Quote from: jibbajibba;737039I tried running nwn games back in the day but was never able to pull it off. I would prep for hours and hours and hours and when i played i realised that the game would be better with an npc encounter here or whatever. I just hated the fact i was unable to improv.
The prep wasn't great either because i was looking to give as much flexibility as when i played. A city home to 10,000 people each building detailed with inhabitants patrols etecetc.  It just got to unmanageable i need about 12 developers to work on it for a year. That the flexibility i get from improv:-)

I ran into the same problem just looking at the system. Id want a more robust town. But much like populating a MUD. That takes alot of effort that may never see any use.

If I did try it I think I'd break things up into sectors and only on a need to be there basis.

Good thread.

When I was a kid I would spend immense amount of time doing prep. My inexperience was one factor, another was the influence of published modules -- I thought that was the way it worked.

With more experience, I am much more comfortable with improv. I do a lot of on-the-fly stuff. I particularly enjoy the emergent details that evolve only due the course of play. However, I do find that I run a  much better game if I have some notes to fall back on, even if I don't use them. They give me space to think. Prerolled treasure, monster stats, NPC notes, prekeyed encounters, maps, name lists ... all help here. There's no useless prep, but some prep is more useful than others. Unused prep can always be recast, and reworked later. My feeling is that if it's not in the game yet, it probably doesn't exist. I'm not married to it.

A related challenge is the record keeping and making sure the gameworld remains consistent. My in joke is that my prep tends to happenafter the session. I always strive to do something more with my session notes after the game. Build on that, add details, layers.

My group plays every two weeks, giving me much time to ruminate on things. The day before, or the morning of, the session, I'll write some things down if I haven't already. This could be 15 minutes, it could be two hours or longer, depending on what is going on in my life. My guideline is 1 hour of prep to 4 hours of play (one session). And I will prep the most immediately useful interesting things.

20 hours prep for a 10 session game? Totally doable. I'd come up with a  small home base, a rather linear and probably generic first adventure -- but fun anyway-- and then based on what happens, have an idea about where the next 9 could go. In game, I'll riff and throw out ideas, see what gets bitten. By session 4-5 things should have their own momentum, and I'd likely know the a probable end of this short arc. But no master plan for me. Shit happens, we're rolling dice, players make choices, inspiration strikes at the table.

I improv way too much.  I basically use it as a crutch for my lack of prep skills.

I suppose it's fortunate that I'm really good at it and the players always seem to think the stuff I make up on the fly was prepared in advance.

I'm trying to run a sandbox campaign by the book right now (Griffin Mountain) and am finding my improv tendencies are getting in the way of me actually using the source material.

The other issue I have with improv as the referee is that I don't enjoy it as much as impartially refereeing the exploration of a dangerous locale.  It's hard to be impartial and play to see what happens when you're making things up as you go.

traveling this week, or i'd be more involved.....it's a good thread, and useful.  

My prep has changed over time, like anything you do a lot of, you get better and more proficient.   i actually take my game notes and work them into the game wiki, so that the locales and adventures maintain consistency and grow properly and dynamically.
plotting and writing abut the relationships between power centers is also critical for understanding how different places work.  

I'm not a slave to it,  I riff off it. And creating a real world in motion feel requires, after a while, the feeling of depth, not just surface detail.  I spend a lot time on that game wiki,

Quote from: NathanIW;737166It's hard to be impartial and play to see what happens when you're making things up as you go.

I used to have real issue with this and always favoured PCs that did stuff that fitted character and genre over stuff that might be totally reasonable but felt dull.  Basically allowing my bias to dictate the outcome.

I developed a specific technique to deal with it which I call the Lady or the Tiger (based on the short story of the same name). Basically whenever you add a door to the game (or a fork or a choice of any type) before you commit to it you need to decide what is behind the door the lady or the tiger. You can't do this when the PCs open the door you have to do it before you commit to including the door in the game.

If you stick to this rule then bias can't influence you nearly as easily.

You also need to commit to "Leaving Stuff Behind". I mentioned this on another thread on improv about 4 years ago but if you decide that the route out of town down the river  is guarded by river pirates and you come up with a great idea for a female pirate captain you know will really gel with the PCs and lead to some great adventure hooks and the party decide to take the path overland through the forest you can't reuse that idea and make her a bandit leader. That is illusionism. The pirates now live on the virtual river in the game world you can't move them or reuse them and if the party never go back to the river they will never encounter them. Sure the pirates may become part of the world in motion and get involved in other stuff which may one day lead to an encounter but you can't change them, reskin them or put them deliberately in the party's path.

So sticking to "The Lady and the Tiger" and "Leaving Stuff Behind" helps me ensure that my improv world is as unbiased as a world I prepared a month ago and wrote out in great detail with maps and stat blocks and everything.

Quote from: Omega;737161I ran into the same problem just looking at the system. Id want a more robust town. But much like populating a MUD. That takes alot of effort that may never see any use.

If I did try it I think I'd break things up into sectors and only on a need to be there basis.

I used sectors but got too big
Poor quarter, wealthy quarter, guards zone, palace, docks ewtc etrc ... teh thing became ridiculous (also I have an issue with teh outside of building being smaller than the inside

Quote from: jibbajibba;737177I used to have real issue with this and always favoured PCs that did stuff that fitted character and genre over stuff that might be totally reasonable but felt dull.  Basically allowing my bias to dictate the outcome.

I developed a specific technique to deal with it which I call the Lady or the Tiger (based on the short story of the same name). Basically whenever you add a door to the game (or a fork or a choice of any type) before you commit to it you need to decide what is behind the door the lady or the tiger. You can't do this when the PCs open the door you have to do it before you commit to including the door in the game.

If you stick to this rule then bias can't influence you nearly as easily.

You also need to commit to "Leaving Stuff Behind". I mentioned this on another thread on improv about 4 years ago but if you decide that the route out of town down the river  is guarded by river pirates and you come up with a great idea for a female pirate captain you know will really gel with the PCs and lead to some great adventure hooks and the party decide to take the path overland through the forest you can't reuse that idea and make her a bandit leader. That is illusionism. The pirates now live on the virtual river in the game world you can't move them or reuse them and if the party never go back to the river they will never encounter them. Sure the pirates may become part of the world in motion and get involved in other stuff which may one day lead to an encounter but you can't change them, reskin them or put them deliberately in the party's path.

So sticking to "The Lady and the Tiger" and "Leaving Stuff Behind" helps me ensure that my improv world is as unbiased as a world I prepared a month ago and wrote out in great detail with maps and stat blocks and everything.

This is an interesting outlook. What defines bias? Arbitrariness? changing prep players have not been exposed to?

When I GM, I treat any ideas I've had that the players have not been exposed to as mutable, changeable, or not truly part of the world. If the players haven't been directly exposed to the idea, but it has influenced their experience in some tangential way, then there is a cause for those slight influences, but until the players come into direct contact with the source, i keep myself open to other concepts that might make more sense or are more entertaining.

Before speaking something at the table and making it real, I have a personal checklist I try to run through.

-Does it make sense and follow logically, in relation to everything that has been said before? (this includes assumptions about the natural laws of the imaginary world, the history of the world and the characters, the current situation, etc.)
-Does it make the characters' lives more interesting or dangerous?
-Does it  advance the situation?
-Does it follow the rules of the game?

If the answer is yes to all of those criteria, then I say it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;737177So sticking to "The Lady and the Tiger" and "Leaving Stuff Behind" helps me ensure that my improv world is as unbiased as a world I prepared a month ago and wrote out in great detail with maps and stat blocks and everything.

This is some seriously good advice.  I'm going to implement it right now.

But in the last session, I didn't.  So here's the situation I need to fix:

Spoiler

The characters are searching for an immortal druid who is sort of the spiritual leader of their people.  They are from a town that has largely become heretics in the eyes of those who practice the old ways and the leader of that town desires the death of this druid and the syphoning of his power to foreign gods.

This druid is a horrible asshole.  He sacrifices other humans.  He sees anyone who lives in a village or a town as a soft nature-rejector who should be cast into the wilderness and die as prey.  He meddles in the affairs of the people, killing local tribe leaders and putting his people in charge.

The players learned that he's horrible and that people want him dead and have decided that they're still going to find him, but then warn him about the plot to kill him.  They asked around and I said he was busy installing and training new leadership among a northern tribe and could likely be found at their nomadic gathering place/trading outpost.

So what's there?  A lady or a tiger?  i didn't decide at all when I gave the lead.  It literally could be a tiger as prehistoric style saber tooth tigers are his totem animal and exist in the area.  Does he put them through his trials of going to some wilderness location and back without the aid of foreign technology (their people are neolithic)?  The characters range in their adherence to the old ways to varying degrees.  How would he react to their mixed company?  Demand the more traditional PCs sacrifice the heretics to the spirits?

Quote from: Adric;737201This is an interesting outlook. What defines bias? Arbitrariness? changing prep players have not been exposed to?

When I GM, I treat any ideas I've had that the players have not been exposed to as mutable, changeable, or not truly part of the world. If the players haven't been directly exposed to the idea, but it has influenced their experience in some tangential way, then there is a cause for those slight influences, but until the players come into direct contact with the source, i keep myself open to other concepts that might make more sense or are more entertaining.

Before speaking something at the table and making it real, I have a personal checklist I try to run through.

-Does it make sense and follow logically, in relation to everything that has been said before? (this includes assumptions about the natural laws of the imaginary world, the history of the world and the characters, the current situation, etc.)
-Does it make the characters' lives more interesting or dangerous?
-Does it  advance the situation?
-Does it follow the rules of the game?

If the answer is yes to all of those criteria, then I say it.

I used to do exactly this but I found that in one game I ran the PCs ran into something that was a bit set fightscene I had planned and I realised that whatever they did they were always comign to that fight and that that was wrong becuase it meant their actions were irrelevant.
I also found that certain players (remember by play base for years was a group of guys I started playing with aged 10) knew which of my buttons to press. By doing things that they knew appealed to me, and to the genre and their character, they were gaming me a little so they got an easier ride. A typical action woudl be to explain their reasoning very clearly to the other players and make it so very reasonable that this door had the tiger and this the lady, this aludes to what I mentioned up post where you lift part of the PC suggested explanation of a thing to explain it.

Anyway in one game I realised I was doing it and I stepped back and I decided not to and stuck with it that way ever since and its been better I think.

Quote from: NathanIW;737202This is some seriously good advice.  I'm going to implement it right now.

But in the last session, I didn't.  So here's the situation I need to fix:

Spoiler

The characters are searching for an immortal druid who is sort of the spiritual leader of their people.  They are from a town that has largely become heretics in the eyes of those who practice the old ways and the leader of that town desires the death of this druid and the syphoning of his power to foreign gods.

This druid is a horrible asshole.  He sacrifices other humans.  He sees anyone who lives in a village or a town as a soft nature-rejector who should be cast into the wilderness and die as prey.  He meddles in the affairs of the people, killing local tribe leaders and putting his people in charge.

The players learned that he's horrible and that people want him dead and have decided that they're still going to find him, but then warn him about the plot to kill him.  They asked around and I said he was busy installing and training new leadership among a northern tribe and could likely be found at their nomadic gathering place/trading outpost.

So what's there?  A lady or a tiger?  i didn't decide at all when I gave the lead.  It literally could be a tiger as prehistoric style saber tooth tigers are his totem animal and exist in the area.  Does he put them through his trials of going to some wilderness location and back without the aid of foreign technology (their people are neolithic)?  The characters range in their adherence to the old ways to varying degrees.  How would he react to their mixed company?  Demand the more traditional PCs sacrifice the heretics to the spirits?

Spoiler

Okay so the important part I guess is to be true to the NPC. the following are things I think I would bear in mnd
i) who controls the informationt hey gained re location sounds like its genuine to me
ii) will he be aware of their coming - depends on what information he has. I suspect he woudl know befor ethey get there seems likely).
iii)Is the druid aware of the plan to kill him? Does he care? Does he treat it seriously, is he afraid of death, would his death be a blow to his religion or part of the great circle?
iv) if you decide he will know they are coming but not what news they bring then his reaction to them will be what he knows of them. I assume he doesn't just kill folk off the cuff so he might grant them an audience to speak with him. He might not instead forcing them to do some trial to get his attention.
v) if he does listen to them he still might not care and seems unlikely to treat them as allies more likely to treat them with disdain due to their impure ways.

Anyway none of that is very helpful. Only you can know the answer cos only you know the setting and the NPCs well enough.

Quote from: Opaopajr;736977...it should be understood by the very nature of this being a mere forum that this is not "objective" or let alone "scientific." It's not peer reviewed like even an humanities journal, and it's all about imagination land, so there's really zero grounds for accusations of bias. It's all bias, it's all opinion. And insisting upon this obvious fact -- in favor of an objectivity that cannot contribute fruitfully beyond static facts like MSRPs -- adds nothing to these discussion.
...

Mere forum or not, when people write things that others are to read, I generally take what they wrote to mean what they wrote.*  If you say "in my opinion" I take it that way, if you say "X is Y" I take it that way as well, if you put a smiley on it I again take it that way.  It's not my place to ass-u-me* people are saying something different from what they write, even if it appears obvious.  Now, if it appears obvious, I probably won't comment on it, but I won't ass-u-me I've got it right either.

In this specific case, there is a difference between stating that (generic) YOU specifically can't improv a high quality game with no prep and saying no one else can.  GMing is an art (I think this is a fact, but people are welcome to tell me "that's just, like, your opinion, man."), and I think it's ridiculous to tell another artist they are doing it wrong if their art is being accepted by their audience the way they want it to be.  When someone tells another they can't do their art successfully, when they are in fact doing their art successfully, bringing up the fact that it's aesthetics adds to the conversation for me.



*I don't entirely agree that assuming is "ass-u-me" but it often can be and when I'm speaking/writing in a group of mostly strangers (like forums on the internet), I try to check most of my assumptions at the door.

Quote from: NathanIW;737166...
It's hard to be impartial and play to see what happens when you're making things up as you go.

I am utterly impartial as I make shit up (or steal it) seconds before the players run into it.  Once I've made it up (and usually written it down at that point), it's the way it is.  I very rarely change things once I have made up my mind.  If there are three doors, I may only have the vaguest of ideas what is behind each OR I may know exactly what is behind all three because six sessions ago I made something up that logically requires it.  Now I do try to keep as many things open as I can (so I can go with a better idea I or the players might think up later) but I'm not ignoring logic or cause and effect.  As well, I may have an encounter in mind, but not know WHERE exactly that encounter is going to be until the right place shows up (or the players want the info and I have to decide at that point).  Not because I'm moving that encounter, but because I haven't the foggiest idea where it is yet myself.  And it's not that they will get that encounter either, it might get tossed out.

Quote from: jibbajibba;737177...

So sticking to "The Lady and the Tiger" and "Leaving Stuff Behind" helps me ensure that my improv world is as unbiased as a world I prepared a month ago and wrote out in great detail with maps and stat blocks and everything.

I am utterly unconcerned with bias or illusionism.  My unconcern doesn't usually matter because in my case there won't be any river pirates or a specific location until I see the right place for them, the need for their existence, and a PC has some reason to know about them.  Though, like I essentially said in a previous post, once a PC knows the river pirates are at point X on river Y, they are locked in (unless of course it was bad information) and if they show up at point Z, not on a river, there WILL be a logical reason for it and it won't be because I want the players to encounter them, it will be because once they popped into existence they had their own agendas that happen to cross paths with the PCs.  This may end up not too far from where you are, but it's not over any concern about bias or illusionism (and really I'd never even HEARD of these kinds of concerns until I started paying more attention here).  I really could care less if my worlds are internally consistent, but I am VERY interested in it being externally consistent, if that makes sense.

Quote from: Adric;737201This is an interesting outlook. What defines bias? Arbitrariness? changing prep players have not been exposed to?

When I GM, I treat any ideas I've had that the players have not been exposed to as mutable, changeable, or not truly part of the world. If the players haven't been directly exposed to the idea, but it has influenced their experience in some tangential way, then there is a cause for those slight influences, but until the players come into direct contact with the source, i keep myself open to other concepts that might make more sense or are more entertaining.

Before speaking something at the table and making it real, I have a personal checklist I try to run through.

-Does it make sense and follow logically, in relation to everything that has been said before? (this includes assumptions about the natural laws of the imaginary world, the history of the world and the characters, the current situation, etc.)
-Does it make the characters' lives more interesting or dangerous?
-Does it  advance the situation?
-Does it follow the rules of the game?

If the answer is yes to all of those criteria, then I say it.

Or I could replace my last post with what Adric said :-)

Quote from: jibbajibba;737208...becuase it meant their actions were irrelevant.

Does this matter if they are unaware of it?

Quote from: jibbajibba;737208I also found that certain players (remember by play base for years was a group of guys I started playing with aged 10) knew which of my buttons to press. By doing things that they knew appealed to me, and to the genre and their character, they were gaming me a little so they got an easier ride. ...

Now this does concern me and I've run into it a couple times in longer term groups and to be honest, I've done it myself as a player a few times, of course, I would say it was only for the good of the game when I did it.  
 
If I suspect this is going on as a GM I tend to start drawing cards or rolling dice to throw some randomness into my decisions of what is next (though I do that from time to time, even when I don't suspect players trying to push my buttons,  if I have more than one good idea).