Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 6172515" data-attributes="member: 23240">Wall of text incoming. You've been warned.In my experience, a good vs evil framework is not necessary for a long-term play and can, in many cases, be harmful for it. But moral themes, in general, are exactly what one needs.In all campaigns I ran or played in, the following were the major factors that made the long-term play engaging:1. Idealist PCs. They don't need to be "good". They may be thieving brigands, or aggressive drunkards, or manipulative bastards. But they must have things they really care for, other than themselves. Things they will make sacrifices for. Things that they will fight for - and die for, if things come to that. Personal rules they won't break when it's easier or more efficient to do it.2. Players who don't want to play safe and that accept their characters may be hurt, not only in physical sense. Players who want their PCs' values and ideals challenged as much as (or more than) their competence. In other words, players who put things in their character backgrounds not because they look nice, but because they want them to matter.3. A GM that does not run their own story, but weaves the campaign around things that are important to players and PCs. Who makes the PCs' values meaningful. Who's not afraid of asking hard questions and endangering whatever the PCs care for. It's definitely not the same as a rat bastard GM that destroys things important to PCs for fun and creates lose-lose dilemmas. The fun part is getting what one wants - but having to decide if it's worth the cost.The typical problem with sword&sorcery in RPGs is that, without an external moral framework, many players tend to create characters with very self-centered motivations and goals. While fun for some time, it just stops being interesting in a long-term game. But it's not the setting and genre that do it, it's players' decisions.Just a handful of examples from a recent campaign I played in:One character had a lover before the game started. She was sure he betrayed her and married another. In the course of the game she meets him and finds out that he was forced into a marriage he didn't want and later found a way to cancel it. So here comes the first question: How does she see him now? Does she still want to be with him, does she judge what happened his weakness, or his fault?They decide they want to be together. But he now holds an office in the administration, while the party plots against the government. He's not an adventuring type, while she takes a lot of risks. How much does she tell him? Will she directly ask him to break his oaths, or ignore the problematic topics, or pretend she's not doing anything strange? It took several sessions (with other things going in parallel, of course) before they were finally fully reunited, and it was a powerful driving force for the campaign during this time.Another character's fiancee was murdered, for reasons unknown to him. Shocked by what happened, he backed away from active life and focused on scientific research. He decided never to fight and kill, even though he had powers that could really help in doing it. In play, he started changing. He had to defend himself; later he killed a creature that tried to murder his sister. Finally he found who ordered his fiancee's assassination and decided "<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> the pacifism, I'm gonna kill the person responsible". Only after he did it (and nearly died in the process) he was able to figure out what he really deems worth fighting for and why his earlier actions were really misguided. The series of trials forced him to confront himself and, through pain, made him much stronger. He finally put his knowledge and skill to use.In both cases, our GM did a great job taking our backgrounds and putting them in a spotlight. She didn't see out character concepts as sacred and inviolate, but she also didn't just mess with them. She just looked us in the eye and asked:"So, your character believes that's most important. And if I do this? Are you still so sure?"and left the answer up to us.Having the characters fight for what they believe, and choose, and evolve - that's what makes a long campaign engaging.</blockquote>

Verification