Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7640089" data-attributes="member: 19857">When I have adult players that I trust, I do bottom-up for the most part, with as much active player collaboration as I can get.  I plan very little before the first session - just an elevator pitch for the campaign and what we need for the first adventure - and see what comes out of character creation.  Typically by the end of character creation we have a few major NPCs, an idea of what at least one religion is like, and a feel for how a few of the nonhuman races and humans interact.When I'm teaching other people how to play (which is more and more common as my kid has hit the magic age where all of their friends want to learn to play D&D), I tend to use a published setting so that I can tell the players more about the world up front, so they can concentrate more on how their character relates to the world.  If they come up with something for their character that doesn't fit with what is published, then we change it, but in general that doesn't come up as often as you'd think - the kids are feeling out the game and so are more likely to find the information about their class/race/background in the books to be interesting and fun, instead of boring and overplayed like some of the jaded adults I play with <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> (I also use FR and Mystara for these games - both kitchen sink worlds that can handle whatever typical D&D shenanigans you want to set there, so even if they pull something from another source - like a favorite fantasy novel series - it's pretty easy to work it in).Either way the rule that I stick to is only build as much as necessary to play the game.  If the gods aren't going to be a big part of the game, then we just assume there are gods and as they become important we'll fill in the details.  I spent far too long in my younger days building up setting material that nobody ever read or cared about but me - nowadays my time is too valuable for that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  If I want to do something like that I'll work on a book, but if it's just for my game I'll spend that time working on adventures that will be used at the table instead.</blockquote>

Verification