So that's useful to know because it helps give you a baseline target for these things: Okay, if we can fit an entire short "adventure" into one night, complete with all of D&D's major features (combat, interaction, exploration, resouce management, tactics, strategy, etc.), we've got something that even someone who only plays D&D once for two hours will get a handle on -- something we can market as a casual game -- and something that can scale well. Stacking adventures can make for a more complex, powerful game, where each time you meet, you can get something done and walk away feeling like you've done something other than roll dice with your time.
There are three aspects, here, I think, and each one requires a different analysis.
First there is session length. In a sense, for the current discussion this is not that important because as many folk are saying, they might not have 2 hour sessions, but they do average around 2 hours per week of playing time. Whether you are playing for 2 hours once each week or for 8 hours once every month the desired rate of "progress" through the levels (for a given meaning of "level") will likely be similar. Nevertheless it does figure in what I'll say later about methods for "expanding" the basic "2 hour adventure".
Second is the length of time between 'level ups'. This mainly sets the fastest desirable rate of progress, I think, because the limiting factor is that players need enough time to get acquainted with the new "stuff" that they got with their new level before progressing onto a new one. Ideally, I think you should just be getting comfortable with your 'level X' abilities when the boost to 'level X+1' comes along. In the greater scheme of things, this really only helps decide how the scope of the campaign arc/sustained play sequence is broken up. The 'answer' to it depends on details of the game design too much to be really meaningful generally. As long as not many folks are levelling up mid-session it should all work out.
Third is the length of the 'sustained play' sequence. This sets the scope of the game. If average players can cope with only X amount of added complexity per hour, and the "attention span" of the average group for a given game is Y hours for a "campaign" or "story arc", then X * Y is the maximum complexity that the average group will be able to digest in one sequence of sustained play.
This third bit of information is abstruse and difficult to gauge, but is interesting. If the answer turns out to be that the "average group" can cope with 12 major character capabilities (to pick a fairly abstract unit of measure for illustrative purposes) in one campaign, and they want to go from 'clueless farm boy' to 'demigod', then the span of those 12 abilities is going to be pretty extreme. If, on the other hand, the "average group" can cope with 36 major character character capabilities in a campaign and want to go from 'tough farm boy' to 'heartthrob of the local girls for what he did', then the degree of granularity of each "capability" is going to be relatively small.
My major worry with this is that, while it is fine for the "average group", where does it leave the
non-average group? Or, to pose the question from WotC's viewpoint, what is the variance on the "average complexity" that can be coped with by a gaming group?
This leads into how a desire for increased complexity scope can be factored in - of which more anon.
Those who play for longer can always fit more in. It's not hard to pad out something that can take an hour in D&D into four or more.
Right - but how does one "pad out" those sessions? I suggest there are basically three ways:
- Add length. Just play out two adventures (or a more complex adventure) in a 4 hour session instead of one "standard" adventure in a 2 hour session. This method should have no issues with the schema as designed for the "2 hour crowd", because you are essentially playing out N 2-hour sessions back-to-back.
- Add breadth. Add in new "sub-games" for ruling domains, running farms or workshops, intriguing at court or whatever that are not linearly part of the basic 'adventure game' that is the assumed staple of D&D but rather runs along in parallel and occasionally touches the "adventure game". The 'touching' can be via earnings from one being used in the other, or via objectives for one being set by the other - both of those should work in either direction. This method should have no issues with the schema as designed for 2 hour play, since (notionally) only 2 hours of "adventuring" play is happening in each longer session, unless this method is actually combined with "adding length", above.
- Add depth. Modify character abilities so that they have more subtlety of effect. This increases their complexity in use and so requires more thought of the player to really grok their new capabilities at each level. It may require more time to play out the same scenes (thus making the content of the "2 hour session" take longer to play through), but it might not, depending on the capabilities of the play group. What it
will do, however, is require more game time for the players to become conversant with the abilities they gain at each level, because each added ability has more possible uses. This becomes a problem with the "standard" rate of level gain - it may be too fast for this group.
This last mode might actually allow a route for groups with a longer "complexity scope" or "X * Y" tolerance to get a campaign that is satisfying for them, but they will still butt up against the fact that the "standard" levelling scheme will be too fast for this style of play. I worry that the design goals for the system as a whole will limit the scope for adding "depth" to the gameplay.
As I write this, though, I am thinking that maybe there is a way around this. If 'modules' for added depth were produced that recommended modifications to the level advancement track, maybe it could be pulled off. If the basic system were utterly rigorous in its design underpinnings, perhaps well-designed 'deepening' modules
could integrate to maintain balance and slow advancement to get a good "long game". Or maybe too few players want such a game for WotC to bother, so the only available game will be quick and shallow...
Who knows? If the flexibility for all these styles really is WotC's aim, and they pull it off, I'll be mightily impressed.
