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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7769153" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Yes, and I think you can have what I consider my favorite campaign style, which is a hybrid of the two: The game takes place in a framework created by the DM in which the PCs can make meaningful choices. It's got the character-based story aspects of "New School" but lots of meaningful player choice and potential stakes of "Old School." For example, I revived an old campaign of mine from many years ago in 2013 and started running it regularly in 2016. The players had remembered an old villain from the first time the campaign ran and were sweating bullets about him making a reappearance at some point. Evidently he'd left quite a mark! He'd been killed way back when, but like any good villain in a fairly Moorcock-influenced setting, his masters brought him out of Limbo. He's just way too useful to the Powers of Chaos that he has sworn to serve. I'd not really planned on having him return but the PCs were worried about him, and they still are, even though he only made one appearance where he tried to broker a deal between the PCs and some yuan-ti they were fighting at the time.  A campaign I'm a player in (with the same folks) had us take actions that led us to blowing the Horn of Change. This prompted us to leave our home plane due to the fact that the various powers that be were really angry at us having upset the applecart so much. It also led to a major, character-defining moment for my PC, who'd been steadfastly neutral but had, by participating in the events that led to blowing the Horn of Change had fallen off that particular road. I ended up doing a substantial character rebuild after a visit to Celestia, not because I was unhappy with the way the character played but because it just felt right that being around the Horn of Change was something that had to leave its mark. None of this was planned out in advance by the DM. My deciding to go visit Moradin and then to lay down neutrality actually took the DM and other players by surprise. This is closer to the way improv or sketch comedy works. It's not written out and can go in various directions depending on how the players react in the framework. Obviously the DM can react, sometimes throwing in things that the players bring up. This works best with an ensemble cast of PCs. 100%, it's a total straw man. He keeps beating the absolute crap out of it over and over, too.</blockquote>

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