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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haakon1" data-source="post: 5884800" data-attributes="member: 25619">I definitely am both Judge and Storyteller -- and a little bit Devil's Advocate and Worldbuilder too.-- On the CaW versus CaS dimension, I'm strongly CaW.-- Both AD&D and 3e/3.5e worked well for what I wanted out of the game.I use random determination a lot, but I don't necessarily need a table.  I'll roll dice for anything random to assist my storytelling and randomize things.   I won't roll if the answer is obvious.  Examples:-- What's the weather?  I roll a d10.  1 is much stormier, 10 is much clearer, relative to what I rolled last time.  1 is colder, 10 is hotter.-- Can I hire an architect in this town for my new stronghold?  Roll a d20, higher is better.  2.  Nope, you ask around but no one knows an architect here.----  If I wanted to get technical and had the time (like with my email campaign), I'd look in the AD&D DMG for the hiring rules, and check the 3.5e DMG too.  If not, I'd totally wing it, with a d20 and a guestimate of what the results mean.-- Can I hire an apprentice brewer in this town for my stronghold?  Me: Yes, I'm sure you can.  Remember, there's a large brewery here.  Player: I'll go there and ask the owner if he has an apprentice he's willing to part with.  Me:  He does, but he asks for a fee for training him, and a higher than usual wage of (looks up expert hirling cost, adds 50%).  Player: Fine.-----  How this was determined:  Pure Worldbuilding.  I'd dropped mentions of the Falwur Brewery and its famous Stout several times, so it's totally reasonable there are brewers here -- but the higher cost is because they don't want anyone stealing the trade secrets, and because working for the Falwur Brewery is a better education than working for the average kegmeister.  It's not really "Storytelling" in the sense that I want the player to hire a brewer or expected it to happen.  I just built a world where doing that was very plausible.-- Any wandering monsters tonight?  Rolled a d10, 1.  Opps, that's trouble, hmmm, what should be out here?  Maybe this, that, that, that, that, or that.  Roll a d6, it's the third one.  Hmmm, a pack of up to about a dozen makes sense, roll a d12.  11 -- ooh, bad night.So I'm neither hidebound by tons of rules, nor completely just using fiat -- it's dice-assisted and rules-assisted storytelling.In AD&D or 3.5e, this would depend on the events leading up to the hiring attempt.If they met the ogre in a dungeon and offered to spare his life if he'd fight for them, he'd readily agree, more readily if he were freed from being enslaved by some other monster.  But unless something changed in his basic attitude to the PC's, or he's not the default CE alignment, he's not really interested in helping them, just saving his own hide.  So he'll run for it first chance he gets, preferably while stealing something.If the PC's saw an ogre in a town (not likely in my campaigns) and tried to hire him, a reasonable offer and a Diplomacy check, plus some thought by me about who the ogre is and why he's in town, would decide it.That's the other key of my DMing style: I always ROLEPLAY every monster and NPC to its own agenda.  The monsters and NPC's aren't necessarily supportive of nor antithetical to the PC's agendas -- often, they are interested in something quite different, most often survival!Off the top of my head, the ogre is in town because he's a religious pilgrim/refugee, so he's not interested in working for the PC's unless they help his cause, which is, roll dice random determination on a table in my head, LE, so Asmodeus worship (fiat to fit the campaign!).  I'll judge the PC's Diplomacy (dialogue and dice roll) on that basis, with money  v. difficulty playing a role in the decision too, since an Asmodeus worshipper probably is interested in his own welfare too.  What LE Ogre doesn't want a big bag of filthy lucre for a quick easy job of smashing some heads?</blockquote>

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