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The important part is to have the players first agree on general goals for the party and then create characters accordingly. That's the one thing where I interfere with players in their freedom to make whatever character they want.

I think what's important is not so much that the players have a talent or developed skills at crafting engaging stories, but investment into the setting and its conflicts. When playing a game, the players are not (or at least should not be) attempting to create a series of events that will make...

In contrast to "only you can stop the villain and if you don't try there would be no game", what available methods do we have to attract PCs to make someone else's problem their own even though the campaign does not require them to? If you have an existing group of players and they are asking to...

Doesn't have to work for a lot of players. Only has to work for players who want to play in the campaign.

That sounds a lot like 2002. When seemingly every new game was d20.

That sounds to me like a campaign hook. The players are given their sendoff by an NPC, or just as the opening narration, and then they are on their own. Being part of an organization is their background, but they are not being managed by an NPC.

That's why it needs to be really simple and straightforward in the early game! :D The misunderstandings and projections alone will provide more than enough complexity.

The challenges of the campaign are the obstacles that stand in the way of the players achieving their goal. I think the main element that separates player-driven campaigns from scripted games is that the players pick the goals depending on their own and their characters' perception of what...

The problem with the players being given a series of immediate task by a superior authority is that it again limits the impact that player decisions to short term situations. They still go from point to point as they are being directed to by the GM as servants of NPCs who make the actual...

One thing that has been bothering me for years now about stories in RPG adventures and campaigns is that it overwhelmingly takes the form of a more or less complete script being written that covers all the relevant plot points and sequence of scenes before the players even enter the picture...

We also had the Motion Control and VR revolutions, self-driving cars, crypto-currency, and NFTs. I'll be waiting another 5 to 10 years to see how revolutionary any of this will actually have been.

I'm not just interested in Fantasy and Sci-fi! I'm also interested in ancient history and astronomy.

Are the undead riders the Dragonlance DM screen? I never pass an opportunity to share my dislike of Dragonlance and I never use GM screens, but that's one I really would want to have.

Keith Parkinson is the definitive original Forgotten Realms look to me.

I love the O'Connor stairs. Those are great. I also really like this fairly simple one on the inside cover of the Moldvay Basic rules.

What is the one book that one should get first to learn the game?

As someone who thinks the AD&D rulebooks are completely incomprehensible to the point of being useless, I think OSRIC looks like a perfectly reasonable and playable game. If AD&D is what I want, OSRIC is really the only option I actually consider.

I assign the stats according to how I imagine the character to be.

I am absolutely a big fan and proponent of romantic gamemastering. When I look at a new rules system, what I am searching for is how the mechanics produce exciting scenes. Good mechanics make taking risks mechanically attractive and produce escalations instead of stopping the action when a roll...