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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9774085" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=7026405]@zarionofarabel[/USER]: I'm going to only respond to a limited number of claims in your post, just to avoid argument without structure.  It matters a lot.Let's focus on a concrete scenario and the different ways that it could work out.Have you ever played a game like Scotland Yard?  This is a board game in which the players cooperate against a secret keeper who  plays the villainous Mr. X who is trying to escape the players chasing him.  The game plays out on a stylized map of London with cabs, buses, and trains that each character can take to travel from one point to the next each turn.  Each player has a certain amount of resources and Mr. X disappears stealthily as the players chase him, turning up only at predefined moments, while trying to stay a step or two ahead of his pursuers.  It's great game.  And it has well, lots of prep.  Imagine trying to run a similar game as the secret keeper without prep.  You have no map.  Each turn you are drawing new connections on the map.  The players have no idea where each connection is going to go.  They can't plan ahead.  You have to decide at each step what connections exist for both Mr. X and the players to take.  You also have to decide when Mr. X will appear.   Who would possibly think that your ad hoc game provided more agency for the players than the prepared one?  Who would possibly imagine that game balanced?  Why would anyone think the outcome of the chase was decided by anything but your fiat?In an RPG, the situations in a prepped game is even more constrained.  In "Scotland Yard" one of the things that balances Mr. X with those chasing him is Mr. X has unlimited in game resources - that is he always has the train ticket or bus face he needs.  But in any reasonably RPG scenario the escaping criminal has only limited resources - minions, transportation, hit points, spell slots, bullets, whatever.  For example, in a prepared game, you could write, "Four blocks from the antiquities store, Mr. X has stashed a small motorcycle, which he intends to use as a getaway vehicle on the crowded streets."  If you are improvising, you have to decide when Mr. X can find his motorcycle, or you might not think of the possibility of a motorcycle until you are some ways into the chase.  Depending on the game system the writers might even encourage to invent a motorcycle on the spot in response to a die roll by the players or to heighten the dramatic tension.  And yes, that creates a certain sort of game that could be fun, but you can't claim that the Schrodinger's Motorcycle that isn't anywhere until you place it gives more agency to the players to stop Mr. X than a game where the motorcycle exists in a certain place.Or imagine something more immediate.  The PC's spot the villain on his motorcycle and give chase.  Imagine the difference between having prepared the city street with its traffic and the events and improvising them on the fly.  This turns out to be exactly like the scenario of trying to play the game 'Scotland Yard' without prep, just with a different sort of map.  What obstacles you place in the way of each character are now up to you to decide at each moment.  Whether the semi crosses and when and whether the fruit seller comes out in front of the players with his cart and so forth is all something you have to think about on the fly.  It's strikes me as impossible to improvise this with the same level of detail as you would if you had prepped. I can think of a certain Dungeon magazine adventure where the PC's are chasing a criminal through the docks and there is a chase that occurs by jumping from the deck of one boat to the next.  I think it would be impossible to improvise that scene on the fly and be as fair or as interesting or give the players as much agency as if you put the map down on the table and said, "You are here and here is Mr. X how do you want to get to him?"  Especially when if you didn't have prep you'd be improvising at each step where the complications would occur, like which boats have hidden obstacles and what those obstacles are and so forth.  The idea that I have this prep limits the players ability to make meaningful choices more than a situation where I have nothing prepared just doesn't work once you remove it from the realm of nebulous theory crafting and actually start talking about real situations that come up.You said you resolve a chase using the applicable game rules and randomizers.  That tells me you don't really run chases.  You've never had the PC's galloping behind a carriage being attacked by wights down a twisting mountain road, trying to intervene before the carriage doors are ripped off, or the roof is bashed through, or once the driver is killed the carriage careens off a cliff or out into the stony woods and the baron and baroness are killed.  Because if you ran those sorts of scenes frequently, you'd know that a) most games don't really have a lot of good rules for them and b) a lot of the outcome depends less on the rules than on the map.  Imagine how much you have to decide at that point that constitutes the map of the scene.  All the different characters, hit points and hardness of the carriage, the map of the mountain road, the monsters, etc.   More prep in that scene doesn't give the players less agency.  What it does is take away some of your own agency.  You have to commit to something.The biggest myth you are pushing is that nothing set in stone means unlimited opportunities.  If nothing is set in stone there are zero meaningful choices.  You are in cloud cookoo land.  Anything can happen.  Only after things start happening does the player have some meaningful choices, but even then it's like trying to play Scotland Yard without a board or with a board that changes according to the secret keeper's fiat. Besides which, to be frank, no improv GM I've ever encountered is actually creative enough to do any of this.  Improvisation almost invariably ends up involving no map and no real travel.  The style is less sand box with a map to explore than it is a Shakespearian stage the players are on where the drapes and props come and go when the scene shifts.  You can go anywhere but everywhere is basically the same, just new characters come onto or exit the stage.  Exit stage left, arrive stage right.  And to the extent that anything is dense, it's probably someone else's prep that they are bringing into the situation to make up for the lack of their own.</blockquote>

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