Should PCs Be Exceptional?

[SableWyvern]

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

That sounds a lot like my original point.

We have very limited and self-selected data pools to begin with and, even with the data we do have, the information is often very fuzzy.

My overall position on the topic is based on a different set of data -- it's the number of people I see pop up with some regularity talking about "what the hobby is like" based on their decades of experience, but whose understanding and experiences are directly contradicted by other people with similar amounts of experience. My take away from that is that the hobby is far more insular than many people realise, and that extremely disparate philosophies and schools of play can exist extremely closely to each other without ever interacting and without groups ever realising that the other even exists.

There is a vast pool of people who just aren't talking about their games online, aren't hanging out at game stores and clubs and aren't responding to surveys. There are about 40 people in my office. I can name four I'm aware of who have an interest in D&D or roleplaying generally, but who aren't members of "the community". In my home group of eight, there are maybe three who might have a vague idea what's going on in the industry (enough to know that some controversy was happening during the OGL crisis, but not enough to know or care what it was about), but I'm the only one active in TTRPG communities.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That sounds a lot like my original point.

Fair enough. But as I've noted before, when I've seen pretty good trends over the decades talking to people in a lot of different contexts about a lot of different games, and some things are very rare, someone has to come up with an explanation of why my experience is not representative to me, or I'm not going to assume it is. And long-running (as in multi-year beyond 2-3) campaigns have pretty much been a minority at the start (in the 70's) and have become an outlier over time.

As I said in an earlier post, this isn't surprising; it requires people sticking with one game, who stay in the hobby for at least a fairly long time, and either do a lot of player rotation or have a very consistent player group for extended times, and there are any number of reasons for any one of those not to be true. Even when all of them are, it has the additional requirement that a GM thinks its more interesting to keep exploring the one campaign at length than moving on to another.

It'd be surprising if the long-term campaign was the common case.

 

[SableWyvern]

Fair enough. But as I've noted before, when I've seen pretty good trends over the decades talking to people in a lot of different contexts about a lot of different games, and some things are very rare, someone has to come up with an explanation of why my experience is not representative to me, or I'm not going to assume it is. And long-running (as in multi-year beyond 2-3) campaigns have pretty much been a minority at the start (in the 70's) and have become an outlier over time.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are deferring to your decades of experience, which is a perfectly natural thing to do.

But there are people with similar amounts of experience who will tell you that they have seen different trends and that what they've found to be rare is different to what you have.

I'm not trying to weigh in on long-running campaigns specifically, just making the more general point that any time someone says that their lengthy experience is representative of the hobby overall, including the silent masses who are just happily gaming in their homes and not talking to anyone other than their immediate friends and acquaintances about it, I'm very skeptical.

For what it's worth, my direct experience is that I regularly run campaigns in the 18 - 24 month range, but anyone else I know personally struggles to keep a game together for even three months, so my experience on this front pretty much matches your own.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Unanswerable.

Not only campaign dependant; but also because PCs in many campaigns start out unexceptional but become exceptional as time and experience and wealth and various boons or character alterations are accrued.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are deferring to your decades of experience, which is a perfectly natural thing to do.

But there are people with similar amounts of experience who will tell you that they have seen different trends and that what they've found to be rare is different to what you have.

But have they? I've seen one person say he saw them a lot locally withing a specific slice of time in the past, and one or two person who says they do them. That's additional data points, but I'd argue the range in space and time I'm talking about is considerably greater than the examples that have been presented to me to date in this thread.

I'm not trying to weigh in on long-running campaigns specifically, just making the more general point that any time someone says that their lengthy experience is representative of the hobby overall, including the silent masses who are just happily gaming in their homes and not talking to anyone other than their immediate friends and acquaintances about it, I'm very skeptical.

The problem there is, I have to assume "the silent masses" are (for undefined reasons) significantly different from the other samples. Its not enough to say your samples are selective; you have to say they're selective in a way that invalidates them. After all, even the best surveys are in some fashion selective.

For what it's worth, my direct experience is that I regularly run campaigns in the 18 - 24 month range, but anyone else I know personally struggles to keep a game together for even three months, so my experience on this front pretty much matches your own.

That's it; its been a rarity for me to even hear about campaigns much longer than the 2-3 year range for a very long time now (it was probably a little more common in the 80's, when a few more people were modelling their pattern after Gygax's apparent assumptions, but even then the other factors I mentioned didn't seem to make it really common).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Unanswerable.

Not only campaign dependant; but also because PCs in many campaigns start out unexceptional but become exceptional as time and experience and wealth and various boons or character alterations are accrued.

Yeah, there's some real issues with top-end in a lot of game systems that, depending on pace-of-advancement make this really complicated.

 

[SableWyvern]

But have they?

Yes, they have. That is the whole basis of my position.

I have seen people say, "Well, I've been gaming since '76, and I can say most people were doing X & Y during Z period." And then someone else will say, "Well I started in '75 and no one I know ever did X during any period. During Z, as far as I can recall everyone was actually doing Q".

I have seen people say, "I've gamed with all sorts of different people, friends, strangers, whatever, for over 30 years and whenever [a playstyle that does a certain thing] has been used, it's always led to problems." And then someone else will say, "Well I've been gaming just as long with just as many different people, and have regularly done [that certain thing] and I've seen it cause problems exactly zero times."

For the purposes of the specific discussion of long term campaigns, @aramis erak has already shown that, of the 21 different games/groups he was aware of actually playing in his area around 1995, 9 were engaged in long term campaigns, which is a pretty substantial number. Someone else might say, "Well I knew of 50 at that time, and only one was long-term." And where does that leave us? IMO, precisely nowhere, if we're trying to make statements about what was actually common or not common, overall, across the entire hobby.

I have seen endless variations on this, and this has led me to view any assertion along the lines of, "From the people I have spoken to and gamed with and the information I've gathered, it is clear to me that [any particular thing] is or was the norm and the standard in the wider RPG hobby" with a great deal of skepticism.

I'm not disagreeing with you about how many people did or do run long campaigns because I think there is good data to prove you wrong. I'm simply saying that my (potentially just as skewed) perception is that the hobby is extremely insular and as a result I'm skeptical that anyone actually has good data for proving much of anything about what the hobby, as a whole, is or was tending to do at any given point.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

Hell, my own campaigns of that year. Traveller was a 5-6 hour session. Pendragon was 2-4 hours, depending upon when people showed up. Prime Directive was a potent 3-4... but some sessions of PD ran 5...
My own over two year campaigns total 2: one was Pendragon - that very campaign. the other was several years prior, but had 50±10 hours of play across it's 5 years.... as I only ran it in October 86, Ooctober 90, October 91, and a postlog in Jan 92.. So, yeah, you're right, it's hard to tell what's in that mixed basket of fruit.

The thing is, tho', continuity of once-a-month is still a major effort to keep going past a year, if only because so much gets forgotten.
Meanwhile, 8 hours every other week vs 4 hours every week has a VERY different tone. (I've done both under the same system, plus 6 hours weekly: WFRP 1e. Preference? 6 hours weekly... Best of both worlds.)

 

[Lanefan]

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

They threw them out.

For proof, click on 'Features" at the top of the page, then the second selection in the dropdown, the scroll down just a bit and read "1. Segmentation Study".

 

[Lanefan]

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.

So maybe a better metric is session counts, or session counts and years in tandem. Or hours played; though I've never known anyone to actually track that.

I say this because a campaign played twice a week (be it the same group of players/characters or different, doesn't matter, as long as they can and do interweave sometimes and are part of the same greater whole) can run up a pretty heavy session count in just a couple of years. I know this as I've done it in the past on numerous occasions and it's easy to get to 85-90 sessions a year if not a few more.

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.

You're right about the variance in "efficiency" between tables, but there's no real way to account for that. I mean, even within my own games I've run groups that were quite efficient and groups that, well, weren't. It shows up in the sessions-per-adventure average; yes there's variance in adventure size but the long-term average doesn't change much, but the number of sessions to get through them sure does.