Didn’t really have a “world” built til a bit later in the campaign (when I got a lot better at my storytelling). It was mostly “generic dnd world with standard characters fighting generic monsters for loot” at the start.
I started introducing unique world elements when I had to expand the world as their characters got stronger. And the world evolved as we played it and I added new towns/cities/dungeons/landmarks.
Best I could explain it is that the world only had a thin veil separating the prime material plane from the rest of the outer planes. Meaning that monsters were everywhere and the cities/towns/villages had to implement some very solid defenses to protect themselves (the party started off as a band of mercs hired by a town to defend it from constant monster attack).
Midway thru the campaign, the big bad came to their town and wrecked it (and them) after I’ve slowly built up rumors of a war going on (but they didn’t care as they were not affected). Thru the earlier years of the campaign, they’ve formed attachments to the town and its people. Wanted them to really hate the baddy so I gave then a good reason to by basically wiping out years of npc relationships/storylines by destroying the town and killing most everyone in it. Other than that, I killed one of the PCs for good (allowed him to reroll a new char with boosted levels plus some items so he wouldn’t be too behind), took half of their magic items (yes, they got plundered by the baddy). They woke up in another town saved by the mayor and some ppl who managed to escape. There were def tears that day but I felt at the time that they needed to be very emotionally invested.
Long story short. Big bad was a god who managed to pierce the veil between planes and wanted to turn the world into a giant node where he can bring in his armies to invade the prime material plane. PCs had to stop him by building their strength and gathering artifacts from several planes that they access via “rips”. Once they were strong enough, they gathered the artifacts, got together with the last remnant of resistance vs the big bad (major cities and races formed alliances to take stop his armies) and the campaign became one big war where they did missions (like taking down a flying citadel) to weaken the big bad’s armies and take out his officers. Etc etc (won’t bore you with any more details on how the rest of the campaign went as I’ve realized that this isn’t exactly the “quick rundown” you requested and it gets pretty predictable from here lol).
Let’s not get into the names I picked tho. They are pretty cringe-y taken outside the context of my language so I’d rather not share lol.
Played Shadowrun every Sunday for quite a few years, a bit of D&D too. We took it in turns to be GM/DM, (we just called it running a game) so that we all had 3 or 4 characters in different games. Still play about once a month or so, mostly at this point to justify drinking 80 beers between us.
__________________ Then lets head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch
As a young teen my friends and I made up our own starships and crew (all there was was ST:TOS so we had a lot of leeway for original stuff). We made props, like weapons, from balsa wood and pieces of plastic or whatever looked good.
Sometimes we had 'adventures' on a planet (think undeveloped plot of land or less-trafficked part of a park + a lot of imagination). Sometimes we'd have it in one of our basements. We did our best to make it look like a bridge (like laying a doorscreen sideways on a table --> 'viewing screen'). Whoever's house it was in, he was the captain.
'Roleplaying'. Heh. Back then it was called make-believe.
We've legitimized it.
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Shinier than a speeding bullet.
Roleplaying games are probably my favorite video games these days. Particularly offline solo ones like Witcher 3, Skyrim or the Mass Effect series. I do enjoy online ones too, I've been playing World of Warcraft on and off since the game was released, and I've dabbled in other MMORPG's too, Final Fantasy 14 and a few others.
I've played tabletop RPG's a bit too, but not a ton.
The roleplaying games I enjoy the most are the ones that suspend my disbelief and where I really get sucked into the world and want to learn more about it and really get immersed in it.