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Sure. I haven't prepped what will happen in nearly twenty years. I played in AD&D 1e games where the DM didn't do so. It's not something outre by any means.

My point was mostly that if the people at the table agree that bringing the world to the game is primarily the GM's responsibility, that's not fundamentally different from the people at the table agreeing to play in Greyhawk or Duskvol. I don't see anything about that sort of arrangement that...

It seems as though a table at which it's the GM's responsibility to bring at least most of a world suitable to play in might qualify as the participants agreeing on the world. This is the way the tables I've been at recently have done it and there's been no shortage of player contributions to...

And some of us have a sense that if we overtune an encounter in ways the PCs can't prepare for then we should maybe adjust something somewhere. My own preference is for dubious-but-defensible tactics because my experience is that if you give the PCs a chance they'll figure something out.

TRPGing with a group you don't know can absolutely be a surreal experience as well as a revelatory one.

In my experience there's a similar realization available to long-term GMs who get or take or make an opportunity to play. Alas many GMs don't seem to learn any more from the reversal of perspective than the players you're talking about.

As a player I am pretty flexible though there are some genres and playstyles I do not enjoy and I try to avoid the game systems built to foster and encourage them. If I know and like the people around the table I can sometimes put those preferences aside and enjoy the company in the context. As...

My sweet spot for skills is probably better described as a range and defined as a set of principles. There should be more skills than any single character can be good at. Jack of all Things is a viable idea but that's typically defined as much by the Master of None addendum as anything else...

That seems right. The biggest difference I see is that the story for your D&D game is already written and and the process of play is just filling in some details whereas the story for your Stonetop game is emerging from play. Changing characters isn't much going to change the story of The Temple...

There have been some people answering in terms of chronological order and there have been some answering in terms of importance and at least one has answered in terms of something like structure. I agree that as someone else has said above story and character can be hard to entangle. I don't...

I think there's a difference between knowing the past of the character and knowing their future. I think it's similar to the difference between the GM knowing the past of the setting or the situation and knowing its future. I think the best experiences I've had at TRPG tables have come when...

I agree that TRPGs are not likely to be the best first choice if what I want most is to interact with the rules. That doesn't mean the rules aren't important in a TRPG of course. I have a strong preference that the players be able to understand the rules well enough to make good...

The players bring their characters. The GM brings the setting. The people at the table do the game. The story is an output of play. Chronologically the characters come first unless the GM has already made the setting. As a matter of importance though I'm pretty sure the story is why we play...

If there is this sort of failure to align at the table there needs to be some adjustment both in the sense that he needs to adjust to the rest of the table and in the sense that the rest of the table needs to adjust to him. If that proves not to be possible then he probably simply will not work...

I think most of the advantage is that the game is meant to be adapted to suit your intentions. The difference between adapting D&D 5e to play a game set in a real-world-adjacent setting with some oddities and adapting Cypher to that same game is vast. Most of the rest of the advantage seems to...

If I have an idea for a thing that doesn't fit with D&D I am perfectly happy to run a genre/setting-agnostic game such as Cypher to make that game happen. Even though the setting/genre-agnostic games I've played have expectations built in about how play happens and how the world works they're...

Our D&D games are very much more about the characters than they are about whatever location they happen to be. That might be why the players pay more attention to everyone else's characters. We tend to play all our TRPGs that way.

I don't know that I've seen players ever not root for their fellow players if there weren't other table-chemistry problems. I do think players tend to overestimate how well the people at the table understand each other's characters.

Those seem good to me. The ones in my circles run to "Take the game about as seriously as everyone else. Respect your fellow players and their characters. Don't be a wangrod." Keep the guidance short enough to repeat while standing on one foot I guess.

Different people will of course have different experiences and different preferences. I played a fair amount of 1e but ran very little of it. I run 5e very much inline with how I remember those games of 1e. I don't think either the 1e games I remember or the 5e games I run could be described...