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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6107178" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't see how that is at odds with confining my purposes to player interest and story momentum. I'm trying to judge those things and respond to them.Except that there are no episodes of wolrd exploration in the form that [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] and (a best I can tell) you are advocating for and defending. The only example of an <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?299440-Exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-Sunday" target="_blank">exploration-focused scenario</a> that I've posted is one in which, of the following points of world detail, all but the first two were worked out in the course of play:1. The manor dates from the Nerathian empire (100 years ago rather than 1000 years ago) and the time period of the scenario is only a few years after the fall of Nerath; 2. The manor became abandoned when the pending fall of Nerath to gnoll invaders (the downstream consequences of which have been a bit part of the campaign to date) led its wizard owner to go mad with the strain and kill his apprentices; 3. The guardian spiders were mostly not undead but a Bloodweb spider swarm (this tied nicely into the spider-filled tunnels under the ruins that the PCs had already dealt with - the Large spider they killed in the gameworld "present" was the sole survivor of the many swarms of Tiny spiders they would encounter in the gameworld past); 4. The religion of the dead mage was a particular cult combining worship of Bahamut (god of the east wind and also of the dragonborn - it is an already established fact of the campaign that the dragonborn empire had been in this region some time prior to Nerath), Kord, Pelor and Ioun - so a type of mystical sun, weather and strength worship; 5. That the burial practices of the cult had the intention of trying to avoid the dead being dealt with by the Raven Queen, instead going directly to Mount Celestia or Hestavar as exalted (the party has a cleric, a paladin and a lapsed initiate of the Raven Queen, so this was likely to be an interesting point for the players); 6. That the spiders in the skull were undead spiders as the module stipulated; 7. That the last work the wizard who owned the manor had been undertaking before he went mad was to try to find a way of harnessing the power of the Raven Queen without compromising the principles of his cult, in order to create more powerful defences by which Nerath might resist the invading gnolls - he snapped when his most religiously devout apprentice learned what he was doing and accused him of treachery.How were these determined?(3) because the spider encounter would relate to, or echo/reinforce, an earlier spider encounter that the PCs had played through and that I knew, as the GM in that earlier session, had engaged them and drawn them into the situation in a range of ways. (4) because it referenced certain game elemens - Bahamut and the dragonborn empire, and Ioun - that were already established as interesting to the PCs (who included a Tiefling and a somtime Ioun worshipper) and also more generally reinforced cosmological elements - the gods and their relationships - that every player is engaged in via their PCs (four divine PCs plus a sorcerer PC who is a member of a religious cult). (5) because 3 of the PCs were worshippers of the Raven Queen and hence they (and their players) had an immediate stake in it. (6) because it reinforced other elements, like necromantic experimentation by the dead wizad, that pushed the players' buttons - especially the players of the Raven Queen worshippers (plus undead spiders seemed like a fun bit of colour). (7) - see (5) and (6).Here is another example from the same post:When the player of the paladin had his PC look closely again at the scroll describing the cultic burial practices and made a good perception roll, I decided that he noticed a stiffness/crustiness in the paper. Eventually, after use of Object Reading, the PCs worked out this was evidence of invisible ink.The player chose to investigate something, and so I used that as the trigger to make the obejct in question interesting for the player. I don't care whether these ways of GMing are common to high improv GMs or not. The more the merrier! What I do know is that what I describe is deliberately deploying elements of No Myth techniques. That it is driven first and foremost by player signals. And that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the GMing that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is criticising in this thread. Everything I've just described is pretty much the opposite of insisting that the players play out a desert trek, or a recruitment process, in which they have no interest. Or of building a world with things in that the players may find interesting if only they engage in the requisite exploration to discover it.If you're now telling me that you GM in a similar fashion to this, no worries, but I'm not sure how to square that with your earlier stated dislike of extemporaneous GMing, nor with your list of desiderata for a new campaign setting.</blockquote>

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