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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3019038" data-attributes="member: 29746">The current version is radically different from the first one I started making 20+ years ago, at least in terms of geography and precise differences between the races such as who controls what, population differences, and so forth. However, the core assumptions of the world have never changed, and the current version (in which I'm currently running two high-level 3.5 games, and have previously run four others in 3.5 and 3.0) has remained largely the same since the first 3.0 game started up over five years ago. I based that version of the world on the one I based my 2nd Edition college campaign in, using the same maps and as much as I could port over to the new edition given the changes in game rules.Since the conversion from 2nd Edition to 3rd, the only significant changes have been additions to the world- usually when I encountered something in a published product that was just too cool to ignore. When that happens, I'll do the usual retconning (rewriting certain ambiguous parts of history, etc.) to shoehorn it in. Fortunately I have a good mind for details and don't often make consistency errors. Usually I find a way to write it into the world without noticeably disturbing existing situations; the hardest thing by far to do this with is core classes like the Warlock and the Ardent (both of which I adopted immediately though no player has tried them yet). It's tough to explain away the prior nonexistence (or at least invisibility) of an entire profession of people. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Of my current players, only one played in the old 2nd Edition game, and he remembers next to nothing about that game except his old character's name and the names of a few very prominent gods and NPCs. When I make a change in the modern game that affects existing characters and players, we all discuss it in game time to decide the best course of action, and none of my players is egotistical enough to try forcing changes (or lack thereof) on the rest of us purely to powergame or the like. I'm probably lucky in that regard. But a few times, we have "grandfathered" in previous abilities that were stripped out by the new edition and other new rules, and on a few occasions when I nerfed a house rule that proved more troublesome in play then it looked at first glance we've all agreed that a PC who was using the old rule should stay the old way.I'm definitely more of a crunch man than a flavor guy, though my players tell me I have a flair for the dramatic and do very good fluff. But for NPCs, for example, I do strongly prefer to have stat blocks of some kind, though I've admittedly become a lot more freeform about this in recent years than when I first started. One thing I did do was write my own character generator utility programs in JScript to help me when running the game; it's capable of rolling up an entire city (with NPCs given complete ability score arrays, class levels though it can't do multiclass, and skill points). That's been an enormous help, even after added races and classes made the original utility obsolete.These days I typically use it as a starting point, just for inspiration rather than taking the stats as complete and finished. And really, it isn't often one needs stats for a bartender or smith in any case, beyond a couple of skill modifiers that are just as easy to make up on the fly.</blockquote>

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