Infrequent gaming

[Perun]

A bit less than a year ago I moved from my home town and my gaming group. It seems I was the spiritus movens for the group, because they stopped playing after I left. I go home about once every two months, and we usually meet for a session then.

We tried a couple of one-shots, to see how paragon and epic gaming looks like, but the experience wasn't all that great, mostly because we don't have enough experience with 4e, and we weren't really familiar with our characters and their abilities.

I'm thinking of attempting a sort of slow campaign this time. But, I don't have much, if any, experience with "slow" gaming.

I can see doing a series of short adventures, one for each session. (I don't think my players would be able to go through more than 4 or 5 encounters (if that) in one session.) But, how do you tie so many short adventures in a campaign. It's not like you can do an attack on a goblin fortress a 4-encouter short adventure.

Doing the standard campaign with exhaustive re-capping at the beginning of each session probably wouldn't work for my group. Ending one session in mid-adventure and then coming back to it in two months would be very, very difficult.

The third option would be to just go with the above-mentioned short adventures, but only very loosely connected (as in, players always use the same characters).

Any suggestions/ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Regards.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

One tactic I used (for both sporadic AND regular games) even before the advent of the Internet as a ubiquitous tool of everyday living was to hand out or post (on a bulletin board) some kind of newsletter on the campaign's status. Usually, it was in the form of an "In house memo" from the agency for whom the PCs worked, or a scroll from the party's client or a local herald.

Such things kept the campaign fresh in the players' minds and virtually eliminated the need for long, drawn out, fun-sucking rehashes of what has gone before, all those months ago.

With the Internet, that's much easier.

Beyond doing what I described, you could even use emails to handle significant "off screen" advances in the campaign, certain role play scenes, interactions with some NPCs, rule & campaign-world detail queries and so forth.

That way, when you finally get together to game, you'll be able to get right to the game after saying your salutations.

 

[Herobizkit]

The easiest method I use for short campaigning is the TV serial method. In short, run your campaign like a weekly TV show.

A basic adventure will have:
a) a goal
b) an obstacle
c) a complication
d) a climax
e) a resolution

There is also a 'twist' that can be added to any of the above, but to keep things simple, only add a twist to one of the above.

At the start of your campaign, have a series of (essentially) one-shot adventures - something nice and neat that can be run from start to finish in one session of 4-6 hours. It sounds hard, and it can be, depending on how willing your players will be to 'get on with it' as each scene changes. Down the road, you'll want to sprinkle in a few hints at a greater plot which will culminate on the season finale.

As your campaign progresses, be sure to include one showcase 'episode' for each PC. Each showcase will feature one of the PCs as central to whatever the plot-of-the-week happens to be. This can be any kind of drama or up-front combat, so long as the focal PCs gets the greater share of camera time.

About 3-5 sessions before the season finale, start tying in those loose ends and point a big "PCs go here" arrow towards whatever BBEG you happen to have.

Most 'standard' TV serials have 13-22 episodes per season; I'd stick with 13 to keep it simple. For structure, I'd strongly suggtest watching season 1 of shows such as Supernatural, Buffy, Smallville, Hercules/Xena, or even The Vampire Diaries (it's actually got a decent plot structure).

 

[pawsplay]

Rather than trying to treat it as a TV series, I would suggest running a slow campaign as though it were a series of movie sequels. Each session would be relatively self-contained. Characters level once per session, and they might start new sessions with new gear or new pieces of backstory about less dynamic things that happened in between.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I agree with the posters who have said that each session needs to be self-contained and satisfying in its own right. The "middle of the adventure" sessions in a normal campaign where stuff develops and the plot moves along and character is explored, but nothing is resolved, make for terrible games in an intermittent campaign. In my experience, the players feel dissatisfied. So you need to make each session have its own narrative arc, with a compelling beginning and a satisfying end.

You can have a longer scale arc, but again, think about the TV show model: each episode needs to stand on its own even if there is an arc plot for the season that really delivers.

I would also suggest aiming for longer sessions. it's hard to have much momentum if you play once every month or two for four hours. If you play for 8 hours or a weekend at a time, you can maintain momentum even if you only play a couple of times a year.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Side note.. regardless of which method you use.. if you are stuck with a once a month game... expect people to forget the story line, where their character are at, what they have on the character sheet, and why they are there in the first place.

This isn't because you have 'bad' players... its just the way it works.

I do recap and warm-up emails, encourage between session 'play by post', and usually spend the first 30 minutes of the session getting everyone settled and ready to game....

and last session the Bard forgot something I told him, put in the recap, put in the warm-up, and had in a side-bar email conversation with him.... sometimes you can't really hint easily without putting flashing neon signs on it....


But yes, try to have each session close well, regardless of if its mid-adventure. Avoid mid-combat closing whenever possible... and have fun playing a game where nobody really needs to be precise on what happened last month!

 

[delericho]

Any suggestions/ideas?

1. Stick with a system you know well. It may be that 4e (or 5e, WRFP 3e, SWSE, whatever) represents the best game ever made, or it may even be that it is the perfect game for your group, but if you don't know it well, and if you can't play more than occasionally then you'll end up fighting the system more than you really want to.

2. If at all possible, adopt a regular (albeit infrequent) schedule, and try to get people to commit to it with the same seriousness as they do any other 'important' event.

3. If people will read their emails, try to do the 'recap' bit of the campaign by email before the session. The less time you have to spend recapping the details, the better. (That said, you probably don't want to require lots of in-depth recaps. Too much detail means too many people will forget.)

4. Bear in mind that with infrequent games, you have a fairly tight "time budget". Spend it wisely. Unless everyone in the group really enjoys such things, you probably don't want to spend lots of time on shopping trips, identifying (minor) items, what I term "frustration encounters" (ones that the DM inserts to slow the PC investigations, often to provide a sense of versimilitude), and so on. Basically, skip to "the good bits", however your group defines such things.

(That's not necessarily a bad recommendation in general. However, IMO, a diet of nothing but "the good bits" tends to get a bit stale after a while - one can only eat premium steak so many days in a row before even that sickens.)

Rather than trying to treat it as a TV series, I would suggest running a slow campaign as though it were a series of movie sequels. Each session would be relatively self-contained. Characters level once per session, and they might start new sessions with new gear or new pieces of backstory about less dynamic things that happened in between.

Yes, this. Try very hard to keep every session self-contained, and give players lots of leeway to 're-envision' their character between sessions. If they want to swap out all of their equipment between times, then that's fine. (Good, even - it means they're interested in the campaign.)

But I'd go further than that, and allow them to actually retcon their characters between sessions - if they want to drop a couple of levels of Rogue for a couple of levels of Fighter, then I would allow that. All I would require of them is that the basic 'core' of the character remain the same - Legolas should remain fundamentally an "Elven Archer", but he can swap out levels of Fighter, Rogue and Ranger pretty much however the player wants to build that concept.

(In-game, I would suggest putting some time between adventures - perhaps a game year passes between each real-world session? This should give ample scope for the characters being not quite how they once were.)

One more suggestion: In Dragon issue 216, there is an article entitled "The Auld Alliance" that is very useful reading for this topic. If you have access to this issue, it's well worth taking a look.

 

[haakon1]

I've been running infrequent campaigns for many, many years.

1) Write up a summary and highlights of what happened immediately afterwards, so you can remember in detail.

2) Email the summary to the players.

3) Read the summary at the start of the next session. I actually reread a summary of the entire campaign, which takes maybe 10 minutes. It definitely helps to remember where you are.

4) Play normally.

5) Do NOT switch editions. You really don't need to and relearning rules everyone has memorized is a huge waste of time and downer. I've only ever run (for D&D) AD&D and 3.0/3.5.

6) Do shopping, leveling up, etc. over email or in one-on-one meetings. Don't waste table time on book keeping.

 

[haakon1]

Try very hard to keep every session self-contained, and give players lots of leeway to 're-envision' their character between sessions.

(In-game, I would suggest putting some time between adventures - perhaps a game year passes between each real-world session? This should give ample scope for the characters being not quite how they once were.)

I agree with most of your advice, but I don't follow these three points you made -- self-contained, redoing characters in between sessions, and long game time between sessions.

Self-contained:
Instead, I run it like a normal game, where we'll look for a normal stopping point, but it might take 3-4 or more sessions to finish an adventure. I think players would rather than get a fully satisfying game (played slowly) than a quick drive through experience and an unconnected experience the next game.

Long game time between adventures:
You could do this, but I don't think it's by any means required. I have a game where 8 months of game time have passed in ten years of play, and no one complains about that.

Redoing characters between sessions:
I'd caution against this. The main difficulty in infrequent gaming is remembering what's going on and continuity. The secondary difficulty is lack of time by the participants. Neither of these is served by putting emphasis on rebuilds.

Which comes down to a keep point: I think infrequent gaming works for people who are interested in story and in action.

For players who are interested in tinkering with new builds and new rules, it's going to be frustrating, since they won't get to use them much.

 

[delericho]

Self-contained:
Instead, I run it like a normal game, where we'll look for a normal stopping point, but it might take 3-4 or more sessions to finish an adventure. I think players would rather than get a fully satisfying game (played slowly) than a quick drive through experience and an unconnected experience the next game.

I dunno. With my regular campaign, I feel free to run the game, and stop when we run out of time. The players will generally remember much of what's going on, and so we can pick things up again without problems. With big gaps between sessions, though, they would forget much of what was going on, and we'd spend a lot of frustrating time trying to get back up to speed.

That said, it might work differently with a different group - if they're all good at keeping track, or someone does a detailed campaign log and everyone reads it, I guess it would work.

Long game time between adventures:
You could do this, but I don't think it's by any means required. I have a game where 8 months of game time have passed in ten years of play, and no one complains about that.

This only really applies if you're allowing the redoing of characters between sessions. It suggested as a means to justify whatever changes are made.

Redoing characters between sessions:
I'd caution against this. The main difficulty in infrequent gaming is remembering what's going on and continuity. The secondary difficulty is lack of time by the participants. Neither of these is served by putting emphasis on rebuilds.

Sorry, I didn't mean to emphasise rebuilds, but rather to allow them.

My thinking here is really that if you're playing infrequently, you're probably not playing much, and the last thing you want is to find yourself stuck playing a character you don't like, or who is inferior to the rest of the group. At the same time, due to the continuity concerns you mentioned, you don't really want people changing characters if you can help it. Hence my suggestion to allow people, if they want, to build an idealised version of the character, without being stuck with any decisions they've made in the past that they may now regret.

YMMV, of course.