What are your preferences?
While reading various blogs, Old School adventures, and generally getting almost-obsessed with devouring information from a variety of sources, I found myself thinking about the types of adventures I like to play and design. So I thought I would share, and ask what your preferred styles are?
As a role-player I have a preference for adventures that involve exploration, discovering new facts about the world, pursuing goals, and delving into dungeons and their kin. I am also very much an instigator, meaning I like to make things happen, other as a result of my reckless character’s actions (I do try not to derail the game, and to keep it in character; most of the time I succeed).
As a DM I like creating location-based adventures, filling it with interesting rooms, monsters and traps and puzzles to confront and deal with, perhaps clues to other places, history and lore to uncover, and a location that (largely) exists in a state of stillness until the adventurers come calling. Basically, I like to design a situation and throw the party at/into it and see what happens: that uncertainty, that level of unpredictability and opportunities to surprise me as what I love, even crave, as a DM.
Of course, I will cater adventures more to my players wants and desires when I get a handle on what they like and enjoy the most, throwing in a bit of variety to keep them on their toes and prevent it getting tedious, but those are my preferences.
How about you?
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Taketoshi
March 14, 2011 at 17:01
Those are almost exactly the kinds of adventures I prefer as player and GM.
I would call myself more of an “investigator” than an “instigator”, as I tend to be fairly cautious about my approach in-game as a player, knowing as I do that I’m probably safer if I let my companions do the instigating, and trusting that they will :)
As a GM, I like to put together interesting locations with features that push the players to engage more completely with the world as an independent entity–forcing them to be away of the three-dimensionality of the space their characters inhabit (instead of just seeing the world as a map), drawing them into the logic of places and peoples, giving them a sense of the history that is alive around them, that existed before and will continue on after they’re gone, hopefully affected in some small way by their action or inaction (hopefully not the latter, in retrospect). While the goals is always ultimately loot and xp, I like my players to consider other motivations that don’t just come from character concept as they get increasingly entwined with their world.