Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is
Change
A lot of my interests and involvement in the hobby have changed over the years. Or have they?
When I first started playing regularly, it was D&D 3.0. The longest campaigns I played in were 3.5, and I ran my urban fantasy homebrew The City for years in d20 modern. The sheer amount of options for characters were staggering. Skills, feats, prestige classes, a truly mindboggling amount of OGL sourcebooks--it was corpulent. Oh my god, that one Mutants and Masterminds game I ran... I assumed this was just how it worked. I -hated- prepping for the d20 modern campaign. Making balanced encounters around CR calculations, trying to create encounters specifically to challenge each PC ability, creating set-pieces and plots; when all I realy wanted to do (and kind of ended up doing anyway at the table) was just have an idea of how things might go and make up most of it as I needed it.
I played other games now and then, but it wasn't until I stumbled onto Spirit of the Century that I realized games didn't necessarily need to be so fiddly. Reading up on Fate really created a shift in perspective--not so much the shared narrative control, but that instead of making a shit-ton of hyperspecific classes and skill lists and character options, you could just... be the thing you wanted to be. The mechanics were there to -support- your idea, rather than having to implement some shadow of your idea through the mechanics.
Now of course this didn't always work in practice, and Fate still suffered some skill bloat (ever tried navigating the list from Diaspora?), but the absolute delight of Fate Accelerated Edition pretty much solved those issues and I wish I could play it more.
When I was living in England, the long-term campaign was just not an option. But there I found a community of designers who were always playtesting and trying out weird small indie games, and it was like I had walked through the doors of perception. Exposure to completely off-the-wall mechanics, one-page RPGs that didn't take themselves seriously, rules-light things that provided scaffolding for specific genres, games that generated histories and maps, the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, the crazy worlds of nordic larp, immersive theatre, and real-world games...
It was in this space, somewhere, that I also stumbled into OSR games. I knew nothing of the scene or people involved in it and mostly thought it was retroclones rather than a style of design and play. But some of the ideas I found, those that melded with other things I was learning from indie games, of stripping out and simplifying mechanics so that they get out of the way and just _letting players be who they want to be: oh that locked a change into the way I wanted to run games. I think it might have specifically been crystalized in an idea I saw in Kevin Crawford's Scarlet Heroes: characters get a background, and up to 3 points in it. They get to add those points as a bonus to any check they make that could reasonably be related to that background. It's so simple and transparent and doesn't involve like 12 different subsystems and I was like "why can't the whole thing be like this".
I've tended to like classless, rules-lite play ever since, with favoured systems being FAE, Maze Rats, and Knave. Ooo, I think running something in Risus would be good fun precisely for these reasons.
It's been interesting to see how the changes have been in knowledge and exposure rather than taste and attitudes. I kind of always knew what I wanted in rpgs, even if I couldn't express it, and managed to discover games that did those things. I'm kind of wondering now if I can codify some of those tastes in design decisions for Crook, or if they can just be things that hang out in my mind and I can keep finding ways of interacting with them via different games and systems.
What about you? How have your tastes and experiences in rpgs changed?
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