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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7768778" data-attributes="member: 5142">You don't demonstrate that the story is not bigger than any one character in the second case. You merely point out the truism that 35 is a greater value than 5 and the same story content will inevitably be more thinly distributed between 35 than it would be for 5. And you do so in a manner that seems to aggrandize or artificially exaggerate the scope of the story for the former. So I still think that this notion that in OS gaming "the story is bigger than the characters" should be dropped in favor of more satisfactory and accurate explanations. And you seem to approach offering such an explanation: there is on average a higher PC turnover rate. If that is true, then examining that phenomenon would likely be more fruitful. That said, you don't see that many groups in 5e having the sort of "ten-adventure existence" lifespan that you describe here. The loose connection of ten adventure modules (or DM plot hooks) isn't really the current mode of operation anymore. The 5e Tomb of Annihilation and Storm King's Thunder each take characters from 1-11. The Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat) takes characters from 1-15. And overall there is not a gruelling grind to these higher levels anymore, and yet most games stop around levels 6-8. So part of the lower turnover rate seems to stem from these patterns alone. And this is obviously speaking only pertains to 5e compared to Early Gen 1 TTRPGs. We may expand the scope of inquiry to other RPGs and likely also find disparate patterns requiring independent explanations. Also, to return to your much earlier point about GoT: There are a lot of deaths. (More so in the show where it pays to kill off characters since actors eat into the budget.) There are a lot of various PoV chapters. But the metaplot clearly favors certain characters over others. The story was clearly always meant to revolve around certain characters: e.g., Daenerys and Jon Snow. (Almost blatantly so.) And the various characters are not organized into any semblance of a party so it's not the best comparison for D&D on that front either. The death of Ned Stark is frequently cited as a case where people thought the story would center around him, but it turned out not to be the case. But GRRM had also intended that Book 1 would have encompassed what are now Books 1-3: Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords. So the death of Ned Stark was intended to be much "earlier" within the story's scope - a third of the way into Book 1. And I think that this also illustrates that for GRRM, the characters were much bigger than the story he planned rather than the story being bigger than the characters. This seems more an indication of personal preference than a "bad DM," an accusation that honestly gets thrown around too liberally on this forum at times. Though it is not my own preference either, I have personally seen this work to great success. It seems like one of the "story-now crew," such as  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION],  [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], or  [MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION] would be better equipped to elucidate clarification on such matters then, if you are so inclined.</blockquote>

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