D&D 5E What's the rush? Has the "here and now" been replaced by the "next level" attitude?

[Lanefan]

Please note the quotes below are out of sequence as originally posted so my reply will make sense.

I play weekly in three hour sessions. Again, this is true. This is the time I have blocked off out of my schedule which works for me and mine. We cannot go longer and no one wants to go shorter.

In any given year, I'll likely get about 45 sessions. We'll lose ten sessions a year to sicknesses, family stuff, Christmas holidays, national holidays, whatever. Which gives me about 90 sessions max for any given campaign.

From my own experience and records, the two paragraphs above are almost bang on (except we usually go 4-hour sessions, give or take).

I have about two years to complete any given campaign. How do I know this? Experience. After two years of play, real life is going to step in and step on the neck of any game I've ever participated in. Might be shorter, might be longer, but, two years is about the half life. So, before I start any campaign, I know this to be close enough to true.

As someone who seems able to keep campaigns going 10 years or more, can I lob in a few questions:

How malleable are your groups to changing players on the fly? (this is essential for a long campaign, and IME there are always people looking for a game to play in)
Conversely, does the campaign end if-when a player drops out? (if yes, nothing will ever last)
Is it usually the DM who gets clobbered by real life and has to bail out?
Are your groups usually otherwise friends or acquaintances in real life or do you only know each other through the game? (gaming with real-world friends seems to be way more long-term stable than gaming with real-world strangers)
How often do you yourself move residence from one city to another?

Lanefan

 

[Campbell]

Speaking for myself I play with a group of real world friends and we don't tend to have long campaigns. For us, the primary tension is that we have too many players with a GM's mindset and tend to appreciate multiple RPGs and character archetypes. I personally like playing in my Scion game, but at the same time I want to run a game of Blood and Smoke, Edge of the Empire and a game of Demon - The Descent. I miss our adventures in Rokugan. I wouldn't mind giving Shadowrun a turn. D&D is a small piece of why I enjoy our hobby. There are so many types of interesting stories I am not experiencing right now that I could be.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

But, you've yet to show that levelling has actually increased in speed.

Just go and look at the XP table.

 

[Hussar]

Just go and look at the XP table.

So what?

A single +1 sword in AD&D was worth 2500 gp if sold. That's 2500 xp in one go. Or, about a 1/4 of 1st to 2nd level for most classes, once split six ways. Look at the example encounter in the Basic D&D book (Mentzer) and you see a couple of hobgoblins with a several hundred gp gem - again, about a 1/4 level. Bumping levels in AD&D wasn't particularly long IME. 2e was a bit longer since you no longer had xp for gold. But, depending on the monster encountered (demons, even very small ones like Manes and Lemures were worth thousands of xp) you could still move along at a fair clip.

It was brought up earlier in this thread that you hit name level in about a year of play, maybe a bit more. That was Gygax's expectations in the late 70's. So, again, you still have to actually offer any proof that levelling has gotten significantly faster under WOTC than in AD&D. I mean, BECMI went into Immortal rules. That's after level 36. At your rate of levelling it would be impossible for any group to ever achieve that from first level. Yet some did.

Heck, look at 1e tournament modules. There's enough xp in a tournament module to bump a level for an AD&D party. And those are meant to play out in 4 hours. Now, granted, I'd never want to play that way. That would bore me to tears. But, it's not like it was unheard of.

 

[Hussar]

Please note the quotes below are out of sequence as originally posted so my reply will make sense.From my own experience and records, the two paragraphs above are almost bang on (except we usually go 4-hour sessions, give or take).
As someone who seems able to keep campaigns going 10 years or more, can I lob in a few questions:

How malleable are your groups to changing players on the fly? (this is essential for a long campaign, and IME there are always people looking for a game to play in)

I don't have a hard and fast rule for this. But, for me, once you've lost about half the group, I'm not terribly interested in continuing a campaign. The new players lack any connection to the campaign and it tends to, IMO, not be a lot of fun playing catch up.

Conversely, does the campaign end if-when a player drops out? (if yes, nothing will ever last)

"A" as in one player? No, that wouldn't kill a campaign. But, again, once you lose about half the group, most of the time we restart.

Is it usually the DM who gets clobbered by real life and has to bail out?

That's usually the culprit right there. DM burnout.

Are your groups usually otherwise friends or acquaintances in real life or do you only know each other through the game? (gaming with real-world friends seems to be way more long-term stable than gaming with real-world strangers)
How often do you yourself move residence from one city to another?

Lanefan

We're gaming friends. So, there is no other link to each other other than gaming. Which, again, probably contributes to games going kerblooie. Granted, I haven't moved all that often anymore, but, people do move frequently. It happens.

But, yeah, it's usually the confluence of DM burnout plus players dropping out which contributes to games ending.

 

[Hussar]

There's been three main ideas put forward to help with the issue. They are not bad ideas and I can certainly see why they would work for some people. They don't work for me, but, that doesn't mean they are bad ideas.

1. Celebrim's Solution:

Celebrim has basically squashed down the D&D experience into a shorter range of levels. 1st level is beginner and 7th is legendary. Campaigns, presumably, would rarely get into double digit levels. And this would work. The player gets to achieve archetypes reasonably quickly and gets to get the entire journey from beginning neophyte to "jedi knight". Cool.

However, it has one glaring flaw for me. It's too much work. From his own admission, he's got hundreds of pages of house rules. In order to do this, you'd need to rewrite every single class, spell, and monster in the game. I'm far, far too lazy to do this. If I need more than about three pages of house rules, I'm just going to play another game, because, to me, the payoff of rewriting large swaths of a game simply aren't worth it.

So, yes, it can work, so long as you are willing to spend the time beating the game into shape. Which I simply am not.

2. Forever Slayer's Approach.

Forever Slayer also takes a very slow levelling approach but allows for mechanics which would achieve archetype fairly soon. However, he's not changing the game world terribly much. A major demon is still a CR 15 creature.

It makes it pretty hard for my character to be a legendary captain, when the real legendary captains in the world are 14th level. It's a more organic approach, one that I think Bill91 favours as well. You start at the beginning and where ever you end up is fine. Bill91 comments that he doesn't even understand the idea of a "whole" game. Fair enough. It just means that we have incompatible playing styles. Not really a big surprise there.

So, I would find this game frustrating since while I get to actually get on the journey, because the time spent means that the journey will just be getting started before the campaign goes wahoonie. IOW, I get to play Luke in Episode IV and V, but never get to actually play Episode VI. I never get to face Vader. Which, to me, is ultimately unsatisfying.

3. Start at higher level

This one has been proposed by more than a few people. But, again, it misses what I want. I want the whole package. I want to play Episodes IV, V AND VI. I don't want to skip anything. I want it all because I'm a greedy mother. Starting at higher levels means I don't get to play the "apprentice" levels where, IME, a great deal of the character personality and backstory building happens. So, again, while the solution would certainly work for some, it won't work for me.

And, just so I don't get accused yet again of trying to make generalisations for anyone, I'm purely, 100%, totally, speaking for myself here. This is why these solutions don7t work for me. If they work for you, then fantastic. Great. Very happy for you. But, they won't work for me.

 

[Derren]

Wow. Talk about taking things out of context. My original comment was about someone playing 1 hour of challenge in a 4 hour session. It was an off the cuff comment since it seemed so fitting. Granted, to me, that would seem very boring, so, yeah, if you want to spend 75% of your gaming time doing stuff that has no challenge for the characters, more power to you. Not really interested myself.

So challenge = fun, everything else = boring?
And what is challenge? Combat & skill challenges? What about, you know, role playing your character in a out of combat situation or experiencing the setting, getting to know the NPCs, etc? Challenge or boring stuff?

 

[Hussar]

So challenge = fun, everything else = boring?
And what is challenge? Combat & skill challenges? What about, you know, role playing your character in a out of combat situation or experiencing the setting, getting to know the NPCs, etc? Challenge or boring stuff?

Challenge = anything the system awards with experience. Ie. Any situation in which the character cannot automatically succeed and failure carries consequences.

So, yeah, if I spend three hours in experiencing setting and getting to know the NPC's where there everything automatically succeeds or there is no consequence for failure, yeah, I'm going to be bored. Note the personal pronoun there. I will be bored. You may very well not be. And that's great for you. Me? I'm checking out after first hour. After the third session like that, I'm thanking you politely and moving on to another game.

 

[N'raac]

But, you've yet to show that levelling has actually increased in speed.

One of the announced intentions of 3rd Ed was to speed up the levelling process. The exponential progression of the xp table in AD&D 1e and 2e meant levelling slowed considerably past the first few levels. By about 9th or 10th, where you refer to the game petering out, levels took a long time to achieve.

3e design set a goal of a year's play, IIRC (weekly play, fairly long sessions) to get from L1 to L20 and wrap up the campaign for a new one. We played weekly, 12+hous at a stretch (I remember driving picking up lunch on the way to the game and driving home in the sunrise more than a few times in those Glory Days) and 9th level characters took months to gain a level.

It has increased. That was intentional.

Its a common criticism (one you have levied pretty often, IIRC) that higher level play fades in balance because it's not as well playtested. To me, that's because few games got there. If the game was really only designed for L 1 - 12, regardless of what was tossed in for higher levels (spells for liches, not for PCs?), the I don't see playing to L12 as "half the game" any more than playing to L18 plays 1/3 as a game "under construction".

So challenge = fun, everything else = boring?

And what is challenge? Combat & skill challenges? What about, you know, role playing your character in a out of combat situation or experiencing the setting, getting to know the NPCs, etc? Challenge or boring stuff?

Challenge = anything the system awards with experience. Ie. Any situation in which the character cannot automatically succeed and failure carries consequences.

OK, so role playing out of combat, if we award xp for it, suddenly changes from "boring" to "exciting", or at least worthwhile? Such interactions are not automatic success (I've seen many players fail to achieve their desired ends when role playing out of combat) and failure carries consequences (allies are lost, or never recruited, enemies are made, resources are lost or never acquired, etc.). Simply adding "and you earn xp" makes it exciting somehow?

To me, that is the single concept that most supports the OP's comment. That which earns xp to advance my character is, by definition, exciting, meaningful and worthwhile. That which does not is dull, boring and should be skipped. So the only focus is, indeed, on advancing the character.

By that measure, in 1e, looting was exciting and fun (because I got xp for gold) but in 3e, it's dull and boring (no more xp). Yet I see the opposite - xp coming from treasure meant specific types of games provided for more, or less, advancement. It implied all PC's should be motivated by greed. 3e changed the system, and now more altruistic characters were viable alongside their mercenary forebears, even if all the players wanted was xp and advancement.

Now, my players in 1e/2e were motivated by playing their characters. Whether they earned xp or not was irrelevant to their enjoyment of the game. It was a nice side benefit, but that's all it was. The characters could advance rapidly or slowly, and the game stayed fun, week after week. That hasn't changed in 3e/Pathfinder. We advance faster, past the low levels especially. But the game is the fun part, not getting more goodies and writing updated character sheets.

Maybe we've been doing it wrong playing the game for intrinsic enjoyment rather than squeezing out every last possible xp. Who knew?

Hero Games published one of the best comments on xp and advancement I ever read. Too slow and the characters feel stagnant like they never get any better. Too fast, and they quickly become unrecognizable. Level up every month? That's pretty rapid change, to me. That's every four sessions if we play weekly (and rarely skip a week - 48 a year). Probably workable, but I would not want any faster. And if all we do is play out tactical combat, well sorry, now I'm pretty bored. I brought a character to play, not a game pawn. If all we do is move from one battle to the next, why don't we just play a boardgame. Most of those play out entirely in a single four hour session, maybe two or three for really involved, lengthy games. We get the "whole game" much quicker that way.

 

[Mistwell]

There was a time when you could go to the EnWorld forums and find great ideas and great content.

Now all you can find is an argument.

You can still find some great ideas and content. See my Tyromancy thread But I agree, there is a lot more argument, and some of it seems to be simply for the sake of arguing.