Why do so many campaigns never finish? Genuinely curious what others think

[payn]

I'll note that these days they're mostly doing 3-part APs, which would be approximately 200 pages of actual adventure and 100 pages of supplementary but related material. My guess is that this is related to the subject of the thread: they noticed sales of later AP installments falling off, so they made them shorter.

Also of note, even thats changing. It sounds like they are going with a bigger quarterly release. Thats a shame because I think doing 1-10 and 11-20 versions worked well as campaigns. Also, folks dont think of it often, but individual chapters of APs work excellently as modules that can be slipped into many types of campaigns. Now, neither of those are happening and its gonna be chunky.

 

[payn]

Out of curiosity, do you have a sense of what the word-count tends to be, like as a range? (That'd make comparisons to novels easier, if still possibly wrong.)

I dont, but im now fascinated about finding out.

 

[Lanefan]

You never have assurance that players do not stop. But when you use a premade adventure (and players can read up on what its about etc.) and use it as much by the book as possible as a GM and tell exactly that it will be 12 half days ingame so most likely 12 sessions then as a player you know sooo much better what to expect than normally.

You can easily overdo the pre-planning, though, and make it all seem a bit too prepackaged.

I dont think its great to make people think about even more things. Games and including them in life is too complicated already.

"I'm starting an old-school D&D game, runs every Saturday* night. Here's the webpage with the setting write-up, class-species options, and so forth. Who's in, and when do you want to start?".

If you need much more than that to get things going among your friends/gaming community, something's come adrift somewhere.

* - replace if necessary with another day if that works better for more people.

 

[Lanefan]

I personally believe there are two main reasons. One is GM burn out especially for games with complex rules like DnD5e the second is that long campaigns are inherently unnatural as most stories are relatively short and have well defined beginning middle end structure. If you look at the vast majority of media (movies, TV, novels, etc) “campaigns” are generally pretty short and the long running multi season/novel/-verses are far less common.

The obvious reason for this is that it takes X short pieces to tally up the same content as one long one, meaning that while you can legitimately say the shorts outnumber the longs X-1 in order to make a point it's also a meaningless comparison.

Over the last 18 years I've run one big long campaign. Someone running a new campaign each year would, therefore, have run 18 in that time; and could say he's run 18 campaigns to my 1. It's a pointless comparison, however, in that in both cases the same crew showed up and played each week and the total number of sessions played is the same.

I believe natural stories tend to be shorter and move faster through the plot than people realized. I like to look at media and break down how many scenes they would be at the table and most of them are around 4-6 per modern short (10 episode) tv season, novel or movie, that works out to about 3-4 sessions (a couple hours each YMMV). Building a long campaign requires 100 maybe 200 scenes and 10 or 15 novels worth of material, thats a lot more than most people realize going in.

And yet the most successful movies, TV shows, and books tend to be the ones that do go long, as in really long:

The MCU (comics and movies)
Star Wars (movies and TV series)
Star Trek (TV series and movies)
Game of Thrones/ASoIaF (books and TV series)
James Bond (books and movies)
Lord of the Rings/Hobbit (books and movies)

Long, for lack of a better word, is good.

 

[payn]

Out of curiosity, do you have a sense of what the word-count tends to be, like as a range? (That'd make comparisons to novels easier, if still possibly wrong.)

From James Jacobs back in 2010

Folks are pretty close on the money for Paizo adventures.

We generally assume about 900 words for a full page of text. Stat blocks and illustrations reduce this number, obviously.

For a 32 page module, we ask our authors to provide 20,000 words.

For a Pathifnder adventure path installment, we ask the authors to provide 35,000 words. The remaining 30,000 or so words in a Pathfinder AP volume consists of new monsters, support articles, fiction, and the like.

Some more fun statistics we assume:

• A half-page illustration counts as about 500 words.
• A full-body illustration of an NPC counts as about 400 words.
• A spot illustration (such as an item or an NPC's head) counts as 150 words.
• An average encounter in an adventure is about 500 words.
• The opening of an adventure, including the Adventure Background and Adventure Synopsis should try to be no more than 5% of the total adventure's length (this works out to about a page for a module, and about two pages for an Adventure Path installment); less words is always better for the background/summary.
• A 2-page Pathfinder AP style new monster is 1,400 words, counting the stat block.
• A 1-page, hardcover Bestiary style monster entry is about 550 words (including stat block).
• High level adventures tend to take up more room on an encounter-by-encounter basis, partially due to larger stat blocks, but mostly due to the fact that you have to account for a much wider range of possible PC actions and abilities.
• 2,000 words of workable writing progress is considered an average day's work.
• 5,000 words of workable writing progress in a day is considered phenomenal.

 

[prabe]

From James Jacobs back in 2010

So it looks as though a six-part AP would have ~210,000 words, which is (very approximately) an eight hundred page hardcover novel. Plus whatever other extras (which might bring the novel-equivalent close to a thousand pages, no wonder they typically split up the authorship).

Thanks for finding that!

 

[GrimCo]

Mentioning tv shows got me thinking.

Longest lasting tv shows are procedural dramas, like NCIS, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, CSI etc. What do all of these have in common? Every episode is self contained story with some having a bit of connecting larger story arcs, but not so much that you cannot jump in in the middle of the season and still understand what's happening. Also, while it has main cast, over time, one by one, that cast changes, expands, characters come and go, it's rare that main cast in first season is same like in last season.

Campaign that operates on similar principles tend to stick longer. Bunch of one-two shots, with minimal connecting plot and character roster. It mitigates problem of 1 missing player leading to session cancellation, it eliminates players getting bored of their characters, you can switch themes and styles.

 

[payn]

Mentioning tv shows got me thinking.

Longest lasting tv shows are procedural dramas, like NCIS, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, CSI etc. What do all of these have in common? Every episode is self contained story with some having a bit of connecting larger story arcs, but not so much that you cannot jump in in the middle of the season and still understand what's happening. Also, while it has main cast, over time, one by one, that cast changes, expands, characters come and go, it's rare that main cast in first season is same like in last season.

Campaign that operates on similar principles tend to stick longer. Bunch of one-two shots, with minimal connecting plot and character roster. It mitigates problem of 1 missing player leading to session cancellation, it eliminates players getting bored of their characters, you can switch themes and styles.

Yeap, the procedural is probably more in line with what @Lanefan does. Long running campaigns where the main cast changes as needed. Episodic adventures with a thread that occasionally runs through them.

I tend to prefer a more serial approach. Which is why APs have been so good for me. 1-2 years tops playing bi-monthly. Every adventure is connected and all lead forward to a central point of the campaign. Character death is a big deal and not just another random encounter.

 

[Staffan]

Also of note, even thats changing. It sounds like they are going with a bigger quarterly release. Thats a shame because I think doing 1-10 and 11-20 versions worked well as campaigns. Also, folks dont think of it often, but individual chapters of APs work excellently as modules that can be slipped into many types of campaigns. Now, neither of those are happening and its gonna be chunky.

Right, I forgot about that change. But looking at the hardbacks, it seems they're on par with the 3-installment APs in scale – most are 1-10, though there's the occasional 11-20 and even some weird outliers like 5-14.

 

[chuckdee]

Real Life for the most part. That and the mentality of we'll finish eventually, or we'll get back to it once Real Life lets us and it never happening.