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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grimstaff" data-source="post: 3605980" data-attributes="member: 34880">Great tips!Some things that have worked well in my "old-school" style campaigns:1. Minimize your combat rules, it speeds up combats and frees up time for exploration, roleplay, etc. Do this by drastically reducing AoO's, roll group initiatives, and simplify stuff like grappling (limiting AoO's helps this right off the bat). Taking out individual initiative made my combats fly by, I had my players sit clockwise around the table from me arranged by fighter, stealth, and spellcaster. Fighters could then charge right in and attack, while rogue types planned their flanks or hides, while spellthrowers could look up their spell's effects before their turn rather than during. My monsters already attacked as a group, so no big change for me. I only used AoO's for drastically stupid mistakes. Taking them out encouraged the party to use the fun "cinematic" combat rules without bogging down play.2. Adjust your xp requirements, there's a good chart in the Wilderlands Player's Guide, about twice what's in the PHB is good. Only give out xp at the very end of adventures or trips. Require training and training costs to level. There are rules for this in the DMG. Make your campaign world's level range more like this: low 1-4, mid 4-8, high 8-12. Levelling up every week in the middle of the dungeon until you reach your 20th lvl "build" is the very antithesis of old-school. Taking time you get to know your 1st level characters every ability or spell is very old-school. Feeling like you lived long enough to get "fireball" is very old-school.3. If you use pre-made adventures, avoid ones with heavy stories or built in "campaign arcs". The players should be developing the story through their own goals and motivations, not following some prefab grand design. DM's, the players are not your pawns or puppets, acting out your well-crafted plays as you railroad them along your desired course. Players, the DM is not your dancing monkey, there to amuse you while you chat amiably about football and motorcycles until forced to react, safe in the knowledge that anything thrown in your way is the proper "EL" and therefore can't hurt you too much. DM's should add in a monster or two to premade adventures that are far above the "appropriate" CR for their level, watch what happens, they'll never get complacent again!  <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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