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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7161601" data-attributes="member: 97077">I don't think I really have a preferred "style." I tend to make my game the most compatible it can be with the given game system I'm using. So my D&D 5e games are not like my D&D 4e games in many ways. This sometimes comes as quite a surprise to people with whom I used to regularly play D&D 4e that jump into my 5e games. Or to those who are used to seeing me post a certain way during the 4e era and now see me saying something different in the 5e era. I think it's inviting trouble to say "I play D&D this way..." and then try and hammer whatever edition of the game system to conform to the game I want to run. I prefer to come at it from the other direction. I think things go more smoothly that way.That said, I have been playing around with D&D 5e's various options and dials to underscore aspects I think are important to the particular campaign I'm running which changes up every 6 months or so. In my last campaign, there was emphasis on the town-to-dungeon experience and each session was meant to be a single delve. So I used the resting rules where 8 hours is a short rest and a long rest is a week which, combined with non-rules tweaks, set up the pace that worked for the episodic delve style. I modified downtime activities and lifestyle expenses to be one week at a stretch as a sort of "Town Phase" that happened prior to the journey to the dungeon and subsequent delving and offered useful bonuses. I worked out the travel rules so that choice of task while traveling and pace really mattered as it impacted how much time you had to delve and/or rest and your risk of wandering monsters on the journey. I encouraged exploration by including more trinkets that could be found by poking around. Trinkets were tied to Inspiration such that if you used your trinket in some clever way, you earned Inspiration (once per trinket), so the more trinkets you had, the more shots at Inspiration you had per session.My current campaign which follows, more or less, the storyline of The Red Hand of Doom, doesn't have these rules. There are others instead which support that play experience. The characters have a caravan to manage, for example, which has overhead, hirelings, upgrades, and whatnot so there's a subsystem for that. Resting is normal except that there can be no long rests outside of a safe haven such as a town or the caravan. This emphasizes the importance of the mobile home base they're paying for and makes the accumulation of gold important. In order to downplay town time, I reduced everything in towns to a mini-game of general tasks with trade-offs based on location so that it's fun and there are meaningful decisions to make, but it's resolved quickly with no chance of getting bogged down with running errands (ugh). This puts more emphasis on pursuing the plot-based quests.As a final example, I ran a one-shot, Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy, for two different groups (and soon a third) recently. That adventure was really about getting into the place and acquiring as much XP and gold as possible. Each group gets a score they can compare with other groups. In this one, I decided to implement the variant Encumbrance rule to make it a meaningful choice as to what treasure to grab. Lots of the treasure was really heavy and many PCs were already lightly encumbered by their armor, weapons, and basic gear. So, because gold = points, in many cases they had to make some hard choices about what to take and what to leave behind. (One character left the place with nothing but a helmet and codpiece and you really can't ask for a better outcome in my view.)So that's my approach: Conform "style" to the game system in general and then do a few tweaks based on the specific campaign to push a specific play experience. And don't do the same thing twice in a row!</blockquote>

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