Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
Before I get into this I am going to give some personal background. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with a story focused Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition game back in 1997 when I was 13. Then went on to run and play a lot of Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. I come back into Dungeons and Dragons with Third Edition, but was still playing mostly Vampire. The Back To The Dungeon aesthetic of Third Edition intrigued me, but our games were still mostly GM story focused. As many on this board know when Fourth Edition came out I embraced with all my heart, but largely as a different game. The lore and indie RPG techniques that bled into the game excited me.
After awhile I fell out of love, mostly because the game was just too focused on the big stories and not enough on the more personal individual stories. So I largely left adventure gaming behind to focus on games like Sorcerer, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Masks. I did run some Exalted Third Edition, Demon - The Descent, and Vampire The Requiem Second Edition utilizing a fusion of traditional and indie techniques. Then something happened - Blades in the Dark. Blades is a game about a crew of scoundrels working their way up the underworld of a arcane powered city in the midst of a set of interlocking factions who are all trying to do conflicting things. The game uses a combination of indie and OSR techniques to make this come to life.
After awhile of playing Blades I saw a video where John Harper, the creator of Blades in the Dark, talked about the game of Stars Without Number he was running. It seemed like a lot of fun so I checked it out. Stars is a B/X retro clone that uses elements of Traveler to let you play out games about mostly mercenaries trying to make it in the cold hard vacuum of space. Really it's Dungeons and Dragons in space. I ran it and I had never had so much fun playing a role playing game. The expansive sandbox, factions that went to war with each other regardless of what the Player Characters did, the play procedures that made it clear we were playing a game and the story came after, the asymmetry of information and ruthless nature of the combat system spoke to me.
After awhile of playing Stars Without Number we made the transition to Moldvay B/X and I literally fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons all over again. The dungeon crawls, secret rolls that maintained a fog of war, long term consequences from fighting monsters, strategic play and just overall vibe of the game awoke like something primal in me. The game was seriously good. I loved how as you rose in levels outside the dungeon you also felt more prominent. I loved how monsters were puzzles that needed to be solved. I loved how time was a resource to be managed.
Currently I still play some indie games, some Moldvay, and some Fifth Edition. When Pathfinder Second Edition came out I was initially skeptical. I had always loved the lore of Pathfinder, but the focus on the character building mini-game just was not my thing. I saw some previews and I liked that it had a clear presentation and seemed to have interesting martial characters that looked like they could be played skillfully and the design seemed to speak to the themes of each class. I also loved that they seemed much more grounded in the fiction and lacked resource management. So I got the PDFs, but was still fairly skeptical.
Over the next couple days I starting digging into the rules of both The Core Rulebook and The Bestiary. For a game like this I always find it helpful to analyze things from both sides of the screen so you can see how things fit together. I appreciated that the tone of the game seemed to be more collaborative, really appreciated the class and spell design, but for me the tipping point was really digging into the Bestiary, looking over the skill chapter, and the Exploration section of playing the game. The thing that really sold me personally is how much of Classic Dungeons and Dragons I saw in the game.
After awhile I fell out of love, mostly because the game was just too focused on the big stories and not enough on the more personal individual stories. So I largely left adventure gaming behind to focus on games like Sorcerer, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Masks. I did run some Exalted Third Edition, Demon - The Descent, and Vampire The Requiem Second Edition utilizing a fusion of traditional and indie techniques. Then something happened - Blades in the Dark. Blades is a game about a crew of scoundrels working their way up the underworld of a arcane powered city in the midst of a set of interlocking factions who are all trying to do conflicting things. The game uses a combination of indie and OSR techniques to make this come to life.
After awhile of playing Blades I saw a video where John Harper, the creator of Blades in the Dark, talked about the game of Stars Without Number he was running. It seemed like a lot of fun so I checked it out. Stars is a B/X retro clone that uses elements of Traveler to let you play out games about mostly mercenaries trying to make it in the cold hard vacuum of space. Really it's Dungeons and Dragons in space. I ran it and I had never had so much fun playing a role playing game. The expansive sandbox, factions that went to war with each other regardless of what the Player Characters did, the play procedures that made it clear we were playing a game and the story came after, the asymmetry of information and ruthless nature of the combat system spoke to me.
After awhile of playing Stars Without Number we made the transition to Moldvay B/X and I literally fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons all over again. The dungeon crawls, secret rolls that maintained a fog of war, long term consequences from fighting monsters, strategic play and just overall vibe of the game awoke like something primal in me. The game was seriously good. I loved how as you rose in levels outside the dungeon you also felt more prominent. I loved how monsters were puzzles that needed to be solved. I loved how time was a resource to be managed.
Currently I still play some indie games, some Moldvay, and some Fifth Edition. When Pathfinder Second Edition came out I was initially skeptical. I had always loved the lore of Pathfinder, but the focus on the character building mini-game just was not my thing. I saw some previews and I liked that it had a clear presentation and seemed to have interesting martial characters that looked like they could be played skillfully and the design seemed to speak to the themes of each class. I also loved that they seemed much more grounded in the fiction and lacked resource management. So I got the PDFs, but was still fairly skeptical.
Over the next couple days I starting digging into the rules of both The Core Rulebook and The Bestiary. For a game like this I always find it helpful to analyze things from both sides of the screen so you can see how things fit together. I appreciated that the tone of the game seemed to be more collaborative, really appreciated the class and spell design, but for me the tipping point was really digging into the Bestiary, looking over the skill chapter, and the Exploration section of playing the game. The thing that really sold me personally is how much of Classic Dungeons and Dragons I saw in the game.