I think the problem with long games is that people simply do not have that level of stability and ability to commit to years of play, especially as players nowadays are MUCH more likely to be older than they were even 20 or 25 years ago. I mean, back when I started there were ZERO 25+ yr old RPG people that I was in contact with. Obviously Gygax and some of the wargame people WERE older, but for a long time games were often being run by high school kids and college students, and maybe people up to their late 20's who were likely to be in the same place for 5 or even 10 years and had time to play. I know from around 20 to my late 20s was probably the main time when was in longer games.
Mod Note:
WTF???!!!! Impossible! I don't like it, therefore it is literally impossible, the most powerful sort of impossible! Listen to yourself. Listen to what you are told, your decisions are based on what you feel like playing, there's nothing reasonable OR unreasonable about having preferences, but there's no LOGIC to it.
No, we simply see through this whole charade Max. Years or decades ago we saw it in a rational light and stopped pretending it was somehow based on anything but whim. I say that, and yet I don't hate trad play. I find some aspects of it which some of you all seem to really cling to as negative, but there can be really excellent trad play, it just doesn't imagine that there's anything realistic going on.
There's no reason here. Tell me, what would be the 'reason' why orcs and not goblins? I don't think any world I've ever seen is constrained enough to put forth a MODEL BASED logical reason for one over the other, period. Its pure aesthetics or whatever.
This is exactly what led me down the primrose path away from games where realism in the D&Dish sense is a priority. I’d say that my top priorities these days are 1) characters’ interior lives and 2) the evocation of genre conventions and expectations to produce game play that “is like” something - specifically, a set of stories sharing some significant features.
As a real person who is seriously disabled, I certainly have dramatic wants.
Yes, but this seems kind of vacuously true, in that as nearly as I know, everybody [/I] skips and compresses. Genuinely, I can’t think of more than a literal handful of gaming sessions I’ve seen or heard about in 45 years of gaming that unfolded in anything close to 1:1 time. And what everybody doesn’t can’t be very diagnostic. The differences would be in the criteria for zooming in and out, in expectations and outcomes.
I'll assume by this you're not trying to suggest that trad play is irrational (and I don't think you are) but note that as written your phrasing here can be parsed that way.
So alright, if trad play can't do realistic, what can?
True, though it can go both ways: I've had 15-ish minutes of in-game time take three sessions to play out, and a single in-game day take nine; and have also had sessions where weeks of in-game time went by in a relative heartbeat.
My take is that in between “rational” and “irrational” there is a vast hinterland. At the poles, logic is decisive, whether for or against. In between, many things are “reasonable”, compatible with much reasoning but not carrying the weight of a strong determination. X is reasonable, given A, B, and C. But Y and Z are too, and the choice is made on ground they are fundamentally about reason: aesthetics, sense of interesting game play, giving a bit of extra good time to the player who had a very crappy time lately, etc. I don’t think any of those is hostile to reason - though obviously this depends on definitions - it’s just that reason isn’t making a decision alone.
I've had bad experiences with DMs who don't skip over enough. It can feel very frustrating, wandering around talking with NPCs but not finding anything interesting to do or interesting decisions to make.
