thread: 2011-09-08 : Trad vs Indie: FIGHT! pt2
On 2011-09-29, cc wrote:
My disagreement is not based on a failure to understand the principles you work from. None of this alters my expectation that I'd be better off with planning than with trying to ask and answer these questions in play. Thus, as you say, when you start reading, these questions are all apparently open; but then Tolkien goes and answers them for you. Now I'd contend that if I chose to answer some of them while wearing my GM's hat, they are just as apparently open, in the subjective experience of the players, as they were to Tolkien's readers. But by answering (some of) them I can, like Tolkien, create a deliberate and thought-out effect that I/we probably couldn't if improvising in real time. And this has the added advantage that as and when I do have to improvise, I can do so in the knowledge of what I have already planned, which minimises the danger of doing something I might later regret, or which violates the theme and mood, or which has implications that are not immediately apparent.
