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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8509487" data-attributes="member: 694">Very interesting subject! How am I a D&D outlier? Uff da, let me count the ways…1. My go-to edition is OD&D (by which I mean the white box, blue box, red box, and black box* editions; they're all coequal in my eyes and not different enough from each other for me to go about drawing pedantic distinctions).2. My ideal campaign model—the one I always strive for, even if I rarely achieve it—is a Lake Geneva style "fantasy wargaming" club. Lots of players with lots of characters who form their own parties West Marches style to explore a persistent sandbox milieu containing many dungeons, possibly playing within the same world for years, possibly reaching very high levels and building dominions that could eventually lead to some entertaining large-scale (and possibly PvP) wargaming.3. Because I learned to play from 90s DMs who idealized "role-playing, not roll-playing!", railroady epic fantasy stories, and fudging whatever (dice-rolls, encounters, the game-world itself) in the name of telling a good story, I now have a deep, abiding, visceral hatred for narrative-heavy, thespianism-heavy, improv-heavy play-styles. Players want to treat their characters as blank-slate (or self-insert) pawns in the dungeon? Cool by me if it means I don't have to put up with Alefist MacAxebeard, Stereotypical Scottish-Accented Drunken Violent Boorish Dwarf #8,572.4. I believe that my job as Dungeon Master is to create the game world—populating each hex, dungeon, and town with as much fleshed-out detail as is reasonable to produce ahead of time—so that the players can meaningfully explore it on their own terms. Once the game starts, I'm not the players' enemy, I'm not their fan, I'm just the impartial referee trying to fairly portray the world I've built. I won't fudge dice, I won't fudge monster stats, and I'll never ever move some piece of the game-world or lovingly-crafted encounter into the players' path just because I'd like for the players encounter this or that bit of content. For me, that would be literal cheating on my part.5. I vehemently disagree with anybody who claims that D&D "can't do" genres beyond sword & sorcery or pseudo-medieval high fantasy. In fact, my preferred milieu is Victorian steampunk or gaslamp fantasy. But I'll also happily use the OD&D rules to run games set in ancient, historical, present-day, or futuristic worlds, both magical and mundane. The period or genre, after all, is just a backdrop—a coat of paint on the game. As long as there are "dungeons" (or the period-appropriate equivalent) to explore and hexes to crawl (even if a hex represents a cubic parsec of interstellar space rather than a square league of wilderness), the game itself works just fine. The key to making OD&D function in any setting is simply to keep the game about exploration and treasure-hunting.6. I pretty much don't run modules at all if I can avoid it. Entirely aside of the fact that I just plain don't like most published adventures, dungeon-design and adventure-creation are entirely too much fun for me to ever want to skip that part!* For the curious, I'm a Millennial who started gaming on black box OD&D and 2nd Edition AD&D.</blockquote>

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