#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 13: Describe how your play has evolved.

Day thirteen of #RPGaDAY2018 and the start of the DESCRIBE week. The first question of the week is "Describe how your play has evolved".

I think it has evolved quite a lot as I've hopefully matured as a player, and as a person. As a teenager, all we really wanted to do was basically be murder-hobos as they call it. We'd go into dungeons and kill the monsters, take the treasure, get more powerful and do it all over again.

Even in the games I ran, that was basically all we did. I used to run Star Frontiers, and the group went into epic battles against the Sathar empire, powering up in suits like "Gavin the Walking Battleship" from the Travellers comic strip.

Ghostbusters and James Bond really saw the start of things starting to change, especially with Bond - there was a plot and a story... and most of the time the plot advanced whether the players intervened or not. The villains weren't going to wait around to be stopped. They had a schedule and if the players arrived too late, the villains succeeded. This was a hell of a revelation at the time.

After that, I had a break from gaming and it wasn't until I went to University that I got back into it through playing original Vampire: The Masquerade. It was certainly more story-driven than anything I'd played before and we quickly progressed through Mage, to Kult, then to WitchCraft.

Games we've been playing recently like FFG's Star Wars, Tales from the Loop, and so on, have all been very plot focused. We've lost the desire to "power up" our characters, and strive to tell a great story with exciting moments of action rather than just destroy the villains.

Part of me wishes I could go back to the old D&D games and say to myself "you know, this is how it could play..."