Three Questions

I don't actually watch a ton of Questing Beast, because I'm not a fan of the OSR as playstyle approach that he promotes, I don't agree with it, and I'm not necessarily interested in a lot of his content. But, I do occasionally check in to see if anything's going on there that I might be interested in. Saw this video recently:

Now, I'm not a famous D&D Youtuber, and nobody cares what I think, but I'm going to answer these three questions anyway, because I'm a sucker for answering trendy questionnaires, or even under the radar questionnaires. I like my own voice.

1. What is your favorite system to run? to play?

I actually don't perceive a dichotomy between running and playing. If I like a system, I probably want to run and play it equally. I'd prefer my own system to run, obviously, and while I'd also prefer to play it, I'd not be surprised to never actually do so. But any rules-lite dark fantasy/horror game would do. I'd probably recommend ShadowDark without a focus on dungeoneering or hexcrawling, or Knave 2e or Microlite (any of the D&Dish ones) as plausible alternatives to my system. Probably Deathbringer when Professor Dungeon Master finally releases the full version would work too.

What I'd really like to do is to play loose adaptations of famous campaigns, adventure paths or at least settings using a dark fantasy rules lite game like this. The Enemy Within campaign from Warhammer FRP, Carrion Crown and maybe some of the other Paizo adventures, the Shadows of the Last War series of modules (including the one in the original setting book) for Eberron, etc. Something like that. Shorten them, get rid of most of the dungeon-crawling, if any (Enemy Within has very little) and adapt races, monsters and whatever to a good analog without worrying too much about getting it exactly right, and good to go. Or Bob's your uncle, or whatever.

2. What else would you want your channel (blog in my case, although I also have channels) to cover besides RPGs?

Well, I mean, I already do talk about other things. I talk a fair bit about current events and political and social trends, but I wouldn't really want to devote a chunk of time to that. I like history, or really pseudo-history; the interpolation of unwritten history using archaeology, archaeogenetics and historical/comparative linguistics, for instance. I also really like hiking, camping and other outdoorsy topics, especially out west. What I'd really love to do in an ideal world that could never be, is where I'd spend about a third of my time overlanding, in an overlanding truck with a rooftop tent, a drone, camp stove, etc. On these trips, I'd caravan with some gamer friends. We'd spend the better part of a day driving on a BDR or other cool outdoorsy place, then set up camp, stay there for two nights. The second day would be split between hiking and gaming in the great outdoors. My channel would be every other video would be about the travel, the hiking, the driving, the scenery, etc. and would be a relatively shortish (half hour or so, mostly?) montage of getting somewhere, showing off awesome scenery, setting up camp and hanging around cooking and talking and adventuring. Then the other video would be an actual play, edited down to 90 minutes or so. Maybe I could even get two actual plays out of a single play session. 

I'd have to think about set up so that we could have and record actual plays outside in the afternoon or early evening and have decent sound, not have our papers blow away, etc. But once I dial that stuff in, it'd be a pretty unique take; actual gaming in the great outdoors. In the summer I can be at high elevation in the mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Idaho, etc. in the shoulder seasons at lower elevations, and in the winter, we go to the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico or southern California.

3. What strong opinion did you used to have that you've changed about RPGs over the years?

Not really any that are super significant. My playstyle is the same. I've dialed in what kind of rules I prefer, though. The closest I can think of is that while I've always liked a breezy toolz not rulez approach, I used to like the chargen options of rulesy systems like 3e or Pathfinder 1e, because I could use them to detail and even develop my character in unexpected ways, giving him unusual details that made him stand out. I no longer feel that that's necessary or important, but honestly that didn't change much about how I played or ran the game, I just used to use it to prompt unexpected little details about characters sometimes, by spending extra skill points on unexpected things, or picking a feat or trait of some kind that gave me a hook to roleplay on. However, I now no longer feel like those systems are worth that benefit.