Improvisational Technique

I saw the scripted vs. improvisation technique and it reminded me of what I had posted on RPG.net a week or so ago. I'm still not comfortable with the answers I got so I thought I'd post a cleaned up version here. By the way, I understand the: To each there own, argument and completely agree. I ask because, I'm curious, not because I feel I'm lacking something or some how are playing my games incorrectly. That said, here's my question. How do you weave an improvisational game into a coherent whole? I have trouble imagining an improvisational game being anything other than a set of anecdotal scenes or encounters that may be interesting but have no real coherent whole. If you wrote them down later you'd have a grouping of VERY short stories and not a novel so to speak. This is how I see it. If you've got a good improvisational GM he/she has an excelent understanding of the world and the NPCs in it. Okay, so there's this lavish setting, populated with fairly fleshed out NPCs complete with goals and relationships and this is what the GM works from while the Players romp around on their whim. Okay, so in this setting my character might stop a thief from robbing a store and I might end up having a duel with a noble. So what? Even if they spawn sub-plots in that the theif now has his cohorts tracking me down and the noble becomes a nemesis, these two threads have nothing to do with each other. And even if they become interwind some how they only relate to me and not the group as a whole and THEN if they relate to the group they don't relate to... well... anything else. It's just some anecdotal experience that while interesting certainly isn't a coherent whole. There's a reason I don't like biographies. Even some pre-planed adventures run like this. I'm constantly amazed at how easily amused people are. The first 7th Sea game I ever played was an AEG published game and in it the players were asked to deliver a letter to a general on the Ussuran front line. Along the way we were chased by the Musketeers. There were scenes that didn't involve the Musketeers: we were attacked by thieves, we encountered a monster or two, we had to book passage with an interesting explorer and solve his export problem. But none of these had anything to do with delivering the letter. I kept expecting the musketeers to turn out to be the good guys and we were tricked into delivering a letter that contained something bad. I kept expecting the explorer we got a ride from to betray us and turn us over to the musketeers. But in the end that was all there was to it. Deliver this letter and have some disjointed adventures along the way. I was slightly disappointed. And this is how I judge both my own adventures and commercially published ones. If when I sit down to do a session write up there are scenes that I can skip because you don't need to know about them to understand the plot then it's a 'bad' adventure in my eyes. It was filled with a bunch of 'filler' scenes to make up for a weak story. For example, the 7th Sea adventure I played can be summarised thus: 'The players are given a letter by a Montaigne Noble Woman to deliver to her husband on the Ussuran front. The letter explains that the attack on Ussura is really a trap laid by the Emporer of Montaigne who wishes the Noble Woman's Husband dead. The musketeers catch word that the players are off to warn the general and set off in pursuit.' There were 4 or 5 other encounters and scenes but they don't have anything do with the above which is the core plot. You see? I like to have freedom in each scene or encounter to do as I please but I want each scene or encounter to be relavent to the whole. I want my games to run as tightly written mysteries or spy-thrillers rather than say, The Hobbit. This has gotten a bit rambly but what I'm really asking is: Can this be achieved with improvisational role-playing? Can everything be woven into a coherent whole so that in the end you can look back and say, "yes, nothing here was irrelivant. If I omit a single scene or encounter then the story becomes unclear and incomprehensible." Jesse