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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9027378" data-attributes="member: 6671663">I’ve long thought that that a missing axis in Forge categories - and in the rec.games.frp.advocacy categories before them - is attitude toward intensity and campaign/series duration. Almost all Forge-related games are meant to be played briefly, as one-shots or fairly short series. A dozen sessions is a long run in that scene and ones spinning off from it.This is important in discussing intensity during play. Most of us would burn out trying to keep that up for, say, a year of biweekly sessions. But then PBTA games, Sorcerer, and the like don’t expect that you’ll be doing that, nor that you’d actually like to do so. They’re assuming you want to get in, max it out, and get out. Then you’ll recharge and start fresh with something else - maybe even another run with some of the same setting and stuff using the same rules, but reset nonetheless.Things get very different if you intend to play a long time and find that satisfying. Out there Bruce gestures vaguely at all narrative realms multi-season TV series have different pacing priorities than movies, and long fiction series have different ones than stand-alone novels, and those have different ones than short stories, and so on. Ditto with rolegaming.People aiming for long runs expect that there will be high-octane times (and a separate note about that below), but also lower-octane ones. The recharging is incorporated into play and applied to the characters. Escalation can happen over a duration that would be the entire arc of play in a shorter series. And there is a lot of room for intermediate levels of intensity, too  - it’s not just on or off. I don’t think anyone involved in this thread thinks it is, but it’s worth spelling out. The music that is games in play has more than two notes available.Some people really thrive on play that starts with a bang (literally a Bang, in Sorcerer <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />) and runs hot to its blazing climax and denouement. You can feel the delight when someone like Edwards or Baker describes some actual play where everybody is in the groove and it’s all booming. I mean, they are having Fun with a capital F, no fooling.But others hate that, or like it only occasionally, or like it but no more than they like other kinds of play experience. Aaron Allston’s Strike Force campaign ran for decades, and you can read his discussion of it and also feel the delight shining through. The same is true for Lee Gold’s campaign that was already mature and established in 1977 and is still going. She and her players )not all the same people nor characters, but still a continuity of milieu) know they have something magical and love all the varied tones available. One of the things that makes an Adventure Path popular with players is variety in activity and intensity.And nobody who’s happy and satisfied is wrong. But it does call for different playing tools. A life of constant adversity may make for a damn fine film or short story but is less likely to hold people for multiple seasons or volumes. So advice should come framed with how long a play experience it’s intended for.Now that promised extra note about intensity. This is another thing that I presume we all know on various levels but bears restating sometimes. So here I am restating it: intensity has flavors. Violent action is a popular way to get intense, a reliable crowd-pleaser around the world and throughout history. But so is the pursuit of answers and justice )on whatever side they may lie) in mysteries that may not have any violent action at all. The tension between criminals and their pursuers is just as widely popular, and partly because they can be grippingly intense. Indeed, in some of them, the violent action is a tension released, lowering the emotional pitch for a while. Religious drama is sometimes gory spectacle - a lot of late antique and medieval saints’ lives are the Eli Roth and Cannibal Holocaust of their times - but others are very intense with almost no action at all. They’re about the internal struggle of various parts of the self and the tension between the bond of human and divine versus all the intervening layers between them that would obfuscate and dissolve it. And on and on.A more clever person would some kind of conclusion after all that. Alas, all I got is “be aware of the context of the advice you give and get”.</blockquote>

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