Notebook Kayfabe
This is one of my few pieces of tried & true GM advice, developed during my one good 5e campaign but very useful for the OSR games I'm running now. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with it.
For those not familiar with the term, 'kayfabe' means something like 'commitment to the bit'. In pro-wrestling, 'keeping kayfabe' means pretending that the dramas & beefs playing out in the ring are genuine rather than scripted (thus acting like they are real in interviews, social media, public appearances, etc.). Kayfabe operates on both sides of the TV screen -- the performers and audience both know it's all fake, but everyone agrees to suspend disbelief.
Using 'notebook kayfabe' means NEVER admitting that you made something up on the spot. When players ask "what's in that coffin?" or "what's the guard's name" or "hey, I can read cybergnome runes, what do the glyphs on the sword say?", simply reply "Hang on, I have it written down somewhere..." and animatedly leaf through your notebook (or prepared module) while you make up the answer.
Kayfabe is essentially roleplaying. Wrestlers roleplay as people with real grudges doing real violence to each other, and fans roleplay as people enjoying that violent spectacle. Notebook kayfabe works similarly by adding a meta-level of roleplaying to a ttrpg. The GM who uses it starts roleplaying as someone adjudicating a truly neutral, impartial, concrete, "blorb-y" world, and thereby invites the players to roleplay as players who believe in that neutral-impartial-concrete-blorb-y world. True concreteness is basically impossible & everyone knows it, but pretending otherwise is (in my experience) very rewarding for all involved.
A few additional notes:
- Obviously, the better your prep, the easier it is to pull this off. If "I have this in my notes" is true 75% of the time, the other 25% goes down much easier.
- This can also be done with dice, where you roll a 'die of fate' but pretend to look up the result in a non-existent table.
- This lends itself to 'traditional' rpgs with a ref/player divide, but I'd argue it's also useful for collaborative or 'anti-canon' games -- if you're a player and the GM calls on you to supply some part of the fiction, why not say "lemme check my notes"?
- This ties loosely to the 'mother may I' complaint about rulings-over-rules games. In my experience 'mother may I' is palatable when there's a strict pretense that mother knows what she's doing.
- Obligatory disclaimer: this is a stylistic preference & not a one size fits all prescription; improvisation is always necessary and there's not shame in doing so openly. Really, all I'm saying is that introducing a tongue-in-cheek social contract to collectively unsee obvious improv can be very fun.