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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3694716" data-attributes="member: 38357">Philotomy ~ you're more than welcome, and I'll be looking forward to it!So, I got to chat with some of my players today (well, largely I vented to one of them in particular, rather than having a real discussion with all of them, but I still feel it helped). We've decided that the main issue I'm having may well be pacing, both in-game and out-of-game. Everyone's going to make second, higher-level characters; simpler characters with less background. I can run these characters through pretty much random adventures (rather than trying to maintain some real semblance of a campaign) on weeks when I just need to do a bit more work on the main campaign, or when the players get antsy about the speed at which their characters are advancing (so, hopefully not more than one session, or possibly two back-to-back, every two or three months). I was actually kind of worried about taking this kind of "time off" creating even more of a problems in terms of how long it might take the main-game characters to level, but my players are saying that getting to play higher-level dudes would solve that for them, so I guess it's cool!One or two of the players might even be willing to take the reigns for a short while and give me a break from GMing at some point, but there was some concern about being able to pull something sufficiently short off. Another good thing about this system is that we can hopefully avoid some problems we've had in the past where we had to cancel a game one week and then the next week (or few weeks) it was really hard to get the group together and get the game started...The jury appears to still be out on both using Affiliations / working some more political / leadership stuff into the higher levels of play, as well as the possibility of adding some significant in-game breaks. I still don't feel completely comfortable threatening the world week in and week out, even if the PCs are higher level. We did decide (several of the players had made some fairly sage comments that led to me having a brainstorm) that it might be a good idea if I planned out (at least loosely) a kind of "adventure path", working backwards by deciding what the end of the campaign is "supposed to be" and then building up stuff that will lead that way. I'm not sure I'm convinced that such a plan can survive contact with the players (one reason I haven't actually broken down and tried to run a published Adventure Path so far... The other being that I'm sure it wouldn't survive contact with my "hyperactive 3-year-old" GMing style... <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> ), but they suggested that if they knew that there was something definite planned out, that they would (at least as players) have a strong urge to see what the next "step" along the "path" was...I'm thinking that if high-level D&D is like superheroes, well the JLA (for instance) is pretty much always fighting off world-beaters, right? (And there's plenty of "supervillains" in the average D&D campaign to keep this going for a while...) But a story arc in the comics tends to be between 4 and 12 issues, and a similar amount of time can be assumed to take place between the start of one and the next... But most of these stories don't take months to play out, but days or weeks. So there really is a bunch of "down time" in between, right? Besides trying to sell this to my players, I'm also thinking that if I can maintain a "path" up to these levels then it's likely that there really is only one "story", just in multiple parts...</blockquote>

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