since i'm crystallized in amber i still use it to mean "oh, so like The Mountain Witch kinda"

i mean if the difference is merely what order you're telling the story in, sure. but if careful prep is actually the difference between success and failure, it allows for a different form of player involvement. scratches a different sort of itch.

to me, the flashback thing feels like me telling a story about someone else doing a heist, and the other method feels like doing a heist.

it's like a DIY zine form of D&D. as if it's telling you "this is how simple this game really is, so take this and do whatever you want with it"

i have this walter benjamin inspired attitude towards it-- i think the gm-player distinction obscures the innately communal nature of what we're doing (eg sharing work load organically among the players has evolved as tradition a few times in the hobby's history)

it's exactly here where i break and take a more rhizomatic view of authorship-- if a player takes (ooc) notice of something, the GM responds to that by giving it further thought (for example) and in fact i think these non-lusory channels of communication are in many ways definitive of the artform

There's an attitude that floats around online like "the most important thing is not that i play games how i want, but that you don't play games how you want". fwiw i don't think people that act like this play games very often

one funny thing is that there's an ideal form of Adventure which is more or less just pre-done GM prep as a toolkit. which i think is good and useful regardless of system but not exactly legible as a mimicry of historical D&D supplements

not yet...

classic traveller. in the past i've gone on kicks where i've been into OSR/NSR stuff, storygame stuff, or crunchy 90s stuff. trav appeals to all of those impulses while being distinct from all the categories. wild and unique game

the dice roll bit is interesting. i think OSR stuff (inasmuch as it exists/existed) is more cool with things being completely arbitrary. "no need to prep this, just roll it on a table and we'll figure out what it means" sort of mentality

spirit animal