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Friday, May 30, 2014

Do You Generally Stick with One Basic Genre When You Run Your RPG Campaigns?


I'm basically a "fantasy" DM at heart. It's what I broke my teeth on when I came into the hobby and it's what I read. Post apoc and Sci-fi I know mostly from movies and TV.

So yeah, when I run RPGs they are set in mostly traditional fantasy settings.

I am getting the itch to change things up. I'm thinking of running Other Dust, an OSR styled post apoc setting. If I do, it would be my first time running a non-fantasy setting in probably more than 20 years.

Do you have a preferred genre to GM in? Is it different for you as a player? Do you habitually swap out genres when you reboot campaigns or do you have a habit of sticking with the same default, much like I have?

12 comments:

  1. Superhero GM of preference...have done various others. Happy to play lots.

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  2. Breaking things up with something different is good for you, your players, and your skills as a GM. I tend to stick with fantasy but not exclusively, I'll wander off into eldritch horror and science fantasy now and again.I've manged two fair length campaigns with post apoocalypse RPGs, they really aren't all that different from D&D the weapons and loot have different names, and sources of power and the biggest monster is man.

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  3. For our group, it was system of choice for decades, not genre of choice: HERO. A lot of superhero stuff, but also a lot of stuff at heroic and capable normal levels of play, in a variety of genres. But about ten years back we migrated away from HERO onto other games, and now we play a wide variety of things; we rotate GMing duties around the group, and tend not to hover over one genre, so we regularly play horror, fantasy, SF, post-apoc, supers and then rinse/repeat.

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  4. Yup. Fantasy. I've run one-off Gamma World games, but I can't recall running a campaign in any other genre.

    This is the case for two reasons:
    1) I don't think I could pull off other genres to my satisfaction
    2) I don't have a lot of time for gaming, so I stick with what I'm good at and enjoy the most: fantasy

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  5. Depends on the players. We have always played low fantasy but we like to talk about other genres. Lately they have expressed interest in a pirate game so I'm writing one.

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  6. I mostly play in or run fantasy games, because that's usually what most of the group wants. But I personally enjoy various genres, and wish I had more chances to play in other types of games.

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  7. I run mostly fantasy but i run some superhero games in between campaigns

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  8. I've run virtually every type of campaign genre there is...sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, post apocalyptic, kitchen-sink (TORG), near future, cyberpunk, modern-day, samurai fantasy, world of darkness. However, it usually goes with me running fantasy, then something else, then fantasy, then something else, etc. We almost always end up coming back to fantasy.

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  9. I've mostly done fantasy.. in fact not mostly.. always.. Until recently that is. We tried Numenara but for some reason that one just didn't stick. Now I am keeping a Call of Cthulhu game and I am having an absolute blast running it.

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