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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5195498" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I started playing I played dungeon crawls. Then I started GMing and tried to build stories but didn't really know how. I was influenced by books like Manual of the Planes (1st ed), Wilderness Survival Guide and Oriental Adventures, as well as a certain tone in the mid-to-late 80s Dragon magazines, towards a more simulationist style. This was partially out of a sense that this was what "real roleplaying" was all about, and partially out of some sort of world-buidling desire. But I never found it very satisfying - the greater attention to detail didn't produce greater fun.Then one weekend as a 16-year old I GMed a Keep on the Borderlands 1 shot with two multi-class thief PCs that never left the keep. I set up a few situations with locked rooms and NPCs, the players initiated their own actions - breaking into things, blackmailing and exposing cultists - and I discovered the sort of game I wanted to GM: character-heavy player-driven, where I provide as many thematically-rich game elements as I can (gods, slavers, factions, mysteries, etc) and the players build their PCs up in response to them. I found out what I wanted out of world-building - not detail or sandbox per se, but a complex and interrelated set of these thematically-rich elements.The next 20 or so years was about finding the right ruleset. Although I played a fair bit of 2nd ed AD&D I was never a huge fan, and certainly would never have GMed it. Playing a range of games at Cons reinforced this judgement - the AD&D game was almost always the least satisfying.I GMed a little bit of but never played 3E, and had no desire to - although mechanically robust in all sorts of ways it nevertheless seemed to me to combine some of the least attractive features of AD&D and Rolemaster. (I'm sure that this is not a fair judgement, but it does accurately capture my feelings.)I GMed Rolemaster for a long time - 1990 to 2008 - but while it delivered very richly defined and playable PCs, aspects of the mechanics increasingly got in the way. For me, it was reading essays at The Forge that helped me work out what aspects of the game were working for me, and what aspects I was needlessly clinging onto just because I thought they were part of "real roleplaying".For me, the announcement of 4e was a big thing - it coincided with likely changes in group composition and with an increased desire on my part to find a game more conducive to my playstyle. Me and my players are now playing 4e.Given my preferences, I probably should be GMing a more explicitly narrativist game like The Burning Wheel or HeroQuest, but my players are probably a bit more traditionalist than I am in their gaming preferences. And we all enjoy the fiddly character building, tactical combat aspect and fantasy tropes of a more traditional fantasy RPG like 4e.On the theory that the older you get the harder it is to change, I can see us sticking with 4e for a fair while.</blockquote>

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