The Kind of Games I run
Hi creatures,
Thought it might be a useful point of reference if I talk about the kind of games I like to run.
I enjoy OSR D&D immensely, but the more I read about actual old school D&D (the good stuff, those little brown books or the 1e DMG) the more I realise that I’m not actually a fan of real old school D&D.
I like problem solving, tension and pulp fantasy. I like when problems are solved through the tactical infinity of RPGs. I like when players are scared of whats around the corner and escape the dungeon from the clutches of defeat. None of this fudging crap - it has to be real, or the game means nothing. And I love fantasy. Fate drawing weirdos together to achieve great things. Fantastical lands. It has to be grounded, and none of this magic is science shit.
Underpinning this, I enjoy social history. How humans got here, how geography, society, culture shapes human psychology and the behaviours that emerge from it.
Alright this is getting a bit wacko. Back to the gaming.
The game I run at the moment is something like a hybrid of old OSR games and dramatic critical role style games. Those are maybe the two most incongruous things on the planet but hear me out. Tables, charts, hexes, dungeons, wandering monster charts. These are my bread and butter. This is the stuff I prep between games. But the world is a little bit dramatically convenient. Spawned out of randomness, events are collated into interesting events as if it was a pulp fantasy stories. Think Fafhrd, Corum, Ged. I’d hesitate to call it contrived. But convenient, yes. And this is mostly the realm of NPCs in the background. The players just do things, interact with toys in the sandbox. But the configuration of those pieces and what they do between sessions is not generally up to tables. It’s drama.
I’m not sure this is of much use, but hopefully it gives you some sort of picture of the games I enjoy and where I’m coming from when I say stuff.