1. I hate a lot of rules... old d&d and ad&d are very rules light and leave a lot of the rules up to the DM. As opposed to modern d&d 3e and up they are filled with all kinds of rules for everything.
2.I don't like the play style encouraged by modern d&d. It encourages a lot of power gaming and personal player control. Everyone is bad ass at everything it seems and it is easy to lose control for a DM and really takes away good role playing and cooperation from the players.
3. I hate the aesthetic. This may seem trivial to most but i really cannot stand the art approach and overall tone and aesthetic of modern d&d. I am big on aesthetics and atmosphere and when i look at those modern books it looks like disney made them as opposed to the old books with all those great illustrations and paintings that with one look fire up my imagination and invoke a certain style that i love.
So whenever i start a new d&d campaign i always start shuffling through my mountains of rules to see what i want to use. I feel like each version of d&d encourages a certain style of play
OD&D (1974 whitebox)- This is the original it is a great toolkit even for the modern gamer. It is very very loose and i love the style. In the three little brown books the overall feel here is for dungeon crawling though in a modern approach anything is possible. I have run many one shots and a few sandbox/hexcrawl campaigns with the white box and variants such as Swords and wizardry.
B/X Moldvay/Cook/Mentzer- This was a reworking and clean up of the original white box and i think the most elegant of all the d&d editions. Many reworkings have been made of these rules because of how good they are. They encourage more of a basic framework of d&d with dungeon crawling inner mixed with wilderness exploration but again many people have approached the style to many ways it is very adaptable.
AD&D 1e/2e- I feel like ad&d 1e and 2e both introduced the more epic heroic adventure especially 2e. These are the rules i usually turn to if i want to run a epic quest campaign PC's are more varied and have lots of options and are alot more survivable it seems.
So for this game i started pondering what i wanted to do.. well at the beginning i was leaning more toward a sandbox approach with a very generic setting and was thinking swords and wizardy or b/x d&d. So i started looking at b/x d&d clones. I like the clones because everyone can get a copy of the rules easily if they want and i like supporting indy productions. One that caught my eye was lamentations of the flame princess. I loved the flavor and the rules are basically b/x d&d with some modern tweaks that i appreciate.
When i started looking more into lotfp i also starting looking at the supplemental material and really loved it. This is where lotfp really shines in my opinion. It also got me thinking more about my setting. James Raggi's modules and campaign is based in historical england in the 17th century and this is something i have always wanted to do. So i decided to base my campaign in early 16th century france. I like the idea of a real world place and time it gives a solid framework the players can relate to but a DM can also go wild with it. Which
is exactly what i'm going to do.. more to come..
No comments:
Post a Comment