Should PCs Be Exceptional?

[Lanefan]

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.

That's what game logs are for.

And it makes sense that long campaigns are in the numeric minority, as while one group might be in a 10-year campaign another just-as-consistent similar group might have five 2-year campaigns over the same period. Thus, despite a 1:1 correlation between the groups you've got a 5:1 correlation between their number of campaigns.

 

[pemerton]

I know the name, but nothing about it.

Somewhat by coincidence, about half-an-hour Google yielded up this review, which is pretty accurate at least based on my experience:

Review of In a Wicked Age - RPGnet RPG Game Index

The recycling of characters via the "Owe List" is not something I've done, as I've only played one-shots, but the rulebook talks about the same sort of thing as the reviewer does. Characters can reappear older, younger, possibly under different descriptions, etc. As p 25 says,

Place this chapter in time and space relative to the last one. You may feel absolutely free to move backward or far forward in time: “this chapter occurs when Tajie was just 7 years old” or “now we’ll see what happens when Bolu Ta is an old, old man.” I also encourage you to create timelines and maps for your game.​

Here's an actual play report if your curiosity remains unsated! In A Wicked Age actual play.

 

[Autumnal]

Thanks!

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.)

Heck, I sometimes regret going to every-other week because people can forget what happened last time. I'm not sure I'd bother with once a month.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Absolutely. I've known people who game multiple times a week, though usually in separate unrelated campaigns, and they were racking up as much or more time than I did when I used to game every Saturday and Sunday, even accounting with the longer playtime than most people can do on a weekday.

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.

Yeah, that's probably the only practical way to measure it.