Should PCs Be Exceptional?

[Professor Murder]

So for me, I would use the idea of bein "exceptional" in that I want the odds of succeeding on a given task to be more likely than not. Not everything, but at the very least at things which I narratively and mechanically sculpt them to be good at. What's more key is that I want stories about exceptional circumstances. What is special about this story.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because it doesn't end up talking about just what the two of us in our little corners do. If you don't understand the benefit there, I don't know what to tell you.



I kind of do think its more valuable to talk about what the hobby as a whole does than what I individually do. I don't see much point in the latter.

Whereas I feel that denigrates less mainstream popular opinions unfairly. Better IMO to dispense with popularity as a metric unless we're talking about money.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do you roll your character stats 3d6 in order?

Sometimes. It's a lot of fun, actually.

 

[aramis erak]

You only view this as a problem because you run ongoing single-world campaigns for years. I don't think that was even common thirty years ago, let alone now, so its a nonissue for most people. Even moreso with low mortality campaigns where you can go the whole campaign with few or any replacements needed.

30 years ago, June 1995... amongst the game groups I knew...

• AY was on year 5... but 3 of his starting 4 had been replaced after they moved out of state. Ship of Theseus issues?
• RCM was running two campaigns, both under 6 months.
• I was running 3 campaigns, 1 Traveller, 1 Pendragon, and 1 Prime Directive, WFRP had ended after most of a year. Pendragon was in year 2 of eventually 3. traveller ran about 8 months, but was just starting as we'd just moved.
• RR was running a campaign of about 4 months.
• D was running AD&D 2. Her players quit after about 6 months because she railroaded them.¹
• EEP wasn't running anything at that point. But he was playing in 3 people's campaigns, including my Pendragon. He was just off a 6 month campaign and about to move in with another friend and run a game for them.
• DK was running a D&D campaign that lasted a few months on, but was a month or two old at that point. He was playing in my Pendragon campaign.
• TdF was running C&S in a 2 year long campaign, which ended shortly.
• SW was running C&S, as well. No clue if it was long or short term, but it was common.
• GMcC was in a group just finishing another 2-3 year campaign; I don't know who the GM was, but I knew all the players.
• TdF was running an AD&D 1e campaign; I didn't know any of his players, but he was running his own setting for about year 15, tho' that particular group of players was only a few years.
• DH had just left his wife and his 2 year D&D campaign, and gone AWOL. (Civil service, not military.) Later interactions imply he quit gaming, too, at that point.
• RK was running a GURPS campaign, doing the Battletech setting. That was the middle of an about a year long one 8 hour every other week.
• One later coworker of mine, whose name escapes me, was just ending a campaign from >3 years prior. We talked about it at 3 Barons' Faire.
• Oh, and PS was still running his 15 year old campaign, AD&D 1, and a 10 year old Traveller campaign. I know that their campaigns continued at least 2 years further.
• JZ was running a 25 player Traveller campaign, but was wrapping it up after several years

9 multi year campaigns (3 or 4 over a decade), of 21 I was aware of. (I had to work to recall for specific timeframe...) so, not uncommon in Anchorage. Almost half.
now, I'll note that there were over 300 people on a local mail list for the convention... and 1/3 were GMs. (I helped the organizer set up his DB.) But no clue on how many of that hundred GMs were running longer form games.

-=-=-=-=-
1: I'd play in a campaign she ran at my place the following year... and at one point, we, the party, being my wife, myself, D's then BF, voted to retreat from the dungeon do heal. "Your god demands you go into that portal, paladin!"
"I guess I'm just a fighter now" I replied.
Everyone quit the campaign. A few weeks later, D and her BF broke up.

 

[aramis erak]

WOTC at least did a survey question on it at one point. You can argue its methodology, of course, but the general indicator was the vast majority of campaigns lasted less than two years of weekly sessions. Might have been a few years back at this point, but its hard to see a reason for long campaigns to have gotten more common in the last few years.

TSR did them, too. One around 1991; I recall the average on the early 90's one was just over 2 years, but the median and mode were both about 1 year. (So a long right leg distribution.)

WotC did several - one around the start of 4e dev, one around the start of 5e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If by a few years back you mean 1999, yes they did; and they threw out all responses from the demographic most likely to be in and-or run longer campaigns.

My cynical take was then and still is now that they intentionally skewed the data to produce the results they wanted, so as to justify rapid-fire levelling and short 1-20 campaigns, promoting that as the expected way to play, and thus generating more sales as people kept buying new adventure books (and updating their core rulebooks) every year or two.

And so it's self-sustaining: they get what they design for, and today short campaigns are the norm because that's the only paradigm most new-since-2000 players have ever experienced.

Did they throw them out, or did they just not weigh in enough to matter?

I mean, seriously, there's an intrinsic problem here; the only people who can run such campaigns even in the theory, have to be people who've been in the hobby a fairly long time, and there's no reason to believe most people in the hobby stay in for those periods; once you also remove the people who don't run the same game system/genre continuously, people who don't have stable enough game groups to consider it practical, why should it be surprising that your decades-long process is not typical? Far as I could tell it wasn't even typical decades ago (at least I can count on my fingers the number of people I've seen say they do that, and its not like I'm only interacting with the Young'ns.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Whereas I feel that denigrates less mainstream popular opinions unfairly. Better IMO to dispense with popularity as a metric unless we're talking about money.

Given I'm "denigrating" my own play preferences by doing it by your standards, I'm afraid I can't take this seriously. So understand that taking me to task for it is a waste of both our times.

 

[Thomas Shey]

30 years ago, June 1995... amongst the game groups I knew...

Just a note:

Were all of these weekly?

Because in practice, a 3 year campaign that only runs every other week isn't the same beast as a 3 year campaign that runs every week, at least for this discussion.

 

[aramis erak]

Just a note:

Were all of these weekly?

Because in practice, a 3 year campaign that only runs every other week isn't the same beast as a 3 year campaign that runs every week, at least for this discussion.

Most averaged 3.5 hours per week; the one every-other-week in that list was 8 hours per session.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most averaged 3.5 hours per week; the one every-other-week in that list was 8 hours per session.

I don't mean to denigrate your data; just noting that fundamentally its easy to end up with apples-and-oranges comparisons without digging down a little deeper.

As an example, I'm in the middle of running a 13th Age campaign; I run it every other week for approximate 7-8 hours. By the time I'm done I expect I'll have run approximately 40-45 sessions (and of course that'll have been about a year and a half to a year and three quarters, realtime.

When someone says they were "running their campaign for 3 years" that could end up meaning really about the same length of time (if they were running it weekly but for 4 hours) to running it half as much (if they were running biweekly for 4) to running twice as much (if they were running weekly at 8 hours). And of course that isn't even getting into the question of the style of game management going on (i.e. how much time at the game is actually spent on the game as compared to side-chat and so on).

It makes it hard to actually do comparisons that mean anything.