breaking from OSR

With one of the fighters reaching level 5, Our Trow Fortress campaign has reached the end of the season. Yes, we made it as in tv shows, so I could take a rest and another player could start GMing his Shadowrun campaign. Which means that I am playing again, as opposed to running games! So fucking liberating!

I am playing an elf samurai who is missing all combat rolls for now. After a month of play and our first serious loot, I got myself big breast implants with LED nipples (im playing as a sort of transgender guy) and I roleplay as the classic gay elf from elf parodies. Pic related, its him, the crossed eye is a bionic eye we all have. Not sure if its really on the starting package by the book or is a gift of our GM.

I find interesting the contrast on how much I stress over the "fairness" and "efficiency" of a given system or mechanic when I am a GM, and how little I care as a player. Honestly I am just thrilled just to interact with things but I dont know yet how combat really works (I pretend to, but really i am trusting that whatever the GM says is ok)

On the other hand, I think I am not running (BX) D&D anymore soon, nor my d6-based clone. But I am instead making my own fantasy game, out of that framebox. I think that me and my players must grow outside it. There are many reasons for this, and I will only cite some; leaving my upcoming posts to hint the directions I am pointing towards.

- XP for gold and monsters stopped making sense when the players decided to embark on altruistic missions from an NPC they pledged loyalty to. I could understand them and the game was actually better because of this decision, but sometimes I had to artificially create XP to compensate their efforts. See my last entry to see how I plan to do it, more or less (though I have refined it by now, more on this soon)

- Tracking things like food and water by units doesn't bring anything productive to the game, and I want to move away from the resource management chores. I am sure that I will find a good abstraction to portray the fact that you need food and water to survive. On the opposite side, I am a little dissapointed on how D&D abstracts many survival checks in the wilderness, that for me are very important to focus on, such as getting lost, hunting, foraging, etc. I'd rather make the scope of the game smaller, so a 30 mile travel lasted one session or three, but I feel its important to feel the texture of the forest, the road, the sea, and without forgetting that cities should feel places to explore and not just inventory refillements. 

- Theoretically, the procedural generation of D&D makes an open world, but in practice players search for the videogamey path: grind level 1 monsters and level 1 loot, then gradually increase in dungeon levels maintaining an expected point of risk reward. This might be broken sometimes by chance, yes; but I don't want to run a fantasy game like this anymore. Though I still want "leveling up" and monsters of all sizes, I want the approach to the game to be different, very far from the "grinding" cycle. I think I want to emphasize how it feels to actually live on a magical medieval land. I don't know. I'm still exploring my own wants on this, but hints of them are scattered through this blog since it's beginning.

But this is not to say that I dislike the game or thing is bad. Not at all, and it isn't. Actually, what i want is to take everything I love from D&D and try to apply to my new chimera, that is nothing like it.