This is going to sound weird. Because as much as I love certain games and certain designs, I haven't gotten to play with them as much as I'd like. But the question wants me to talk about the things that I do in play.
And the thing that has had the biggest impact on my play experience has been calendar keeping and downtime management. I started it with my OSR megadungeon game and using graph paper to track the downtime required to train or recover from grievous wounds. Then I graduated to using timeline software.
"Megadungeon Take 2" used the detailed downtime rules from the Ultimate Campaign rulebook for Pathfinder. None of the downtime activities were really mandatory like they were in the OSR version, but were options to help characters feel like they were part of the world. I generally used them to backfill a character's time when the player didn't show up for a session. "Why didn't you go down into the dungeon with us yesterday?" "I made a scroll/made friends within the community/ran a small XP-bearing errand."
Though that was not as effective as I'd like. Since I was dealing with a lot of new and casual players, it took up a good piece of the actual session instead of being the tiny bit of bookkeeping that I was hoping it would be.
Even so, both of my prospective future campaigns will use my timeline software. I'll use it in my Star Trek campaign to keep track of stardates and warp drive travel times. The kingdom-building campaign will use it not just to track the status of characters, but to track the calendar of the world.
And the thing that has had the biggest impact on my play experience has been calendar keeping and downtime management. I started it with my OSR megadungeon game and using graph paper to track the downtime required to train or recover from grievous wounds. Then I graduated to using timeline software.
"Megadungeon Take 2" used the detailed downtime rules from the Ultimate Campaign rulebook for Pathfinder. None of the downtime activities were really mandatory like they were in the OSR version, but were options to help characters feel like they were part of the world. I generally used them to backfill a character's time when the player didn't show up for a session. "Why didn't you go down into the dungeon with us yesterday?" "I made a scroll/made friends within the community/ran a small XP-bearing errand."
Though that was not as effective as I'd like. Since I was dealing with a lot of new and casual players, it took up a good piece of the actual session instead of being the tiny bit of bookkeeping that I was hoping it would be.
Even so, both of my prospective future campaigns will use my timeline software. I'll use it in my Star Trek campaign to keep track of stardates and warp drive travel times. The kingdom-building campaign will use it not just to track the status of characters, but to track the calendar of the world.
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