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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8162710">Well, yes, a lot of it comes out of the OSR, which was us going back to earlier games, editions and adventure structures. And I started gaming in '86 so much of my early experience was around styles that embraced letting the dice fall where they may, a GM creating a place for players to explore, and not worrying about having something like a overarching plot or story (it was more lets see what the group does today and lets see what happens to them). But it is new too. It is definitely through a lens of the present. And the effort is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, find what is useful. But there are other aspects to it, and a lot of people arrived here by very different paths (this is why I keep hammering "living adventure" which is a concept that I first encountered when I was running Ravenloft in the early 90s and used Feast of Goblyns). That gave me a very different sense of the game than say people who use a term like world in motion. We are in a similar space but there is a difference. There is a lot more to the style, a lot more to what I like, and a lot more in general, but these conversations tend to get very binary and very locked in around the points people are making. I think both sides in this discussion had a strong reaction to some of the railroading and the Gm as story teller that was heavy in the 90s, and some of us also had a reaction to things like the rigid linear adventure structures in the 3E DMG. And we all went into the forest to find a solution to this problem (and there may have been other problems in the mix or different problems). One sides solution was things like the tools you guys are talking about (and these tools make sense, and they do solve the problem). Our solution was to go back and see where things might have gone off the rails, then find a way to bridge that to our current games and approaches. I settled on a few different approaches based on that which work for me: Sandbox-living adventure, Sandbox+drama, monster-of-week/monster hunt, situational character driven adventures, etc. Basically I took the things that had stuff which worked for me: the van richten books, Call of Cthulhu, the 1E DMG, the Isle of Dread, OD&D, the HARN setting, 100 Bushels of Rye, Feast of Goblyns, etc. But I must reiterate, this isn't my only way of approaching games. The groups I belonged to growing up played all kinds of RPGs, and the groups I am in now, are the same. What I am describing is what kind of games I like to run most. But one of my favorite games is the old Hong Kong Action Theatre!, which as a concept is quite different from what I am talking about (but lots of fun). I also used to love the game OG, and TORG with the Drama deck. And like I've said many times, I really quite like Hillfolk. One of the default games in my group is Savage Worlds, which is a game I am always happy to play (and the person in our group who usually runs it, does so in a very different style from the GM approach I am describing above).</blockquote>

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