I think that's true *in play* but for world building, which can be a more deliberative process, some things seem useful to nail down.

I might not need to have a reference that tells me the task difficulty and DMs for ocean refueling, but I need to have a concept of the process and what steps are there. At least, if I lack that, I may not play it as richly as it might deserve as a GM.

I look at most of the discussion about how things could work as 'GM background'. That all gets absorbed into the mental gestalt, but not in detail, just in form and maybe in where some boundaries exist. Then improvisation at the table is done within some larger precepts or approaches.

It's kind of like all the D&D and Traveller sector/regional modules.... I will never look up stuff at the game table from them (or rarely). I will skim a lot to get the flavour and the gist and to quickly extract key unique aspects and then at most have a few bullet points on a card for when I ref. Then I'll use the unique and valuable aspects and fill in the rest on the fly.

If I don't like any of it (has happened... many a d&d regional model was 'yeah, that's kind of interesting, but not my groups style'....) in terms of utility to my gaming group, I just let it pass out of my GM brain.

Harvest the meaningful 5%, jettison the other 95%.

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:21 AM David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net> wrote:

Tom Barclay <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

If you can make up reasonable sounding task statements (or rolls if you are OST folks - Old School Traveller) and keep the game and combats flowing without too much document diving, you'll have a much more dynamic feeling game. It will have a sense of momentum.

This is a keen insight which often leaves me puzzled when there is an in depth discussion of the ways in which this or that rule "doesn't work" or seems to be "in conflict" with some other bits of the rules.

The "primary principle" you've identified here suggests that the "answer" is such instances is something like "Yep, that bit's not quite right; here's an opportunity for the referee to exercise their essential discretion." (In other words, this is why the "referee" role cannot be effectively automated out of existence.)

Any resulting "disagreements" about a proposed resolution would seem to be mostly about differences in the inherent subjectivity of that referee discretion.

YMMV,

David
--
"Let's see yours. Draw--soul! Inspection--soul!" - Foxx Travis (H. Beam Piper), "Oomphel in the Sky"

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