I mean, we decide to break into a warehouse in Fong Town. Who does it belong to? What's in there? Can they afford magical protection? Do they have influence with the town government to get the PCs in trouble? I believe you can sometimes construct this amount of detail in a very restricted sense, but that means you better have the PCs on a short leash so they don't go outside that!
I ran this kind of campaign, it definitely wasn't sustainable at the pace we moved at! In fact it devolved down into essentially narrativist play after a few months. Not that I'd really heard about those techniques (it was the '90s) but focusing on the plot as being the thing that was the game part of play got pretty interesting. Not that it was easy to do with 2e, but kind of possible.
