I surveyed 200+ TTRPG players on what they wanted from a game. Here's what it taught me about campaign longevity.

Thomas Shey · Mar 27, 2026

Jacob Lewis said:
Playing online has made this particular point of contention almost irrelevant now. Covid proved that it was a viable way to play the game without ever leaving the house, or confining yourself to just the people in your immediate area/town/city. It may not be the preferred way for everyone, but it has its advantages. And of course, it became another way for publishers to sell you those books all over again. And again, if you switched to a different software program or service. $$$

I'm not so sure. Its broken a lot of the constraints of space, but not of time; if the only time you have available to play is 6PM to 11PM Pacific Fridays, that's still going to exclude a lot of people, and if you're interested in a game that isn't among the top hitters, that still may be a problem (and of course VTT choice functions as a different "space" component; if all you've got access to is Fantasy Grounds all the things on Foundry or Roll20 might as well be out in the Lesser Magellenic Cloud).

[Rest was clipped because either I agreed with it or didn't have anything useful to say about it.]

Jacob Lewis · Mar 27, 2026

Thomas Shey said:
I'm not so sure. Its broken a lot of the constraints of space, but not of time; if the only time you have available to play is 6PM to 11PM Pacific Fridays, that's still going to exclude a lot of people, and if you're interested in a game that isn't among the top hitters, that still may be a problem (and of course VTT choice functions as a different "space" component; if all you've got access to is Fantasy Grounds all the things on Foundry or Roll20 might as well be out in the Lesser Magellenic Cloud).

I did say "almost", but I probably should've gone with "largely", or something that sounds less accommodating or exhaustive. The constraints are different, but your pool and parameters have widened immensely. You may find more people able to fit in a particular time constraint because 1) they don't need to physically leave their home (no travel time), and 2) they can be anywhere in the world, not just your city, or state, or time zone.

The personal reasons it didn't work for me is because I couldn't handle operating all the systems and the software AND the game itself. I've reached a point in my life where my cognitive abilities are less capable than what they once were. Even trying to learn a new system (or a new version of a system, or variation of the system I knew) has becoming daunting, not to mention the task of running a game while interacting with several people and so on. My time has passed to play those types of game anymore. Unless I can build a different kind of game for people like me, I doubt anyone else can or will.

Thomas Shey · Mar 27, 2026

Jacob Lewis said:
I did say "almost", but I probably should've gone with "largely", or something that sounds less accommodating or exhaustive. The constraints are different, but your pool and parameters have widened immensely. You may find more people able to fit in a particular time constraint because 1) they don't need to physically leave their home (no travel time), and 2) they can be anywhere in the world, not just your city, or state, or time zone.

The problem is that last part can make the issue worse, not better. I found that years ago when MUSHing; there were classes of people it was actually much harder to get together to play with because the time you were working/going to school/sleeping could be the very time they were available and vice versa. And its not an unlimited pool to avoid that once you get outside of North American, Briton and Australia/NZ because of some language barriers.

Jacob Lewis said:
The personal reasons it didn't work for me is because I couldn't handle operating all the systems and the software AND the game itself. I've reached a point in my life where my cognitive abilities are less capable than what they once were. Even trying to learn a new system (or a new version of a system, or variation of the system I knew) has becoming daunting, not to mention the task of running a game while interacting with several people and so on. My time has passed to play those types of game anymore. Unless I can build a different kind of game for people like me, I doubt anyone else can or will.

Well, that's a different problem, of course. I've actually found in many ways the load for VTT play is less for me as I get older, partly because some of the physical elements are much simpler (the thing you mentioned about travel time and/or potential site layout).