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Way more roleplaying stuff, and why it's a really good thing. Not that most people here need convincing.
I've been playing the "Amazing Tales" system with my kids, which is good because it's built for kids. And I really like it! It's simplified without feeling too simple, they still get to make choices, make criticle die rolls, and also be crazy creative. Like in this story:
We were playing a situation where the player characters were trying to protect a young girl from an evil wizard. Their main task was to keep the wizard busy while the girl escapes. I had mentioned, just as a throwaway characteristic, that the wizard had a scraggly beard, since he was kind of new to wizarding and young and burned his beard off frequently with mistaken fireball spells.
So when the players wanted to slow him down they cast a spell to give him a nice, full beard...roll the die for magic and...critical success! The wizard stopped in his tracks and stood there admiring his awesome new magic beard for quite some time.
but eventually he got over the beard thing and went back to chasing the NPC they were escorting (ughhhhh escort quests right?) The wizard cast a spell that made a snake chase the girl. My kids decided, hey it worked once... they cast a spell to give the SNAKE a nice full beard. Another natural 20. So the snake now has a beard as big as the one that appeared on the wizard, and also sat around admiring his new facial hair. The little girl got away.
My wife was live-texting all this to my siblings who were quite amused. In her words:
Y'all I lived in a tent for a few weeks in Alaska with a bunch of people doing assorted drugs. This is like that.
I'm currently running three D&D Campaigns:
It turns out that there are a LOT of people who want to play D&D but don't know how to get into it. I'm planning a general throughline that all three groups will follow, partially so I don't go insane trying to track a bunch of different characters and stories and partially because maps and source books are expensive.
But it's also so much fun. The energy each group brings to the table is different, but they're all awesome. And I love making maps and planning encounters and reading up on my players' characters and planning things to catch each individual characters' attention...it's a blast.
I've been building a few maps in Campaign Cartographer 3, and it's a LOT of work but I really enjoy it.
I'm toying with the idea of gently suggesting people pitch in a little bit of money to offset costs...but I'm holding off for now. It's not like I'm going bankrupt and mostly I just want to have fun, not run a business.