Sure, but there is not always a need for them to be sitting around and doing nothing. They can be involved.
I'm not saying that I've never talked to people outside the game about long-downtime, I've done it more than a few times. But the story being crafted is "these people in this world". For me, if there is a major event going on and part of the party is going to go deal with it, the rest of the party follows. They don't just take off and leave their friends behind to face something like a Lich or a rampaging dragon.
In our adventuring company there's over 40 characters, of which about 25 are PCs belonging to the six players in the game. The rest are adventuring NPCs and henches.
We can put together an adventuring party and get 'em in the field on a moment's notice and still leave most of the company back at home base.
So, we often do downtime at the same time, and some times we just circle the table asking what each person wants to do.
Which is fine if one player says something like "Jelessa will take the winter off and do some general spell research" and another says "Aloysius will spend the winter waiting for delivery of the Broom of Flying he commissioned". Those can be dealt with on a whim.
But if a player - me, in this instance - says "Xana spends the winter engaged in politics in [faux-Rome] and putting herself out there as a viable option as a future (or present) Senator, along with making sure her family are well cared for, finishing construction of her townhouse, [etc. etc.]" and wants to go into any detail on all of that (which I almost always do) then either it has to get done off-cycle or everyone else is gonna get mighty bored.
Never had a game where anyone had more than one active character. It just isn't how we approach the game.
Right now, all in the same setting and mostly in the same greater adventuring company, I've got:
X - Mage - she's the "Xana" noted just above, currently engaged in medium-term downtime activities
Aloysius - Cleric - currently active in the field in party #1
Aelyina - Mage-Psyonicist - wants to be active but can't yet talk people into the specific adventuring she has in mind
Elena - Mage-Thief (was Necromancer-Assassin before an annoying alignment change) - long-term retired due to lack of Con
Terazon - War Cleric - helping with construction of our company base but will get back in the field when chance presents
Tuarthia - Mage - does whatever adventuring people ask her to do (her severely limited Wisdom makes her a bit of an airhead) but otherwise hangs around the base
Skyboot - Illusionist - long-term inactive due to loss of mind [was kicked out of company due to being a nuisance]
Lanefan - Fighter - currently trying to build his name-level stronghold [not a company member, yet]
Black Leaf - Thief - currently active in the field in party #2 [not a company member, has never heard of it]
This setting has been going, with some gaps, for 42 years; I've been in for 40 of them. Other than Black Leaf (new this year) all of those characters have been going for at least a decade.
(the DM runs 3 sessions per 2 weeks, 2 of party #1 and one for party #2)
Problem. This is a game. We aren't engaging in a mirror simulation of reality, we are engaging with a game. And it is only when people start saying that it must be a reality simulator that this is ever a problem. And again, I refer you back to your initial point, which was that the game has been made "too easy" because the designers were "too spineless" to stand up to players. But this is a good GAME design. And they are GAME designers.
It sells well, I won't argue that, but there's a lot of external factors that lined up in its favour as well. Whether it's good game design is a very open question.
True, but that doesn't mean every single player always wants to trend towards less difficulty.
There are always exceptions to every trend.
Two studies were conducted to understand why subtraction with fluency is harder than addition. In Study I, 33 kindergartners were individually asked t…
www.sciencedirect.com
By analyzing children's accuracy and reaction time, it was concluded, in light of Piaget's theory, that subtraction is harder than addition because children deduce differences from their knowledge of sums.
Micro reflects macro. Adding is easier than subtracting. Maybe I'm stretching this from simple math to game design, but I notice that I've never seen a game designer start from an incredibly complicated system then trim it down, unless they are working from someone else's design which was already complicated. No one started computer programming by writing the unreal engine then reducing it down to Pong.
But there's no denying a computer programmer capable of writing the unreal engine would 99.99% likely do a much better job of writing Pong than someone for whom Pong was pretty much the limit of expertise.
So, we are in agreement that a less complex and easier system is better for the players.
System, in the nuts-and-bolts mechanical sense, yes.
And I disagree with you. In-play challeges are only as "watered down" as the DM makes them. I recently ended up with a discussion with Maxperson who claimed to want a monster ability that cuts player level in half with a single save. Chunk, half your levels are gone til you recover. He made it til a short rest. You could make it permanent. Loss conditions are infrequent because the only loss condition is, for many groups, ending the game.
I think there is a tremendous difference here that you aren't seeing, because of how you look at player characters. Most people can lose a character, but it disrupts the entire part of the game they want to explore. They don't want to be cog #5 in the machinery of the story of The Blackscale Mercenaries. They want the Blackscale Mercenaries to be Yue Silverhorn, Shea The Gilded, Trosk Bladehammer, and Seven, and they want to tell the story of their adventures.
Where I want the Blackscale Mercenaries to be the Blackscale Mercenaries, regardless whether their current lineup is Yue, Shea, Trosk, and Seven or if it's Taran, Geldi, Hopkite, and Pertrel all of whose names are recorded in the Blackscale's Book of Fame.
The Blackscale Mercenaries are the team we follow in this game, regardless who their current membership might be; much like some people follow the New York Yankees or I follow the Vancouver Canucks regardless who might be playign for them this season. None of the current Canuck players were with the team 30 years ago (hell, most of 'em weren't born then!) but I cheer for the team now just as I cheered for it in 1992.
People often reference Tolkien in the discussions about DnD, and this is one of the few places that this makes sense. The Fellowship of the Ring isn't a cast of 50 people who come in and out of the story. They don't have Aaragorn leave the party to go and become the King of Gondor, or Gimli killed off to be replaced by Boian. In fact, only one member of the Fellowship is actually killed. Boromir, who is most famous for being the member of the Fellowship who is killed.
Since then we've been handed an even better example, that being Game of Thrones, of what in D&D terms would be a big sprawling campaign with characters coming and going every which way and death not only always on the table but easily achievable.
That doesn't mean all our victories are handed to us, or that we suffer no setbacks, or that we don't gain any "real" sense of accomplishment from our victories. I'll note that you have survived all of your life, and I'm sure you felt a sense of accomplishment even when you weren't in a life-or-death situation. Challenges don't have to be just death or just status conditions. If that was all people wanted, Video Games do it better. The challenge of TTRPGS comes from out-of-the-box solutions, from setbacks that are not mechanical in nature.
In the session I finished playing an hour ago, I sent Black Leaf into a situation where of a party of 8 she was the only character doing anything directly against the BBEG (as a Thief, she crept up invisible behind him and started looting him of his useful possessions while he was distracted by directing his troops around); everyone else was bogged down with his dozens of small-m minions and for a long time couldn't get free to do much else.
I sent her in with full expectation that within the real-world hour I'd be rolling up her replacement - she was one-against-four (the BBEG and three guards) and badly outgunned by each of them; I thought she was doomed but somebody had to do something - so the sense of accomplishment was heartfelt when not only did she successfully steal BBEG's components pouch off his belt (thus no more casting for him!) but when someone finally got free and hit him with a
Hold Person on him I was able to get the coup-de-grace; on which - now suddenly visible, standing on the corpse of their now ex-boss - I demanded and got the guards' surrender.
Were the situation such that I-as-player had more expectation that she'd in fact succeed, the sense of accomplishment would have been greatly reduced.
Just because a character survives til the end of the story doesn't mean they didn't face real challenges. 90% of all stories have the main character survive until the end. We know they aren't going to die off, because that's not the point of the story. The point is "how do they win".
Which is sort-of fine for movies or novels (though it gets a bit boring there too, TBH), but to me RPGs are vastly different. Going in to an RPG campaign each character is a thread of as-yet-unknown length and there will ultimately be a not-foreseeable number of these threads, and only after those threads are all woven together into a rope can the story of the party or parties - the story that matters - truly be told.
