From: dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan)
Subject: Re: Improvisation!
Organization: Xanadu Enterprises Inc.
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 12:34:22 GMT

In article <4815@balrog.ctron.com> smith@ctron.com writes:
|If the players were really bad, this is in inevitable result.  But if they
|operated in a reasonable fashion, made reasonable or better choices, and
|_still_ failed, then the problem lies in the scenario.  If you did not fix

	And I say that if my clues were reasonable, failure is their fault.
After a run I'll usually reveal anything that doesn't involve deep, dark
campaign secrets.  I've never had a player look at one of my flowcharts and
bitch that it was too complex to solve.  I've seen lots of
forehead-slapping, though.

|that problem on the fly, then you are not just a poor improv GM, you are a
|poor GM, and I can prove it by the most basic metric around, your players
|didn't have fun.  That is, after all, the entire purpose of the game.  Your

	"Fun" and "success" are not one and the same.

|players are not professional sleuths, they are not never going to miss a

	I'm not a professional criminal, so we're even.

|bet, success should be implied by the quality of the experience.  If they
|play their roles well, if they game well, then they should succeed.  If they

	Your criteria suck.  I don't really care how well they play their
roles; this ain't method acting.  (If they roleplay their disads even when
doing so impedes their progress, I'll nudge their karma meters up, though.)
As for how well they "game", whatever you mean by that...'A' fer effort, but
that and a buck will get you a ride on the subway.

|step out of character, or bicker, or work at cross-purposes, or otherwise
|damage their own cause, they should fail.

	This means that success and failure has nothing to do with their
PERFORMANCE, only with whether or not they were nice well-behaved players.

|Then, forgive me, but I think you have your priorities backwards.  The players
|without much a clue are not gaming badly, they simply are not realizing what
|is going on, _they_ deserve a helping hand.  The moron, by your own words,

	No, they do NOT deserve a helping hand, they need to put their brains
in gear.  If they'd gone and talked to the dead girl's friends and family in
the first place they'd have this case wrapped up by now.  This "mystery" is
only about three clues long, really; it was only intended to set up a series
of action scenes as rival gangs started competing to get their hands on the
new drug.  Instead they made a super-massive production out of it and
they're getting nowhere fast.


|had it coming, and you didn't give it to him.  How is this improving the
|experience of the game?  It doesn't sound like fun to me.

	In THIS case, following through would have meant death by fiat.  If I'd
had the general put the offending PC in jail, keeping in mind that they had
sufficient firepower to make him stay, it would have meant that he'd be
trapped there until the end of the scenario, which would consist of the
destruction of the town and everyone in it.  It would have been unfair to
kill the PC just because he mouthed off at the wrong person, so I saved his
butt.  But I did assess some pretty heavy penalties on him anyway.

[long claims that improv doesn't equal constant success deleted]

	Oh, nonsense.  I've GM'ed for ten-year old kids that meet the criteria
you've laid out.

|You still have it in mind that improv invariably means helping the players.
|It doesn't.  Improv means adding elements to a scenario during play, those

	It does.  It HAS to.  Your whole argument is that GM's should cheat to
create a "pleasurable gaming experience".


dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com   ...uunet!tronsbox!dfrancis     GEnie: D.HEFFERNAN1
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"I don't understand why you make such a big deal out of everything...haven't
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