Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SableWyvern" data-source="post: 9683394" data-attributes="member: 1008">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, [USER=6779310]@aramis erak[/USER] 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.</blockquote>

Verification