Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
Meanwhile "tailor made" has nothing to do with that. It's either:
- customizing play style for the players
- customizing campaign / adventure-arc theme to the PC (ie nature adventures or pirate adventures etc)
- customizing plot hooks to the PC
- customizing encounters to the PCs numbers & levels (CaS)
- customizing encounters to the PCs abilities (CaS on steroids)
There's also content customization (both in terms of setting elements and encounters) to the players separate from the PCs. A good example here is phobias - one of the people I've had as players has a really deep, really entrenched fear of needles. She doesn't particularly like the idea of IVs, puts up with vaccination only because she also has a really strong sense of social responsibility, etc. If I, as a GM, in a game she was in repeatedly put cactus everywhere as a hazard in a desert and graphically described the effects every time someone fell in it or similar it would be a total jerk move.

A similar thing can apply to setting level content, both in terms of phobias and (in my experience more often) in terms of tailoring to varying degrees of player expertise, and in avoiding areas near certain real world hot button issues. Personally, this tends to mean computer science and religion. It's not uncommon for me to be GMing for a group that's mostly professional programmers - and while this doesn't matter for fantasy games, I run a lot of science fiction and space opera. This means that as a stylistic choice I'm basically locked into very cinematic hacking, because there's no way I can research the subject enough for a campaign to appear realistic to actual programmers, particularly when they include actual security specialists. Religion is more a matter of avoiding acrimonious out of game argument; there are groups where I absolutely could run a game about sectarian conflict between real world religious groups in a near-modern setting and other groups where that's a terrible idea.