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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6282912" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is reaching the point that I'm not really understanding the difference between taking it slow and taking it fast.The original question I understood.   The question had to do with the speed of leveling relative to people's enjoyment, and the OP's impression that people expected faster leveling now than he's used to.  But we seem to have moved passed that.  Now we seem to be talking about speed of story, and I'm increasingly not sure what exactly that means.   I thought it meant something like, "We focus on things that advance the story and we only spend time on things that are relevant to determining how the story goes and what the story is.", which I could largely agree with though we'd probably quibble about the exact ways to artfully do that.   But when you start going, "This is especially so since, partly thanks to spending so much time with RPGs and other kinds of story-based experiences, I can process story information faster than any DM or player can talk", now I'm confused.   Because I really haven't yet met the RPG that fits story into the game at faster than conversational speed.   Novels of course manage story at faster than conversational speed depending on how fast you can read silently, but that's not an interactive experience.   Most cRPGs are going to be 30-40 hours of experience for what amounts to 3-5 PnP short adventure modules worth of story and generally most of them deliver their story at conversational speed through dialogue and cut scenes.   If you are playing them at a faster rate, you certainly aren't getting immersive story out of them.The story pacing at my table is generally considerably faster than Robert Jordan or GRR Martin, and a lot less leisurely than fishing tends to be.   I could speed up the pace of leveling by dumping story in order to focus on non-story related activity - like combats and gaining levels - or by arbitrarily dumping XP infusions on the characters, but I'm not sure what that gets me other than NPCs with bigger numbers in order to be a challenge.   If leveling up was the measure of a story, then surely Diablo has some of the finest stories in all of cRPGs.   The players could speed up the pace of the story, but only by always knowing what to do to resolve the current conflicts in the story, which would certainly be a linear experience devoid of mystery and probably excitement.   Likewise, I could move the players toward faster play by in some way facilitating telling them what to do next, but again - linear, devoid of mystery, and probably excitement to say nothing of player agency.    So if we are no longer talking about the velocity of the leveling, but rather the velocity of the story - how are we going to even define what a stories pacing is?  We can say that a story is shorter or longer, but we can't necessarily say that because a story has 10 or 100 or 1000 that one story moved more slowly than the other.   It's likely rather that fewer things are happening in the shorter story, and that the longer story had more to say.  I'm not saying that is always or necessarily true, but how to do we go about tallying meaningful events and compare rate of story?</blockquote>

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