Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9020713" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I’m nowhere near to caught up (nor likely to be), but just some thoughts:* No matter how much a GM loves the activity of prepping and/or loves their prepped content, it is no more TTRPG play than gameplanning is a football game in American Football. Fight prep is not an actual match. Surveying sites is not building a road on one of them.The situations gone over, the prospects evaluated for later inclusion or discard, the contingent courses possibly charted downrange, the work to sharpen various tools…all of these are provisional, may not see deployment or use, and certainly don’t take place temporally during the execution of the game, match, build.It might be a worthwhile activity, it might help or harm actual play, but it isn’t actual play, and calling it what it is doesn’t diminish it, but calling it actual play certainly diminishes the ability to have clear conversations and convey concepts usefully to each other and to prospective TTRPGers alike.* Being given a budget (whether it be by system or players), building out a roster and array of challenges within those budgetary constraints, and then executing the challenge (constrained by rules and fiction) as antagonists/opposition/obstacles, is not a violation of Gamist priorities or The Czege Principle.  You can have significantly distilled Skilled Play that way, so long as the participant roles are clear and the game engine is robust.  Its just a particular brand of Skilled Play that is quite distinct from a brand of play where the GM’s resources are without budget constraint and the locus of the GM’s role in creating an environment of Skilled Play ability is in all of their ability to deftly prep challenges, deftly signal/signpost challenges, deftly extrapolate all the converging factors that are brought to bear upon the imaginings of the participants, and neutrally and correctly deploy action resolution machinery.The rules do different things in these approaches to design, create different participant roles, generate different demands and constraints, and site different technical skills (for both GM and player) as important.</blockquote>

Verification