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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 2179816" data-attributes="member: 8447">Interesting question...When I first got into rpgs I was just "YIPPEE SKIPPY! No more miniatures battles!"  After that D&D pretty quickly became, well, dungeon crawls.  Since those days I have done very, very few dungeon crawls.I think I hit my stride with a double whammy -- Traveller and RuneQuest.  One day while creating a character for my friend's Traveller game and listening to a Rolling Stones tape, I heard the song "2000 Lightyears from Home".  Really hit me, that.  I turned to my buddy and said, "Where does my guy come from?"  "Huh?"  "Well, you have about 200 systems on your map; which one is my home world?"  "Never thought about that before..."  And thus started the first leg of really developing character backgrounds.  With RuneQuest this became even more intense; RuneQuest also soured me on pre-made adventures, as we ran Borderlands (no, not the D&D adventure) and midway through running the adventures the group had taken about a 180 degree turn from where the series was "supposed" to go.  I wrote about my experiences to Chaosium and their attitude was "you didn't prepare the group right".  So much for pre-packaged adventures.  From there on in, games were all about homebrew worlds, homebrew adventures, and deep character background.In the intervening years I've more or less held to that notion.  Sometimes I went for more rules-heavy systems, sometimes for more rules-light (Harnmaster on one extreme, Over the Edge on the other), but the core notions of creating my own worlds and adventures and giving players a sense of where they belonged in the worlds has stayed with me.  I have refined background material so that people feel like they are part of a living, breathing world with actions other than their own taking place, with laws that sound appropriate to the society, and a tangible sense of, if not reality, at least plausibility (insofar as the given rules system allowed -- Paranoia is a whole separate issue...).  The final move was to Ars Magica.  The notion of the Covenant, the magical village which all the characters are attached to, snapped the last piece of the puzzle into place.  Now in my campaigns I try to come up with very solid reasons for why the characters not only are together but should bother staying together.  There is a larger story and all the characters are involved in it.  In my current D20 campaign, all the characters belong to the same club, a group of like-minded individuals who want to outdo each other in deeds of daring, yet also want to help the community.  The leader of this group has good points and bad points, but at least he feels very real, and since we have dropped alignment, that is not really an issue.So I'd say overall my path in gaming has been a slow evolution, a refining of ideas, getting closer to not the perfect system, but rather the right feel of the game.  This probably also explains why I pick up so many different systems -- very little system loyalty  <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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