As others have suggested, mood and inspirational material is always my starting point. I figure that I can "wing it" and throw players into interesting situations without a lot of prep, and then I react to what they want to do, but the feel of the campaign requires me to be in a certain mood. My rule of thumb is that I let players do what they want, but I try to toss obstacles and challenges their way to keep them hooked on the action.

Yora wrote:

I just read A Princess of Mars. And now I know where George Lucas got all his ideas for Star Wars.

Even freaking speederbikes, in a book from 1911!
And all the character names wouldn't look out of place in Star Wars either.

And keep in mind that Barsoom has a giant insect creature called a "sith." 
 

It's amazing to me how much cool stuff he wrote in so few years. He died in his 30's.

I've been a player in some playtest sessions of Next for around a year and a half now, and have run a couple sessions using the rules. Overall, it seems to be a solid rules set with options to go minimal or to go extreme. In my home game the rule is that the GM gets to decide what to run, and this is pretty much the only way I can see Next working for a lot of groups.

One problem I have found in discussing D&D Next is that Next has been changing along the line based on playtest feedback, so when a person says "I played it and hated XX" it's possible that XX has been tweaked or deleted since then. The designers have adjusted monster hit points and AC values several times, adjusted spell damage and effects several times (even adding and deleting spells), tried using extra skill dice and removing them, and other features of the game that aren't coming to mind at the moment. Our GM was very careful most of the time to use the most recent playtest packets and we constantly had to go re-work our characters to fit the current rules. And I'll say that many of our playtests were done using classic AD&D modules and there seemed to be minimal conversion needed overall.

In short, I have high hopes for 5E. My friend who owns a game store says he's tired of Pathfinder being the only "big company" option when new players ask about "Dungeons and Dragons." I think that WotC's biggest blunder is actually the timing of the release -- it should have been early in the summer so that kids could play it over vacation, and there should have been some sort of "Free RPG Day" thing to help draw attention to the product.

mabon5127 wrote:

RedJowel wrote:

Now I like the idea of a knowledge driven, role-play heavy campaign, and I'm up to the challenge, but cutting down on combat is a very serious challenge to me.  I'm going to have to think less Conan and more Call of Ktulu,  and devise ways to challenge the players outside of combat, or at least give them interesting things to do once they inevitably get captured by combatants.

Back in the old days when OD&D was it we managed to have mysteries and quests without combat.  I don't think its a fools errand particularly since both players desire that type of thing. Balancing a group of players with a mix of desires / agendas is tougher, I think, so no one feels bored.

Keep in mind that the whole "non combat" campaign has to be a choice of both players and GM, so it's not entirely your burden to come up with things for the players to do. They ought to be generating many of these ideas as well.

Mabon is correct about early OD&D -- while our group had its share of dungeon crawls and barroom brawls, we also did a lot of investigation stuff and "rescue the princess" adventures where the goal was to get in and out without getting ourselves killed. You can steal a page from the "Call of Cthulhu" RPG and have some big nasties that the players might want to destroy through ritual rather than fight. You can have them run errands for sorcerers who are in need of spell components. You can center a campaign in a city full of intrigue, where killing someone will get you run out of town or worse. There are many options you can pursue that don't involve combat on a regular basis, but you need to be sure that the players are interested in that style of play as well.

Fundamentally I don't see that you have to switch game systems at all, only keep in mind that you will probably have to "wing it" through stat checks and the like occasionally. Heck, I do that all the time and prefer it to a rules set which gets too intense in terms of

I think that character lethality has to go hand-in-hand with the type of players involved. Back in high school we had pretty standard character types and I felt like I could kill off characters and my players would just shrug it off and start new ones. My current group, however, spends a lot more time angsting over "persona" and the like and really doesn't deal with character death well at all. Different times, different players, different philosophy.

I tend to see a gaming world in terms of black and white -- typically "Law" versus "Chaos" where law is the good guys and chaos the bad guys. This shakes out in my game in the form of a party of characters who pick either law or neutral, depending upon whether or not they are actively battling chaos or not. Some of my players tend to view the game as "there's a bad guy ... get him!" and pick law. Others tend to view the game as "I don't like chaos, but often I do whatever works best for me" and pick neutral. I really discourage folks from being chaos in my campaigns.

Just my two coppers.

I'm starting a thread here because of the mention of the HEAVY METAL movie in the other section. This question is actually about the magazine, but I thought maybe there would be some crossover in folks who read the magazine and watched the movie.

On the Blackmoor forum there is a discussion about Robert Adams' horseclans series and someone mentioned that he thought that some horseclans stories were serialized in HEAVY METAL magazine before they became books.

Anyone here familar enough with Heavy Metal to confirm this? Any informtion would be appreciated.

Odysseus wrote:

As I've kept thinking about it, I wonder if He-Man, Conan (and the Young Warriors) and Xena wouldn't be some good inspirations. 

I think they would be, although both Hercules and Xena sometimes found themselves in situations which were more adult than you might expect. On the other hand, both of those shows were tame enough to be shown on regular TV so I don't see a problem with them. Heck, if you watch Disney animations they have several layers of stuff in them -- some things that kids get and another layer for the parents.

You mentioned Atlantis -- recall that there is a Disney movie about that which could be fun. John Carter is a fun action show without any real adult themes. Frozen was good. Treasure Planet has neat flying ships. Disney also did Hercules and Alladin and I'm sure others that kids would love. Remember that often the hope is to inspire creativity in the kids, not to have them role-play an actual setting.

I think that the fact that we're even having a conversation about a 2nd edition (or printing or whatever) in itself is really cool. It shows what an impact the game is having out there in the gamer community.

Think about how many games never reach enough fans to warrent another print run....