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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8288930" data-attributes="member: 70468">Thinking back on it, I think it was their homebrew setting that kept them in that “old-school” mode of play. Many of the people in that group had been playing since the ’80s (if not the beginning). They also did fantasy miniatures battles in that setting (called Falmurth) with other people, which had also been happening for a while. From what I understand, well after I left, they eventually started doing more adventure paths and stuff like that. What I remember from my time is that most of our play was setting up for the fights in the dungeon, we’d kick in the door, and then smash the monsters. It was a fairly large group (8~12 players), so anything else wasn’t really feasible. Any kind of narrative development was driven by one of the players, which in retrospect was functionally similar to a caller.When I started doing my own thing, I decided I didn’t want just to have kick-in-the-door play. I was lazy, so the very first campaign I ran was almost entirely improvised. A story manifested out of it, which I built riffing off of things players would say. I also liked subverting things like alignment because my first group had a policy of only good characters, which they “enforced” by having the paladin checking for evil and killing any who were evil. That group also regarded CN as crazy (e.g., you have a random chance of jumping off any bridge you cross). A lot of my first campaign was rejecting that particular style. I took a break for a while after that campaign, and my particular group did a lot of different things (nWoD, Dogs in the Vineyard, Unknown Armies, Exalted). I think I started running again in ’05 or ’06. It was just before the release of 4e, and the player culture was way different.I ran some adventures and did an aborted adventure path in 4e, but Pathfinder is really got into those. However, that’s also when I started reading <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Grognardia</a>, which was very influential on how I approached things. At the time, I described my campaign as quasi-old-school. That Kingmaker game was the only AP we finished. I was down on it at the time, but it was definitely the best AP we played. We tried others after that, but eventually I decided I wanted to do my own thing. That began a sequence of various shorter campaigns and finally arriving at a true sandbox because my players kept saying they wanted an exploration-based game.By that point, I’d been stealing ideas from B/X and OSE because of <a href="https://thealexandrian.net" target="_blank">the Alexandrian</a>’s articles on dungeon crawls. I’d been operating under a belief that my group wouldn’t like OSE, which is why I never pitched it. I was right in a way. My players did bounce of OSE, though it was not for the reasons I thought. I expected it would be system aesthetics, but I think it was more about how weak characters felt and how comparatively lacking their abilities were. However, that failure did open the door to trying WWN, which practically seems designed for my group. It has awesome GM tools and is easy to run, but it also has 3e-style character customization and action economy. There is a tactical element, but it’s really only concerned about using your actions smartly (e.g., taking advantage of snap attacks or swarm attacks) rather than shifting your position around the board and taking advantage of synergies (like 4e of PF2).</blockquote>

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