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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5517610" data-attributes="member: 38357">re: nostalgia...I have fond remembrances of playing in a campaign, as a member of a party of adventurers, in the person of my character(s); specifically in that order.I admit that I have always been a DM more often than a player, but I remember being genuinely interested in what was happening in the campaign world and to the party. That's not to say that I wasn't exited by the thought of seeing what contribution my character could make, but my recollections really are that this was, at the very least, not more important to me than what any of the other PCs or even important NPCs where doing. I remember riding in the back of a station-wagon full of smelly boy scout gear, and with our books and dice out of reach, "playing D&D" in a session where no PCs where involved and the DM simply told us a story about what some NPCs we knew where doing in another part of the campaign, and thoroughly enjoying it.Nowadays, it seems different. Well, it is different. I play modern D&D because it's different than AD&D, not in spite of it. (Not that I need a game different from AD&D, so much that if I want to play AD&D I'll play... um, Labyrinth Lord, probably... =P  ) Characters take a lot longer to "roll up", and with that tends to come a lot more interest and detail in background, etc. right out of the box. Which is good stuff, for sure... But it seems to me that players just don't care anymore about stuff that's happening beyond their character's arms' length.Too much "play" is happening away from the table. The character-creation minigame (solo) becomes the focus of too much of the players' attention. Too much of their tactical influence on the larger game is tied up there. And too often the character sheet is seen as the limit of a player's choices and their influence on the game. On the DM side, it's harder and harder to actually bring the things that would give the campaign "life" into actual play. And for myself, at least, a certain laziness creeps in. If the players don't care, then why bother? Why not just string together a series of level-appropriate combat challenges and just not worry about why?I don't know: Is this really an artifact of changing times & changing systems? Or is it a matter of different circumstances, different players, etc.? I feel like if I was seeing the players outside of the 4-6 hours we game each week (and I doubt we'd be in the back of someone's Mom's car, but we could hang out and have a beer or three if we had the time) it might change things. But maybe not - we've got email, and even when we are together outside the game, we always seem to have other things on our minds...</blockquote>

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