thread: 2011-09-08 : Trad vs Indie: FIGHT! pt2
On 2011-09-29, cc wrote:
Yes, on the basis of my experience, and not in gaming alone, I think it is wrong. In fact I used to be employed in ensuring that teams of engineers stayed on focus, and they weren't even creating things out of their imagination.
The last is dangerously "motherhood and apple pie". Essentially I am invited to imagine all the things I could want for encounters and whatnot, and to then assume that they can somehow be met. Well sure, seeing as that would all go on in my head, the answer would necessarily be "yes". But CAN all the things I would want be realised in this manner?
In addition, even if all this happened, it would mean that I would be denied the joy of sticking a cigar and my mouth and remarking that I love it when a plan comes together. And from the other side of the GM's screen, there just seems to be something less valuable about a sequence of stuff that arises out of a sort of random walk rather than from human artifice.
But those are fairly vague aesthetic concerns. Fundamentally I don't think ad hoc decision making can achieve the kind of the things that deliberate and thoughtful planning can. There are any number of real world examples; there are very few scenarios in which extemporising is superior to having a plan, even a bad plan. So yeah,I think it's wrong.
