How do you live D&D? Alternate reality or heroic tale?

[Wombat]

I dunno; this is kind of a split decision.

No one I regularly gamed with ever got into the Six Million Dollar Me notion of playing themselves in an alternate reality. We are more the Heroic Epic line (albeit with "Heroic" and "Epic" both in quote at different times for different reasons). The gang wants bigger stories than Real Life (tm) and they want fast and furious action (when it comes to that). They also want humour, one-liners, and the like. I guess you could call that all pretty cinematic.

On the other hand, the players DO want a lot of character background, a lot of world background, and a lot of motivation. They don't want to feel railroaded into anything; barring the first adventure or two of a campaign, they want to feel that there are serious reasons why their characters would be involved in any given quest or adventure. Thus we do a lot of deep character work, including whole sessions with no dice rolling, no combat, and a lot of character & NPC interaction. Character deaths, conversely, are expected and accepted (they certainly don't happen ever session, but everyone in the group has lost at least one character, and some are pretty much known for having The Grim in their dice), usually with great death scenes, pathos, and soul-searching after the fact.

Then again, none of them wants to know why orcs are evil -- they just is.

So I'd say we fit more in Column A (alternate reality) than Column B (heroic tale), but I'm not sure by how much.

The main thing my players demand, however, above all else, is that the story dictates the sessions, not the mechanics of the system. If the mechanics would cause something to happen that does not make sense in the game world, the mechanics get chucked.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I worry about a ripping good yarn more than I worry about generating a world and living in it.

 

[StalkingBlue]

I voted Heroic Tale.

Both as a DM and as a player I love cool scenes, larger-than-life characters and furious action. I also find that a risk of failure can increase my enjoyment of a challenge (so I'm currently operating on the assumption that DnD is still a good game system for me to use), although too much risk can cause me to clamp down instead of expanding and being creative.

Personally I'd count character development as part of the heroic-tale style btw. I don't need to play/run a PC's visits to their family (unless there's a dramatic scene or a sliver or plot involved), but I do need to know where the PC comes from and what drives them.
In fact one of my recent DMing errors involved making a decision for a group of PCs when I hadn't fully understood at least one PC's motivations and ways of thinking.

 

[Li Shenron]

...let me make you aware of this.

Thanks for the link! It's in my bookmarks now. I hope you are going to also post updates of the Abyssal Campaign

 

[Henry]

I lean towards "Heroic Tale", especially because as our group ages, we think of the game more in terms of "cool imagery" than the kind of D&D we did back in the day, doing dirty work, scrabbling for every copper piece, rejoicing when the thief scavenged a rusty dagger out of the trash, etc.

Nowadays, when I DM I try to come up with imagery that's neat in the mind's eye, like fights on rope bridges (with the occasional slip-and dangle rule), opponents that flummox the characters with new tricks until the players figure out the secret to winning, etc.

Now, I ALSO introduce a little realism here and there - bargaining for Magic Items, not being able to buy magic at the same price everywhere, supply and demand so that people can do trade missions, etc. - But I don't try to hit them over the head with it.

 

[Zappo]

Back at the beginning of my current Planescape campaign, I wanted to dive deep into the "alternate reality" style. There's a planar newspaper called SIGIS, which I think you can find on planewalker.com. Each issue has lots and lots of short articles about stuff happening in Sigil and the Outer Planes; I translated several of them and gave them to the PCs at regular intervals. With a half dozen adventure hooks per issue, they would choose somthing to get involved in and start working on it.

Unfortunately, they would often see two or three interesting things to do and split the party. -_-

Thanks for the link! It's in my bookmarks now. I hope you are going to also post updates of the Abyssal Campaign

Working on it right now. Chapter 3 almost complete. ^_^