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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8428304" data-attributes="member: 694">My refereeing style is best summed up with two pithy sayings: "the world is the world" and "we explore dungeons, not characters."The first statement is both a method of refereeing and a philosophy of play. I've created the setting before the campaign begins, populating all the hexes and towns and stocking the dungeons, and the setting will tick along according to its own internal logic; I'll never alter it on a whim (or because of the "rule of cool"), nor will I move some element into or out of the players' path. (That is: quantum ogres are totally verboten, and I'm still carrying personal trauma from past GMs who overestimated their ability to "make a game up on the fly" and thought that their "733t improv skillz" weren't just tantamount to flagrant railroading.) But of course the game world will evolve dynamically over time and respond appropriately to the players' actions (or inaction).The second statement is one of the old rallying cries of the OSR. In spite of that, I still find it useful to drive home the point that I'm here to present a world full of places to explore, mysteries to solve, challenges to overcome, and allies and enemies to interact with — but I'm not going to tell a story, or encourage anyone who doesn't like play-acting to improv lines of dialog in character. You, the player, are sitting at my table to feel like you're on an adventure, not to simulate the personality and psychology of some boorish dwarf.Rules-wise, I'm almost certainly going to be running some variant of OD&D or possibly AD&D, depending on the setting. Players can expect me to reliably follow and apply the game rules (consisting of the core books plus whatever supplemental materials and house rules I've enumerated in a campaign handout). For the same reason that I won't lay down railroad tracks or invisible walls, I won't fudge rolls (in fact I prefer to roll out in the open as much as possible), rubber-band monster numbers or hit point totals, or ever do anything underhanded to favor either the PCs or the monsters.As for the campaign model, my ideal (momentarily stifled by These Pandemical Times™, but I hope to get back on the wagon soon) is long campaigns with a persistent milieu, a large and constantly rotating player base, and players creating several characters that they choose from when deciding who to take on a given adventure — what you could variously call a living sandbox, a "West Marches" campaign, a Lake Geneva / Twin Cities style "fantasy wargaming club," or a "massively multiplayer offline RPG."When it comes to creating a setting, my feeling is that a game world is at its most interesting when it's ancient, mysterious, and full of puzzles and clues. A D&D game should be 40% Myst, 30% Diablo, 20% Morrowind, and 10% John Carter of Mars. You can never go wrong following that particular recipe! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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