D&D 5E What's the rush? Has the "here and now" been replaced by the "next level" attitude?

[ExploderWizard]

then again classes are weird in the D&D community... you're not really supposed to be able to tell what class or level any given PC/NPC is, as it's a entirely a metagame construct, yet we often force or assume certain flavor on the fact that the guy's a "ranger" or "mage".

This brings back old funny memories of an AD&D campaign from long ago. We were always keen to guess the class of an npc based on how they were dressed and what they carried. One time, the DM had informed us that we had met a gnome. We immediately began a barrage of questions; how was he dressed? any armor? was it metal or leather? what weapons, etc.?

The DM got so frustrated with our pestering that he blurted out " he's got no clothes ok!!"
Many naked gnome jokes followed. I even painted up a gnome mini all in flesh color and brought it to the next session. Good times.

 

[Lanefan]

To answer the thread's title question, I think it goes beyond just the "level up now, now, now" issue (which is certainly out there) and into a realm of simply having less patience to allow the game to develop; less interest in "smelling the roses" in either the game world or the game itself. Example: there's a thread going right now about mapping in dungeons, in which there's several posts that boil down to "we used to do maps in the '70s and '80s but we don't have the patience for it now". I've seen this "get on with it" mentality in action, I was sitting in on a game where the party had just beaten the dungeon boss, the players said "OK, we loot him", and the DM - who as both player and DM has little patience for anything that doesn't directly move to the next encounter - said, "OK, you loot him (lists off what was found) and now a few days later you're back in town." Because the DM wanted to just get on with it he didn't give the characters any chance to explore the now-empty dungeon or to do anything during travel or to go somewhere else entirely. I asked the players later whether this was normal for that campaign; turns out it was, and the campaign didn't last much longer.

Tangential, sure; but reflective of an attitude that was once unusual that has become more common since 3e took hold. And the level-up thing is just another symptom.

A further question is what represents gratification. For me, solving a story mystery gives as much gratification as levelling up; for someone else it might be winning a long-odds combat; for someone else it could be pulling off a ridiculous piece of swashbuckling; for another it might be just finding out what's over the next hill. And for some, it's levelling. But in all cases one thing remains true: if it happens too often it ceases being gratifying and starts becoming expected, at which time the point is lost.

Interesting that it implies that Gary had players who might reasonably play up to 75 times a year.

I can easily squeeze a year of play like that into 2 or 3 years.

My long-term tracking shows each party played (in theory) weekly gets in around 42-45 sessions a year.

Lan-"when levelling up starts becoming a chore instead of fun, it's happening too often"-efan

 

[Umbran]

To answer the thread's title question, I think it goes beyond just the "level up now, now, now" issue (which is certainly out there) and into a realm of simply having less patience to allow the game to develop; less interest in "smelling the roses" in either the game world or the game itself. Example: there's a thread going right now about mapping in dungeons, in which there's several posts that boil down to "we used to do maps in the '70s and '80s but we don't have the patience for it now".

In the 80s, I was a kid with huge amounts of spare time, so that we had sessions that lasted for 8 hours, and we'd do that at least once a week.

Today, I have one session every other week, and once you get through socializing and eating a meal, there's maybe three hours of game. Stopping and "smelling the roses" is nice, but doing that means nothing else will happen in that session. So, they need to be some pretty gosh darned amazing frakkin' roses to compete with the other things the game has to offer.

I think you'll find that the less spare time the players have, the more they'll want to get to the meaningful action. People who remember playing in the 70s and 80s are adults, likely with jobs and commitments, and thus not a huge amount of spare time.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

In the 80s, I was a kid with huge amounts of spare time, so that we had sessions that lasted for 8 hours, and we'd do that at least once a week.

Today, I have one session every other week, and once you get through socializing and eating a meal, there's maybe three hours of game. Stopping and "smelling the roses" is nice, but doing that means nothing else will happen in that session. So, they need to be some pretty gosh darned amazing frakkin' roses to compete with the other things the game has to offer.

I think you'll find that the less spare time the players have, the more they'll want to get to the meaningful action. People who remember playing in the 70s and 80s are adults, likely with jobs and commitments, and thus not a huge amount of spare time.

So I ask you this, what's the rush? Are you terminally ill? Are you required to stop playing at a certain age? Maybe, it's because you want to play that next concept you had your mind on?

I can tell you this, we may have had more gaming hours back in the day, but now a days we get a hell of a lot more done because we are more focused than what we were. When you go to watch a movie, are you in a hurry to get to the end, or do you enjoy the beginning, the middle, and the end?

Personally, I would rather "stop and smell the roses" and it take 2 years, than to run by those roses and finish the game in 6 months time. I'm not in a hurry to play the next character I came up with a few days ago.

 

[Li Shenron]

In the 80s, I was a kid with huge amounts of spare time, so that we had sessions that lasted for 8 hours, and we'd do that at least once a week.

Today, I have one session every other week, and once you get through socializing and eating a meal, there's maybe three hours of game. Stopping and "smelling the roses" is nice, but doing that means nothing else will happen in that session. So, they need to be some pretty gosh darned amazing frakkin' roses to compete with the other things the game has to offer.

I think you'll find that the less spare time the players have, the more they'll want to get to the meaningful action. People who remember playing in the 70s and 80s are adults, likely with jobs and commitments, and thus not a huge amount of spare time.

Not sure I understand your meaning here, but...

I am also in the same situation, really a lot less time for gaming than 10 years ago. However, I don't think I want to level up more often today than ever!

Different strokes and all that, but to me the adventures are still THE game together at the table. Character creation and advancement (or adventure design, when I'm the DM) is a sort of side-game by myself between a session and the next.

The underlying problem as I understand it, is that the side-game has become for some gamer the main point, and has turned to be sometimes detrimental to the game played together, when players are too focused on the character design game.

"Smelling the roses" here is not about spending time on details irrelevant to the game, it's about focusing on the game together (whatever it is: roleplay, exploration, riddles, action...) and its damn serious. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] means that gamers "not smelling the roses" are like people taking a pleasure cruise on a boat (the adventures) and focusing on when they'll arrive at the destination, missing the point that they didn't take the cruise to reach the destination, but the cruise itself is supposed the be reason to be there!

 

[MoonSong]

[Off-topic Rant in 3..2...]

This is a weird sticking point for D&D. Class has equally been considered archetypes (fighter, magic-user, or rogue are descriptive and can apply to a wide-range of professions and people) and a tangible occupation (cleric, thief, paladin, druid, ranger, and bard are all classes that define a certain job or role). Some straddle both (monk and barbarian, for example, are archetypes that border on profession, or at least very narrow archetypes). Even the Iconic Four (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Thief) straddle the line between being archetypal and professional. If you asked them all what they do, the wizard and thief would state their class as a profession, the fighter would give some background (knight, mercenary, soldier) and the cleric might go either way depending on the nature of religion in the setting.

For a long time during the "Next" playtest, debate kept raging over whether certain classes "deserved" to remain classes. My observation was that most people who argued FOR reducing the number of classes often wished to remove the Occupational (and narrow archetype) ones, while those who favored a larger number of classes didn't wish to see these classes get rolled into another. (A good example was the Sorcerer/Warlock/Wizard:Mage debate).

Oddly, I kinda wish the archetypal classes (fighter, rogue, kinda cleric, mage) were all replaced with more "professional" classes (knight, warrior, thief, assassin, priest, crusader, summoner, necromancer, evoker, etc) and D&D officially move to "your class IS your profession" mode, but I don't see that happening.

Sorry for continuing with the tangent, but just want to clarify that, Wizard/mage/mu/whatever isn't really archetypal but more occupational, not archetypal at all. Sorcerer on the other hand is more archetypal, in fact a sorcerer (or a warlock) with the scholar background can clearly substitute for a wizard, a wizard on the other hand can never truly shed the scholarly flavor to be something else. Also a sorcerer might say in-world "I'm a sorcerer" -after all it is a thing in world- but also might as well say "I'm a thief/aristocrat/sailor, my natural magic just makes things easier for me".

Back on topic, this isn't so black and white. It is very easy to just divide players on two uniform camps, but it turns out this isn't really the case, one might truly care for the journey, but sometimes the concept you have truly needs more levels to be realised on the system. And this is eggregious in for example 4e, but also present on 3.x, in order to get something as simple as "dual wielding sorcerer" you need quite a long number of feats and probably even recurr to hybrids. But yes, sometimes people just want to do cool stuff, play a game, do something that is satissfactory on its own rather than doing something that might or not pay off. And this isn't wrong on any way, just different. I'm not advocating for 'just a string of fights', I lean more on 'smeling the roses', but sometimes you just want to feel like you are playing that nimble witty magical swashbuckler instead of struggling to hit the wide side of a barn. There is enough room in the game for everybody, we cannot just declare a single style "the one true way" and dismiss everything else as "badwrongfun".

 

[Obryn]

So I ask you this, what's the rush? Are you terminally ill? Are you required to stop playing at a certain age? Maybe, it's because you want to play that next concept you had your mind on?

I can tell you this, we may have had more gaming hours back in the day, but now a days we get a hell of a lot more done because we are more focused than what we were. When you go to watch a movie, are you in a hurry to get to the end, or do you enjoy the beginning, the middle, and the end?

Personally, I would rather "stop and smell the roses" and it take 2 years, than to run by those roses and finish the game in 6 months time. I'm not in a hurry to play the next character I came up with a few days ago.

None of this is directly comparable at all.

Gaming isn't a movie, and leveling up isn't the end. And you can play in the present story even if there's a level-up right around the corner.

For me, I like the way a campaign changes over time; that's part of the point. If I have 3 hours per week to play instead of 8, I still want to feel that sense of progress and an advancing/changing story. In Dark Sun, you go from scraping together a few ceramics to becoming regionally known to challenging sorcerer-kings. All of that's important. The latter stuff can wait - but I don't want it to take 6 real-life years anymore. A year or two is plenty.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Maybe, it's because you want to play that next concept you had your mind on?

This is what I've noticed. Between every class, prestige class, race, feat chain, etc. you have a lot more distinct options that don't depend on anything to actually happen in the game.

Imagine you're the healer of the party. You can play a dwarf cleric, and then wonder what it would be like to play a gnome archivist, or a halfling favored soul, and there would be a meaningful distinction in terms of how they overcome the problems presented to them.

If there are only four classes, and race doesn't have much of a mechanical impact, then there's less incentive to play a different character. If you're a dwarf cleric, then a human cleric would do just about the same thing in any given situation, because the situation and the person playing it are so much more significant than the possible difference in mechanics.

 

[Lanefan]

"Smelling the roses" here is not about spending time on details irrelevant to the game, it's about focusing on the game together (whatever it is: roleplay, exploration, riddles, action...) and its damn serious. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] means that gamers "not smelling the roses" are like people taking a pleasure cruise on a boat (the adventures) and focusing on when they'll arrive at the destination, missing the point that they didn't take the cruise to reach the destination, but the cruise itself is supposed the be reason to be there!

Mostly right, but in my case it doesn't have to be "damn serious" - things done in the game world outside of adventuring can only serve to add to the richness and feel of said game world, as well as what's done during the adventures.

And yes, when I-as-DM start a campaign my intent is to run it until one or more of these happens:
a) - nobody wants to play anymore
b) - I run out of ideas for the campaign/story/setting and-or just get bored with it
c) - the rule system has wobbled off the rails and needs to be fixed (I only do major rule revisions between campaigns) in order to be or remain playable

So far, so good - three campaigns, two went over 10 years and the current one is 6 years in (as of this month) with enough "legs" for maybe another 4 provided there's still people interested in playing it (and a sub-story that has kind of arisen and evolved during play might give me another 2-3 year campaign in the same world if I ever reboot from 1st level)

As a player I hold much the same expectations - if I'm in, I'm in for the long haul; and if the game ends 2 years in when I'm just getting going I'll be mighty disappointed.

Lanefan

 

[Hussar]

My problem Lanefan is that if it takes two years to be "just getting going" I want to blow my brains out.

I have zero interest in a campaign where the presumption of play is that long. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] mentioned being three years into a bi-weekly game and the players still don't know what the big bad is doing.

I'm just not interested in that game.