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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6435689" data-attributes="member: 6696971">You need to pump the brakes a minute here and throttle it back.  I started GMing in 1984.  I learned while watching the games of 4 prolific GMs of that era who began playing in 1974 and by digesting Gygax's DMG + the absurd collection of D&D magazines that troupe possessed.  Over the course of the next 10 years, as I was honing my craft and my own specific niche within it, I watched and shared advice on principles and techniques with a dozen other very prolific GMs.  Your "unless you're using your weird retcon rules" statement is 100 % absurd.  The art of heavily improving a game via random encounter rolls and adjusting backstory as required to mesh the newly generated content with the establishment is utterly orthodox GMing (and one of the most important, and most difficult to master, skills of proficient GMing).  It is absolutely as legitimate (and predates it) as the extreme prep, metaplot heavy, detail-saturated setting, process-sim (possibly heavy GM-force) style you're advocating for.  The Dragonlancing of D&D during the burgeoning stages of AD&D2e was a thing.  And it was a thing because it was different than what came before it.But more to the point, D&D has had many different agendas that require the invocation of different principles, techniques, and play procedures:1)  Pawn Stance, Step On Up, Dungeon-Crawl Murderhoboing2)  Sandbox Hex-Crawling3)  Metaplot Heavy, Big Damn Setting, Process Simulating (and maybe Deep Immersioning + GM Forcing)4)  Action/Adventure, Story (right) Now For Big Damn HeroesI'm intimately familiar with running all 4.  Whether you personally like them or not, styles 1, 2, and 4 are not remotely deviant to the hobby.</blockquote>

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