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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dreaded_beast" data-source="post: 1340711" data-attributes="member: 11185">While going through some of my old RPG books, I came accross my old Basic DND rulebooks, the red "Basic" set, the blue "Companion" set, etc. These are the ones that came out around the mid-80s and early-90s.This brought back memories of my first DND games and campaign. It wasn't "story" driven and didn't have "character development", but these were some of the best times I had playing DND. I believe what I miss, was the whole feeling of being able to play a game where you could virtually do almost "anything" you wanted.I won't go into the details, but I'm sure many of you may have played that type of campaign early on in your RPG careers. For an extreme example, and perhaps a DMs worst nightmare, an example would be the Knights of the Dinner Table comic. The players in this comic continuously go off-track from the story, ignoring the princess that needs to be saved, stealing from the magic merchants, killing the king, etc. While this is going on, the DM in the comic complains and what not, but he actually "allows" this to happen, regardless of what story he has planned.This is somewhat similar to how one of my very first DND groups played our games, although I don't think we gave our DM that hard of a time. It wasn't that the story was unimportant, it was more about being able to do "virtually anything", only limited by our imaginations and creativity. This may have resulted in 2-dimensional characters or derailing a planned adventure, but the DM allowed us to do nearly anything and everything, only giving slight hints that it may be a bad idea: "Are you SURE you want to do that?" Which could have been wanting to attack the cityguard just to see how good a fighter he is or eloping with the princess after meeting her when the king was giving us our first quest. The DM didn't try too hard to persuade us or prevent us from taking a particular course of action, instead he would interpret the outcome and let it flow from there. In my opinion, it wasn't about what you "couldn't" do, but more of what you "could" do and the consequences that came along with it.This was a long time ago, so my gaming style has changed: Now I can enjoy and appreciate campaigns that have "story" and "character development", but I still miss that feeling of "virtual freedom".In my opinion, I believe that game has changed and evloved over the years, where story and character-development has taken a forefront in many campaigns. This is a good thing, but in my opinion, a double-edged sword, where that sense of "virtual freedom" may be lost in favor of staying "true" to the story or the vision of your character.I realize this is heavily dependent on game style and perhaps even personality, but do you ever miss or want to play in a campaign where you are not limited by following a "set" story or by how you "envision" your character; a campaign where it is more about doing the things that you could not or would not want to do in real-life?This is just my opinion, but I believe that is one of the core reasons to play, to play in a world where anything is possible with no limits other than your imagination and creativity.Of course, your imagination and creativity can only get you so far when you find out the cityguard your 1st level fighter wanted to pick a fight with happens to be a sergeant who is 10th level or that the king has now posted a bounty on your head for eloping with the princess and that you are now a wanted criminal through out the kingdom.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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