There is a small but vocal (and caustic!) faction online the the TTRPG space called the BrOSR. These guys tend to be Christian, conservative, and deeply knowledgeable about the roots of Dungeons&Dragons. They are often bombastic and drive the sparkle-trolls insane. While I am reminded of the old saw about academic politics (they are so viscous because the stakes are so low), I admit that I often find their gleeful dick-slappping-across-the-forehead of 5e players to be...satisfying.
Yesterday I got sucked down into a BrOSR rabbit hole by one Jeffro Johnson and another dude who goes by Crossface. The essential point taken by these two (and this is a generalization) is that all of us who have been playing D&D have been playing it wrong. That the rules exist for a reason, and if you are not playing with the rules as laid down by Gary Gygax (he of blessed memory) you are doing it wrong. We can call this point provocative, to say the least, but like the best Biblical scholars, they back up their assertions with chapter and verse: the words of Gygax himself, in the seldom (never?) read introductions to books like The Dungeon Master's Guide, or in Dragon Magazine, or wherever else. It's a jarring thought: I have had my DM's guide since 1981, and played a melange of D&D/AD&D for a decade without using 1/2 of the rules in the book. So what was I playing? Folk D&D, I guess, not 'fantasy wargaming D&D' as envisioned by Gygax, with his weapons speed tables, his strumpet tables, his wind effect tables...In the olden days, someone had to show you how to play; there was an oral tradition behind the game, and I think it is safe to say that Gygax was writing--at least at first--for wargamers who already knew how to war game, and who were adding his rules to games they already played.
All of this got me thinking about how I play D&D. In the olden days, 1981-1992 or so, I just ran modules. There was no idea of a 'campaign' in our games: they were episodic adventures based in whatever TSR was selling. I did linked modules for sure: Pharaoh/Oasis of the White Palm, Giants-Descent-Demonweb, Master of the Desert Nomads, etc. but overall none of these adventures had any connective tissue going between them. They were more like Conan stories: in one story he's in Aquilonia, in the next story he's in Stygia, etc. Call of Cthulhu was similar: I ran modules and investigations that had no real connection to each other. I wouldn't have occurred to me to run a campaign, at least in the modern sense of the word.
When we played 3rd edition in the late 90s-early aughts, I was a player in my brother's campaign, and that's just what it was: all of the modules were connected together in an overarching story. When I returned to GMing in 2019, I did the same thing: a group of adventurers playing through a bastardized version of Tyranny of Dragons. The characters had backstories, there was an overarching narrative (Tiamat's return) and all of what we did was related to that larger story. It was set in the Forgotten Realms, where most of my games took place post-high school (vs. Greyhawk, which was the assumed setting in the early days). My second 5e campaign was based--again, loosely--on Descent Into Avernus, although I mostly used Adventurer League stuff vs. the main book. I made up a lot of this game on my own (believe it not, for the first time!) and played very loosely with the actual published book. It was fun! By the end, when the party had moved to the Moonshaes, it was all home brew setting and storyline.
What I have never done is a sandbox. I have never let the game emerge from player choices, and have things I've already put into place and lightly penciled in--factions, say, or NPCs, or 'campaign characters'--evolve and change in reaction to what the players do...or even harder to grok, evolve and change on their own! So that's my next challenge: an emergent game world using 1:1 time with some kind of verisimilitude in regards how the world operates. Ed did a little of this with his DCC campaign: as my group moved through the world, we heard tell of things his other group had done, like legends and rumors and tales of their adventures. This kind of world building creates a 'subreality': a sense that things are happening in the world despite, or inspite of, the players' actions.
On interesting idea: keep NPCs and campaign characters (kings, wizards, demigods) on index cards.
I am hoping to do this using the OSE rules, set in Greyhawk. I also am going to sell a lot of my stuff: games I am not playing (or going to play), books I purchased on a whim, just stuff that is imagining for me vs. sparking my imagination. I want to have a little of this imagined for me as possible. I want it to come from my own mind (with a liberal helping of the many, many, many fantasy books I've read thrown in!) We shall see how all of this develops.
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