Gaming Phases

[Haltherrion]

As a referee have you ever gone through phases? Fundamental shifts in your game style?

I think I'm on the cusp of one now. We'll see if it sticks but based on the demands of family and work I've made the decision (mid-campaign even) to move from a style of play that depends on heavy pre-game prep, is more "serious" and story driven to a more sandbox style. I don't mean to imply the two are synomous; I just want both less hard core gaming and a more player driven game.


The recent change has prompted a look back over my ref'ing career and I see several phases or "eras":

• My initial junior high to early high school phase where I was discovering RPGs, anything went in terms of setting and mixed genre and while I was never true "Monty Haulish" I could be very liberal.
• Late high school through early post college where I went "serious": no mixed genres, deep, developed settings, in-character for PCs at all times but very sandboxish with little direction from me and a wide open world to explore. In many ways I was trying to simulate a fantasy world.
• Post college, where I moved to heavily story driven when I realized I could not get my game group together very often and my sandbox games seemed to be languishing due to lack of momentum, partly because of the less frequent play (the first two phases were characterized by game play at least once a week and often daily in high school; yes call me a geek).
• Now I find myself moving back to a sandboxish open world, not because I don't like or know how to drive a story but because I don't have the out of game time to put it all together. (And for me, strong story takes prep time; I can't ad lib strong story). But I also think that with a few more decades of play under my belt, I can handle sandbox with less frequent play.

So, do you look back at eras or phases in your ref'ing style?

And a second question I will preface with a caveat: I'm not looking to start a flame war and see merit for both sandbox and story-driven campaigns. I don't see "sandbox" or "story-driven" as perjorative. So, for those of you who have done both sandbox and story driven, what has made you move between the two poles or points in between?

 

[AeroDm]

I can definitely see an evolution with almost all of it relating to how much time we as a group can commit to the game.

There was a time when I felt it was really important to create a detailed weather generator that would only gradually change the weather based on the previous day's result. We briefly had rules to see if you got sick modified by if you carried around a bedroll, tent, or extra blankets. These were during periods of the game in which we had a lot more free time and so it was worth the incremental investment. Those rules are long, long gone and I find the game more enjoyable without them. Now we only focus on stuff that provides a high ratio of fun-to-time.

 

[Shades of Green]

When I began GMing in 1997, I played VERY fast-and-loose, with cliche plots, ultra-kitchen-sink worlds and about 20 minutes of prep per session, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. We didn't really know the rules well, we made some serious mistakes, and I did some serious handwaves, but we had fun and that's the important part.

Later on, around 1998, I got into more serious gaming, with detailed plots, more world-building, and much less juvenile munchkinism. We role-played a lot, spent a lot of time drawing elaborate maps and complex plots, and put the plot first. We loved detailed rules and played 2E by the book including differential armour class by weapons and weapon speeds.

Then, around 2001, I got into a hiatus in gaming until 2006 due to personal reasons - college, moving out of home, changing friends and so on.

In 2005 I met Hani, the love of my life, and in 2006 she expressed interest in my RPG books. So we started playing Shadowrun 4E. She is a superb role-player, but hates complex rules; also, I had some sort of a GM burn-out, so I didn't prep much. So we ran things very fast and loose, with minimal prep and me winging things up on the fly, mostly plot-driven and NPC-driven while ignoring the more complex rules of Shadowrun 4E.

Later we moved to D&D 3E, but I didn't like the necessary prep work-load of that system; so we moved to BFRPG and had lots and lots of fun. Then I got into a gaming hiatus in 2010 due to university workload.

Now I'm leaning towards more loose sandbox play, with Hani making the decisions and me (as the GM) just providing the setting.

 

[nedjer]

Romanticism - finding out what all those interesting monsters do by killing them and stealing their money
Arts and Crafts - move into the more naturalistic G and D modules
Pre-Raphaelite - mythologising the naturalistic
Art Nouveau - fluid, organic sandboxyness
Art Deco - sandbox gets lines and boundaries
Modernism - introducing and balancing new ideas and challenge-based play
Post-modern - what kind of ideas and challenges are we playing with and how do we want to balance them

 

[S'mon]

The main difference for me would be two eras:

Era 1: AD&D from ca 1985 to mid '90s: high play rate (often daily), high PC attrition and advancement, small groups of 1-4 players, small number of different players (some I'm still friends with), PC infighting, campaigns going to epic/deity level. Heavy worldbuilding.

Era 2: 3e & 4e D&D From 2000 to present: lower play rate, typically fortnightly, lower PC attrition & slower advancement; one 3e campaign went to ca 17th-19th level but generally single-digit play; larger groups of 5-7 players, lots of different players most of whom I don't know well, no PVP. Less worldbuilding, less prep time - although the ratio of prep to play may be similar, it feels a lot less when games are every 2 weeks rather than every weekday.

I have never run a story-based game, and I tend to seek out sandboxy modules to run. I did experiment with a 3e campaign, 'Willow Vale', 2008-10 that had a bit of overarching narrative, BBEG, and a bit of CS Lewis-influenced high fantasy theme, but the campaign was still made up of a series of self-contained, largely sandboxy adventures. And overall I don't think it was quite as successful as my normal low-fantasy approach.

 

[Haltherrion]

There was a time when I felt it was really important to create a detailed weather generator that would only gradually change the weather based on the previous day's result. We briefly had rules to see if you got sick modified by if you carried around a bedroll, tent, or extra blankets. These were during periods of the game in which we had a lot more free time and so it was worth the incremental investment.

Yeah, it is funny how excessive time can lead to covering the littlest things. I had forgotten about detailed weather rules with hysteresis.

On a similar note, I once had a list of something like 1000 gem descriptions that I used in the game. I've always loved geology and gems, wrote a perl script to randomly define and appraise gems based on a bunch of randomized parameters (material, size, flaws, etc.).

Eventually I had to come to the painful conclusion that my players couldn't care less about a detailed description of every piece of loot. It was all just portable gold to them

Thanks for the reply; apparently I need to spread more XP around before I hit you up again.

 

[Haltherrion]

The main difference for me would be two eras:

Era 1: AD&D from ca 1985 to mid '90s: high play rate (often daily), high PC attrition and advancement, small groups of 1-4 players, small number of different players (some I'm still friends with), PC infighting, campaigns going to epic/deity level. Heavy worldbuilding.

Era 2: 3e & 4e D&D From 2000 to present: lower play rate, typically fortnightly, lower PC attrition & slower advancement; one 3e campaign went to ca 17th-19th level but generally single-digit play; larger groups of 5-7 players, lots of different players most of whom I don't know well, no PVP. Less worldbuilding, less prep time - although the ratio of prep to play may be similar, it feels a lot less when games are every 2 weeks rather than every weekday.

Good call on attrition and level advancement; those too tend to track with my "eras" of play.

For me attrition was partly tied to "realism" in the sense that at times I've felt PC death was proper for a well played fantasy world. These days, my interest in PC death is much more simple: while I like it in principle, I don't have a lot of players and I like to keep them motivated. I've found PC death to be overall more trouble than it is worth in general. If it happens so be it but I don't see goals for it any more. I have done so in the past at times where I've wanted the feel of a more lethal campaign.

That said, some of the more memorable campaigns have had a fair amount of PC death. Also depends on the genre. If I'm running something contemporary or sci-fi with a hard edge and PCs are playing with advanced weaponry, they can expect to be killed regularly. On the flip side, 4E has made PCs very survivable. They are pretty hard to kill these days.

Thanks for the reply; can't hit you up for XP just yet...

 

[pawsplay]

Phase 1: Gimme
I started with the Red Box, and got coaxed into playing AD&D with the older kids on the street. I wanted all the gaming I could get, all the time. I was fairly strict about reading rules. As a budding DM, I experimented with a variety of styles, including "telling a story" and soon learned the folly of trying to predict anything. I sharpened my adversarial, dungeon-crawling player and DM skills, while at the same time sensing there must be more to it than this.

Phase 2: Genre!
DC Heroes. TMNT. GURPS. MERP. I became a rapid genre fiend at age 12. I became particularly attracted to parsimonious game mechanics. I thought it was keen that Star Wars and GURPS dispensed with all but the humble d6. I spent a lot of time prepping games, and scheming how to find more players. Talislanta and Hero System became my dominant systems.

Phase 3: College
In college, the gaming you want, you can't get, and the gaming you get, you don't want. I got talked into playing AD&D again for the time in years. I got rooked into dysfunctional Vampire games. Several campaigns died flaky deaths.

Phase 4: Enlightenment
Somewhere along the way, I began to wonder if I had actually outgrown RPGs. I sold all but a few out-of-print games, and even some of those. I went over a year without any tabletop RPGs, played some Everquest, and focused my attention on alcohol and sex. Then one day, I realized how tedious it was being in a long-term relationship with someone with a nominal interest in RPGs, but who seemingly despised actual play. Once that relationship ended, I returned. Ever since then, I'm in a weekly game whenever I can get it. I'll play almost anything that isn't horrible. I love funny dice. I paint miniatures. I still love GURPS and Talislanta, but I enjoy tinkering with funky systems, too. I don't mind playing in a one-shot. Games are fun! I look forward to gaming with my kids.

 

[AeroDm]

Pawsplay's phase 4 inspired me to expand on my previous post.

I would say that the importance of RPGs has actually increased over time despite taking an increasingly back-seat role in my life. Some people paint, others write, others knit, others build... I do all of those through RPGs. If I get an urge to draw a map, I do it and I have an audience. If I want to write a legend, I do it. If I want to design a multi-tiered battlefield out of lumber, people love it. As commitments take more free time away from me, the ability to express my other passions has become more important and RPGs are a vehicle by which any passion can have a home.

I'd say that is my current phase. When I was younger I spent a lot of time focusing on what wasn't present or wasn't allowed. Now I focus more on how I can facilitate things my players or I want to show up.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My initial phase of gaming- 1977-1982- was driven by my love of genre fiction, but most of my early PCs were warriors of some kind. I wanted to play combat guys, and the RP, while there, was not very nuanced. Even in Traveller, I mostly played PCs with Space Marine backgrounds.

With the release of Champions, I got to stretch a bit more, since I was a comic book junkie. Exploring superheroic PCs whetted my appetite for FRPG PCs who used magic. From that point on, most of my FRPG characters had access to some kind of spellcasting or similar powers. But while i was a pretty good RPer, I was still focused mainly in the combats. That lasted until 1990.

In 1990, I went to Law School, and happened to find a game group that played HERO (as Champions was now called) and D&D, but also a host of other games, including a smattering of playtesting. We played so many different systems that I began to focus less on combat and more on RP...and PC design to support the RP. Why? Well, it takes time to master all those different combat systems, but RP is internal and mechanicless. All you need to do is analyze the PC in depth.

And that has been my style since then: I play PCs I find interesting. While I still love the combats, I get as much- if not more- joy from PC design and RP. And by PC design, I don't mean mechanical optimization (though that may occur), but rather, using the mechanics as best I can to make the PC as much like the ideal version of him/her/it floating around in my head.