I've said before that I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. What do I mean by this? Mostly that I prefer systems that encourage and enable an old-fashioned, rulings-centric style, but I'm not old school in that I'm not a fan of the game played with those rules the way it was originally played. Most long-time players of D&D came into the hobby from one of three vectors, and have—speaking very broadly—three major playstyles (that don't necessarily correspond to the vector that brought them to the hobby.) You could over-split this into more taxonomical classifications, but I'm deliberately keeping it rather broad. The approach vectors to D&D, up to and including through the big "D&D as fad" period in the early 1980s, are the following:
- Wargamers and other hobbyists. This is the original vector into the hobby, but it was destined by its very nature to remain a niche vector. Gygax and Arneson, of course, were hobby wargamers, and D&D rose out of playing around with solo variations on wargames that they were playing in wargaming hobby stores and whatnot.
- D&D players who may not have been wargamers, or even particularly interested in wargaming as a hobby (although they may have dabbled a bit here and there) but who were fans of fantasy fiction and wanted the game to resemble that as much as possible. I'm one of these kinds; my wargame experience even today is limited to a handful of games played here and there, and looking over stuff because it was somehow related to D&D (in other words, D&D was an abortive vector into wargaming; the exact opposite as above.) In fact, I presume that a very large majority of gamers came in via this vector, and it makes up by far the largest population within gamerdom.
- D&D players who joined because it was faddish. Back when the Puritan-descended totalitarians who have been culturally and socially dominant in America since Lincoln's War went through one of their many episodes of paranoia, hysteria and mob/Crusading, D&D was a target. This predictably made lots of people check it out. Most of them didn't really stay, they played D&D when it was faddish and stopped when it wasn't—but some of them did.
While there is some correlation, I believe, between approach vector and later preferred style, it's not a perfect correlation. Or rather, I think the first two are somewhat correlated to two specific playstyles, the third approach vector isn't correlated to anything, and the third playstyle is one that's just common no matter where you came from, because it's an easier way to run the game, and requires less effort and skill, while still giving a relatively decent result for most gamers.
- Focus on sandboxing. Hexcrawling is very popular with this crowd. Modules that are not hexcrawl-like in nature are not often used. This is what I mean when I say "old school"—there's a high correlation between the approach vector of wargames, the tendency to treat D&D itself more like a game where the characters are more like tactical chess pieces than characters, etc. For whatever reason, this playstyle also tends to attract a lot of really whiny, bitter, resentful caitiffs who are desperate to smugly proclaim their superiority to anyone else who doesn't play the way that they do.
- Focus on module play. This was unfortunately encouraged early on by the publication of tons of modules, of course, but a side-effect of that is that a lot of GMs don't really know how to run more player-driven games very well, and don't know what to do when players deviate from what's written, so they tend to railroad them back on track using ham-handed DMus ex machina. Better GMs can pull this off, and assuming that the players are somewhat forgiving or willing to be a bit on the passive side here and there in the interest of promoting the game, this is probably by far the most common mode. It's not limited to any particular approach vector, I don't think, although the wargamer approach vector seems to be the most likely to hate anything that even hints at this.
- There is a third method, of course, which is probably driven by guys who are fans of fantasy stories, novels, movies, and TV shows, and who use techniques found therein to create a experience who's end result bears a passing similarity to those as well—including an emphasis on character and roleplaying to equal the emphasis on combat and exploration. I doubt many people approach gaming with this style who don't come into the hobby via the second approach vector. This is an approach that can go wrong if not done skillfully, although what usually happens to GMs who try this and fail is that their game simply degenerates into something like the second style above, but with home-made modules. Either that, or it degenerates into sitting around talking sessions where nothing exciting happens. The tea party with Lady Moonblade which takes up multiple sessions is the parody of complete devolution. But that's what you get when the style goes wrong, or when you just have an extreme Girl D&D as Jane Austen Wannabe endpoint on the spectrum. When it goes well, it's going to be more like an exciting action movie with likable characters. Fantasy James Bond, maybe, or fantasy The Three Musketeers, etc. Don't get me started on what the other two styles are like when they go wrong, but trust me; they're at least equally obnoxious and irritating. I'm assuming for the sake of argument that when talking about these different playstyles, we're talking about when it's being run by a skilled and talented GM who understands the strengths and weaknesses of his style and does it well.
If you can't tell, I certainly am part of that third group. There's some good advice out there from folks who are good at running games that way, if you can still find it, that used to be published in Dungeon Magazine as a column. The first to get your hands on is Ray Winninger's run on the Dungeoncraft column, and the second is Chris Perkins' gig as the author of the DM Experience column. Sadly, the archives of both are no longer available on the Wizards of the Coast website, which is a bizarre tragedy. Luckily for me, I grabbed the text of all of those columns while it still was and copied and pasted it into a text doc so I could have them available when I wanted to read them—but I know for a fact that you can find most of the content for both at various other archive sites here and there.
Of course, you may be thinking to yourself, "Hey wait, this CULT OF UNDEATH project you've been describing doesn't really sound like the third method, it sounds more like the second method with a handful of nods to the first method sprinkled through it." That's... actually not an unfair thing to note. CULT OF UNDEATH is specifically me trying to find a way to adapt a module series in a way that would be successful for me, but it's not really my style to use published modules at all in the first place. But assuming I were to want to, how would I make it work for me? CULT OF UNDEATH is supposed to answer that. I'm trying to keep it from becoming the worst kind of railroad, while still maintaining the structure of the modules, more or less. (Well, actually I've changed a lot there too. Paizo is a highly SJW-converged company, and its products reflect that same twisted, delusional world-view, so I've had to make some fairly significant structural changes so that their "horror themed adventure path" doesn't actually resemble the "anti-horror, anti-heroic hot mess" that was published.)
It's my intention that if I ever actually ran CULT OF UNDEATH, it would be in one of two ways. The first is the simplest; it's a shorter, mini-campaign with a planned, bounded finish in sight from the get-go. How fast it moves depends to a great degree on the group. But from my most recent experience with my most recent group, I'd say that the whole campaign could be done in 8-12 sessions. The stuff that I've already done could easily consume four sessions. We have long sessions—often over five hours, but we've also known each other a fairly long time and "waste" a lot of time chatting, messing around, eating, and otherwise not really playing. I'd guess we get anywhere between three and four actual hours of play in an evening.
The more intriguing way to use CULT OF UNDEATH would be to have it be only one of probably about three threads going on simultaneously. This means that I'd need to create something like two other CULT OF UNDEATH equivalents, and drop all kinds of hooks and hints about those other two, interweaving them throughout the CULT OF UNDEATH experience. Normally when I play like this, which is normally how I play, of course, I'm not adapting anything in particular. I rarely have so much material planned out; I just have NPCs with vague goals that I've only fleshed out a few sessions at most of at a time. I also wouldn't be adopting some other material without any reference to the PCs that I have, so I'd stuff going on that the players could really sink their teeth into, because it would relate more directly to their characters. It's a much more fast and loose, invent stuff on the fly approach, that's driven by NPC agendas clashing with PC agendas. By "planning" I really mean that I have some NPCs and they have their goals and plans, and I predict what the PCs are likely to do about it in the immediate term only, and then prepare something accordingly. If my prediction isn't right, that's fine; I can usually use what I prepared in some other way,and if I can't, well, I figure something out.
I prefer not to let one thread dominate for too long before the ignored ones start to press in on the campaign by virtue of their neglect; the NPCs with their agendas are doing things while the PCs are otherwise occupied. Anyway, as I said earlier, the best thing to do to understand how to run this method successfully is to read the columns mentioned above. There were about 25 or so columns by Winninger before he briefly (and abortively) started over with another sample campaign. The second example is not only incomplete, but it also just highlights the same methodology, so it can be skipped entirely without missing anything. Chris Perkins' columns, on the other hand, weren't nearly so carefully organized, and he bounced back and forth from one topic to another. It's all good, but you really just kind of have to read it all. There's at least a hundred columns, I'd guess. But they're all relatively short. About midway through his run, he collected all of them in a single 107 page pdf (but each column has gigantic titles, an illustration, and some white space, so it's not as intimidating as it sounds.) And of course, it's only the first half of his columns. I think the actual articles are still available on the WotC site if you do a search for Iomanda. But you'll need a list of the columns if you want to read them in order.
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