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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinak" data-source="post: 6178441" data-attributes="member: 6694112">Huh, well, I'm glad that we're communicating properly. I thought for sure you meant something other that what you said, but now I'm really glad I asked.I understand what you're laying out, because that's literally the basis for a <a href="http://www.metroplexity.com" target="_blank">web-based RPG</a> I designed. I just find it hard to imagine applying it when you're around a table. Even at my most prepared, running from a published scenario and doing all the battle prep before hand, I don't see any reason not to improvise.As an example from my last session, there was an encounter that the AP authors and I all thought would be a fight to get through a guarded room. Instead the PCs were extremely respectful of the guards and didn't try to get through the room at all. They ended up having a nice chat. As written and prepped, they would still have been attacked, but it enriched the world and rewarded the players for thinking outside of the box.I think that depends entirely to what degree you're improvising.I've absolutely run games where what you say is true. I don't touch the DMG or MMs and just wing it, describing magical items as they come to me and assigning monsters stats on the fly. I don't have any numbers, but I imagine that's a fairly uncommon mode of play.What I'm running now, though, is fairly by the book. Stock magical items. Encounters strongly based on what's in the module. But there's still improvisation during session preparation and at the table, mostly in response to player actions or just me papering over my own mistakes.If you have a group of players that wants to solve the Rubik's Cube, learning rules through play, I'm sure they're delighted to have you as a GM. I know a lot of my players in Metroplexity (the web-based RPG I mentioned) love that stuff. Then again, they also have an impartial referee in the form of a bunch of code and databases, which makes that easier.Outside of the world of careful constrained (if numerous) choices, I'm not sure DMing should be so programmatic. My best experiences gaming are always when the players try something totally unexpected and I have to juggle things, trying to keep everything consistent and fun. I don't always succeed, but I enjoy getting better. I suppose dealing with things the rules can't is my Rubik's cube <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=":)" />Cheers!Kinak</blockquote>

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