The Greatest RPG Advice in the World . . .

Recently, I was reminiscing about one of the greatest RPG campaigns of all time. It was the one I played with my friends between 5th and 6th grade. It was my first long-term campaign. We literally played every single day. This allowed us, without "cheating" to achieve very high levels. Our primary characters made it to the mid-upper 20's.

Perhaps out of jealousy, a fellow gamer scoffed "There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. As DM I'd burn out pretty quickly having to come up with new material every single day!" And then quickly shifts to "Oh, the lower levels are for adventuring. I prefer to switch gears to politics at high levels." Or "Above 10th level, it's time to retire."

And then it occurred to me. One reason DMs can't keep up the pace of playing every day is because they're weighted down by absolute crap parading as accepted and true RPG wisdom. Who could be expected to create under the constraint of 9 billion fun-busting, finger-wagging reasons why you're playing wrong? Don't get me wrong. Some of this "wisdom" is hard to argue against. It seems true. It seems sophisticated. It seems to represent that vision we get when we close our eyes and imagine the ideal RPG campaign. It seems to get us to the promised land.

We want it so bad that we attach our identities to it, we say "well in my campaign...." And then it's no longer just some jerk's opinion. It's our own personal "GM style." It's hilarious to me when I see someone say, "Well, I prefer..." or "Well, I handle things..." and so on. Because  none of what they're saying are truly their own original thoughts. I've heard it all before. Sometimes even word-for-word.

And so it seems as though that the greatest RPG advice in the world . . . belongs in the garbage!

Now, I know what they'll say. "Isn't that throwing out the baby with the bathwater?" Well, we have to. Because this is Rosemary's baby we're talking about.

Look, in our campaign all those years back, we built castles. When we were good and ready. Which turns out to be below "name" level. That's when we began construction, anyway. It was after name level by the time we got things the way we wanted. In between, yeah, we still went on some adventures. Notice how there was no "those levels are for adventuring, these levels are for castles & politics." We did both at 6th, 7th, and 8th level. We did both at 12th, 13th, and 14th level.

We honored the rule that before people start coming to settle and work your lands, you have to "clear the hex" which is several adventures in itself. Then enemies we made would sabotage our construction (they had Zelda-style bombs for some reason). That was an adventure, to put a stop to them. Or get revenge. It was another adventure to accumulate wealth to fix the damage. Another to plan a better design so that doesn't happen again. Another to personally oversee re-construction, and respond to any problems, to leave nothing to chance.

The more we adventured, the more we shaped the world, and the more we shaped the world, the more endless the avenues for adventure became. How could we ever tire of this? And once we made the world a more awesome place, you know what we wanted to do? Start some new characters and have fun in it. Of course, we had a leg up. Our old characters could serve as mentors. We didn't stop playing our old characters. One or two of them would travel with the group of newbies as a guide.

If they didn't flat-out gift the new characters some magic items, their surplus items they had accumulated over time was available for purchase. Not because we began thinking it was a good idea to have magic shops in our campaign. But because player characters created a market for second hand magic items.

We changed the world, and finger-waggers couldn't stop us.