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<blockquote data-quote="The Firebird" data-source="post: 9611393" data-attributes="member: 7015803">Yeah, I think this kind of improvisation does happen in almost all games. My point is just that there are different kinds of improvisation. To the extent that I view RPGs as games, I think of this kind of improvisation ('improvisation outside the bounds of the rules') as a fail state. If the referee doesn't know whether or not a certain strategy will disarm the trap and has to decide on the fly, then I'm not interacting with the world to make a certain thing happen--I'm interacting with the referee, and appealing to their sense of drama, or their idea of a cool solution, or their idea of &quot;we have to get to the boss soon or there won't be time to finish this session&quot;. All of those are very different from me being able to interact with a fixed world in creative ways. A nice way to avoid this fail state that a lot of OSR games rely on are random tables. Then the referee doesn't need to prepare everything--if the players explore a desert hex, they get a desert hex roll, if they explore a forest hex, a forest hex roll. These are different outcomes and reduce somewhat how much the referee is improvising.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="The Firebird, post: 9611393, member: 7015803"] Yeah, I think this kind of improvisation does happen in almost all games. My point is just that there are different kinds of improvisation. To the extent that I view RPGs as [I]games, [/I]I think of this kind of improvisation ('improvisation outside the bounds of the rules') as a fail state. If the referee doesn't know whether or not a certain strategy will disarm the trap and has to decide on the fly, then I'm not interacting with the [I]world [/I]to make a certain thing happen--I'm interacting with the referee, and appealing to their sense of drama, or their idea of a cool solution, or their idea of "we have to get to the boss soon or there won't be time to finish this session". All of those are very different from me being able to interact with a fixed world in creative ways. A nice way to avoid this fail state that a lot of OSR games rely on are random tables. Then the referee doesn't need to prepare everything--if the players explore a desert hex, they get a desert hex roll, if they explore a forest hex, a forest hex roll. These are different outcomes and reduce somewhat how much the referee is improvising. [/QUOTE]

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