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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3512640" data-attributes="member: 2067">How does "creating an adventure on the fly" yield "railroaded into a novel-writing session" in your head? Players loose. Players die. It's not a "guestimation" to figure the necromancer king uses ghouls so if you fight the necromancer king you'll fight ghouls, and if the PC's go up against ghouls totally unprepared for the fight, well, it's their funeral (and eventual re-animation) I suppose. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Choices have actual meaning. You choose to pursue the guy in the WANTED poster, you catch him and maybe gain some cred in the local Town Watch. You choose to advance your thieves' guild, you contest the current Underworld King, go against his henchmen, maybe earn some recruits of your own.Each path flows from the player's choice.I mean, I can't very well improvise without a participant player out there throwing me a bone. A line, a motive, a goal, a scene, something...True, but the Necromancer King came first and suggested all that. The world didn't tell me I needed X, I told the world I needed X, and adapted it to suit my needs. And it was all created with the needs of my players in my head (because it wouldn't be an issue if no one was interested in challenging a possible necromancer-king). And it all came within about 10 minutes. On the fly.Which was really my point: you don't need to spend hours worldbuilding. Which are all secondary considerations to the Archetype. There's no background and context before the archetype exists.But really, we're talking about something totally different now than we were, namely that you can improvise all of that and have a perfectly good adventure. You don't need background and context before the game begins, so you don't need to spend hours working on an adventure that never gets played. Archetypes don't limit freedom, because they don't need any background to emerge from -- people will understand their basic background because they've seen it a million times before. It's the core of improv, it's the core of oral storytelling, it's the core of the vast majority of my D&D games: Do what you want, I'll make sense of it, feed it back to you. You react to it, feed it back to me. If the crux of your argument is that I'd have to do as much wasted work if I allowed the PC's to pursue their thieves' guild dreams than to pursue the bad guy on the WANTED poster, making me guilty of "too much worldbuilding" unless I "railroad," your argument's crux is weak and unsupported (because I don't have to do any pre-prep work for either), and everything else is tangential. #1: Far to the south in a land that was buried underground until this recent wave of earthquakes. #2: How many people do you think died in that earthquake? Or were buried beneath the ground before it? Or died in that ancient empire?That doesn't shatter anything. The questions just feed the beast. There is no point made. There's quite enough verisimilitude to be had with improvisational role-playing. You've played such games yourself, you say, so you know it to be true. You don't need to spend hours developing a setting for it to be rich, detailed, and realistic.No, it is. "Dull" is dull for the readers, e.g.: harmful to the reading experience. So the desert analogy would be traced to being harmful for the body. As a for instance.Simple rules of English, old bean: "Why is worldbuidling bad? Worldbuilding is bad because of X."Why worldbuidling is bad: X.Just by being bad doesn't also mean it's not good, or that the badness can't be avoided. Desert is bad because it rots your teeth, but if you brush after you eat and don't eat much of it, you can avoid rotting your teeth. Worldbuilding is bad because it can get in the way of actual enjoyment, but if you focus on the storytelling and you sublimate worldbuilding for a greater process, you can still enjoy its many fruits.Reading Comprehension is a good talent to develop. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />:shrug: If you can't believe that someone's experiences with this game are that different from your own, I guess I can't convince ya. There's no such thing as a complete vacuum, man. There's always inspirational debris floating at the corners of your head. I think that worldbuilding done during the game is still worldbuilding. Ditto with adventure-building. Where an improvisational game fits in is that it creates things in response to what is going on at the table, rather than before something happens, meaning that "creating something useless" is almost never an issue (because you wouldn't create it until there was a need for it). You're spending time doing it, just not much. I don't bake the cookies before the group tells me what cookies they want, so that way all the cookies get eaten. Unless I'm a natural talent at world-building so much so that I never really have had to gain any experience with it before leaping into improving it, all I needed was some lessons on how to create improv, which has to do with archetypes. Consistency happens as long as you adhere to what has come before and the overall conceits of your chosen archetypal figures. It's a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with practice. But the same is true of DMing in general. You could say your world can't, but you're really the only one. So if you want it to, it does, and if you don't, it doesn't. And if you don't, but your players *do*, you've made the game less fun. Right, but that's only true of they tell you what they want before you spend your hours of development. Which works, but not everyone has that kind of prep time. You can do the same thing without hours of development right at the table itself just as easily.Same thing that happens in any other D&D game: some people get stage time now, some people get stage time later. The cleric doesn't like skulking around about the theives' guild, but we hit them later that night with a divinely ordained mission or something. It's not some sort of alien entity from the Far Plane, here. It's just a different way to pretend to be an elf for a few hours: a way that doesn't require me to think about what it's like to be an elf for the days before I get to be an elf.The game doesn't *need* to be an obsession like that. It can be, if you enjoy it, but it doesn't have to be, if you'd enjoy doing it on the fly more.</blockquote>

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