ones were planned well ahead of time and which ones were spontaneously generated because the players wanted to buy books is unknown. Okay, it can be apparent if the DM is reading from a book or sheet of paper, reciting the read-aloud text. But if I just have a few key word notes and improvise my description, there's fewer tells that I'm improvising or pre-planning. And I can also change details, customising elements to match the player's expectations and respond to their questions. Ditto is you paraphrase, reading the text and then putting it into your own words. If there is a DM screen, there's no easy way for the players to tell if you're reading from a book, reading from the notes beside the open book, or just looking down to give the impression they're on the right track and you're not just pulling everything out of your ass.Uh-huh. And that play experience isn't affected if you took a pre-existing tower that was on a map in a published campaign setting and just said, "oh, this is the NPC tower", tweaking the description to match their tastes. The details that matter are basically madlibs. "This is the <place noun> of an NPC <class> whose is you <relation>." You can mix and match those blanks infinitely but the actual effect on the session is unchanged if the players are racing to their mage brother's tower to save him from an assassin or charging to their thief sister's warehouse lair to save her from a slaadi. The relationship and how it affects the players is the important part and what the players care about. The origin of the specific noun does not. Did they like those bikes more than if you had paid someone else to assemble them or bought them pre-assembled? Or were they just happy to have a damn bike? Or was it the time spent making the bike the important bonding part? I've read some of the same stuff you have and had very different reactions. How I read the Luke Crane bit you posted was very different.</blockquote>

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