Sorry, I may be confusing you with the fifteen other people who keep telling me to change how I want the game to go. See, from my perspective, this is what I see:
Me: The game would be improved if it was run at a faster pace since many games end before a satisfactory conclusion.
Response 1 - No, you're wrong. The journey is the reward and you should just be happy with what you got.
Response 2 - No, you're wrong. You just want to go from combat to combat, and not do any role play.
Response 3 - No, you're wrong. Nothing that ever happens in an RPG is ever a waste of time.
Response 4 - No, you're wrong. Gaming is about "emergent" stories. Totally different from authored stories.
See, I'm not saying you're wrong for your
emotions. I'm saying you would very likely be happier if you tried to move away from the idea that a game must complete to be fun.
Or, as others have suggested (here and on that other thread of yours), you need to switch to an episodic format rather than an overarching campaign. Since your long campaigns never work out for you, shorter ones might.
At no point does anyone say, "Hey, Y'know what? Maybe if we tightened the campaign up a bit, stripped out those sessions where we "didn't get any closer to ... saving the day", we might, just maybe, actually have a complete campaign. But, no. Instead, I have everyone tripping over themselves to tell me how wrong I am for wanting DM's to maybe skip a few things, just so we DO get closer to saving the day. Because, for me, a session where we didn't get closer? That's a total waste of time because it means we're one more step closer to the campaign failing.
OK,
this is where you're wrong: How do you know that what you're doing, while you're doing it, isn't taking you any closer to the actual plot?
Example: In one of my games, we reached a new city and were heading for the inn so we could then go to the next step, which was heading to a specific temple, which was a necessary point in the overall quest. We're getting the town's flavor text, as per usual, and, well, I can't remember the exact order of things but one Perception check later my character spots a fortune teller's stand. My character has had some interesting experiences with fortune tellers before and I was usually on the lookout for one. And after a brief argument with the other players (one of the players... well, you know how never splitting the party leads to jokes about everyone going to the bathroom together? He's that kind of player), I slipped away and went to see the fortune teller. Thank goodness for a high Stealth score.
A big waste of time, I'm sure you'd say. The fortune teller had nothing to do with the temple, after all, or with what we knew the plot to be at that point. Strip it out; the game's better without it, right?
WRONG!
The fortune teller had legitimate info.
Because I decided to ignore the "actual" plot and do something purely for roleplay reasons, I learned information that was both very useful for personal reasons
and information about an upcoming major event that could have taken us by surprise otherwise. We may have learned that same information later on, if I hadn't chosen to go to the fortune teller--but now we had advanced knowledge.
And this keeps happening in our game. We shop or go to the inn, talk to the shopkeeper or smith or barkeep, and learn something important, either for a personal goal for the campaign's goal
and we gain allies and/or useful equipment that will help us in the long run. I'm pretty sure that every single magic item I have (other than consumables) is something I've gotten by doing something you would consider a waste of time--but every one of those items has been either very important or very useful.
So that's my question. How do you know that the events you are going through aren't actually important?
If the answer is "experience," that you've never had those events actually be important in your games, then the
answer is that when you DM,
make those events be important. Pre-written adventures rarely take these things into consideration, if only because that would end up making the book too long, so you need to add them in. There's probably dozens of generators online that can help if you don't have the time. Heck, depending on how you feel about AI, you could even use ChatGPT or something similar to help.
I mean, FFS, our Ravenloft campaign ended in the middle of a freaking combat. The DM just vanished into the ether and never came back. Real life stepped on him hard. I get that. But, poof. Campaign gone. No warning. No word. Just showed up for the game next week and... no DM. Our recent Avernus campaign ended while crossing a bridge. We'd resolved nothing. I'm not talking about campaigns trailing off because the DM wants to move on to something else, so, we've kinda sorta come to a conclusion (although that's common enough too). I'm talking about how the campagn ends three sentences after the Ring Wraiths stab Frodo.
This is a completely different thing, though. Whether the DM has something major happen to them or they just ghost because they're a jerk or a flake, that has nothing to do with spending time doing "unimportant" things in the game itself. Even if you had stripped out every single option until you had the most linear, railroaded adventure possible
, the DM
still would have left, with the only difference being that you might have been one session away from the end instead of ten sessions.
