You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[Celebrim]

Um, Star Wars starts with a fight.

To be very specific, Star Wars starts with an external shot of a spaceship, and the fills the screen with what is one of the most iconic scenes in movie history - the purusing Star Destroyer that just gets bigger and bigger and keeps on coming. That's the missing element in my earlier campaigns - I failed to go epic right from the first scene. You have to start with something BIG, because just like a novel, you need to win the trust of the audience right from the start. Then, if you need to slow down later, they trust you because they've got a taste of where this is all going.

But the fight within the ship is staged in a completely unusual fashion. It's told from the view point of the droids, who aren't even participating in it. For the first 15 or so minutes of the movie the droids are our protagonists - not Luke, not Han, not even Leia. It's a daring (and given his later writing history, probably accidental) move, but it has a huge pay off.

Ships exploding, people dying and whatnot. We get the next scene of the droids landing on Tantooine and guess what? We don't spend any time on them trekking through the desert.

Oh but they do. It lasts several minutes. Lucas spends like 30 camera shots, 4 scenes and nearly as many minutes on the epic voyage of the droids across the desert. It's nearly three pages of script. Why? Because he's establishing the character of the droids! That was part of what made Star Wars so startling when it came out. We the audience are getting to know the personalities of these two individuals we've been following around the first portion of the movie, and they are robots. We could have started the movie with Old Ben giving Luke his lightsaber and telling him about his legacy. Cut to the chase. But we don't. Instead we spend 15 minutes on the droids and another 10 minutes on Luke's petty trials as a farmboy IN SPACE, before we really begin the quest.

You can criticise Star Wars for a lot of stuff, but, lack of pacing? But, then, you feel that even Star Wars is too fast. To me, Star Wars is just about right. It's high paced from the outset and doesn't really let up a whole lot for most of it.

You don't have to take my word for it. You can watch Lucas's commentaries on the movie. They were initially terrified by the slow initial pace of the movie when they first cut it together. They thought they'd bore the audience to tears. They were so scared they started cutting everything they could out of the movie and they still felt it was too slow.

And, I will also say that as a result before the extended version, the movie was nearly incomprehensible. Having a sequel let them put together the peices from that decision. The recut (unlike the recut of the later two, which generally added filler) really helped the structure of the movie because they had cut so much out in an effort to pick the pace up.

And we are still missing what is probably the most important early scene of the movie, Luke's encounter with Biggs Darklighter at Toshi Station that really sets the stage for his emotional arc through the movie and which allows the audience to participate in Luke's grief at his friends death. It's in the novelization of the movie, and at age seven as a second grader I was like, "Why is this scene missing? The movie is so much better and more enjoyable now that I know that happened." (You can read the original script online, which has problems and puts I think the scene in the wrong place, but which gives structure to the movie nontheless.)

What we really don't have is a fifteen minute scene of the droids slogging through the desert, trying to keep sand out of their moving parts, suffering from exposure to heat and whatnot and having terrain crop up that forces them to go in a different direction.

No, what we have is about two minutes of that. Once we establish our context, there is no need to be redundant and show the next sand dune or the next or the next. But then again, I've never been arguing for that. I mean, in theory, we could have jumped from the droids leaving the crippled blockade runner to them being herded out of the Jawa crawler. We might could have even shown the scene of them being herded out of the Jawa crawler first, then cut immediately to a scene with Old Ben Kenobi. But we would be losing things in doing so.

And another thing, you seem to be fixated on the idea that the action scenes are what makes the movie have fast pacing. Action scenes don't make a movie have fast pacing, as one season of CGI infested soulless 200 million dollar 'action movies' after another proves. Action can be as slow and deadly dull as any other sort of scene. Without reasons to care, it's all just meaningless spectacle. I'm quite sure you agree with me, since we both agree that after a certain point one random encounter after another is just meaningless filler.

But again, you want an emotional, dramatic, 'plotsy' character driven movie, spend some time building up your drama. You want just a meaningless action movie, just blow some things up and have some people die on the screen. CGI gets cheaper every day.

 

[Hussar]

Celebrim, you make good points. I'm not sure I 100% agree with you, but they are good points. However, (and you knew that was coming) where I think we differ is in the amount of stuff we need to make something important.

I've been playing for about thirty years now. Like many people here. That's nothing unusual. I've played in more campaigns than I can actually count, both as a DM and a player. Again, nothing new there. I'm the same as pretty much anyone else around here who's played for as long as we have. But, something I've realized is that despite playing in literally over a hundred campaigns over the years, I can count on one hand the number of campaigns that have come to a satisfactory conclusion and still have fingers left over.

Now, that conclusion could be a TPK, it could be retiring the characters, it could be a lot of things. But, almost always, it doesn't happen. What happens, IME, is that we start some campaign, play it for several months, and then something comes in and the campaign dies an ignoble death. The DM gets burned out. Someone or several someone's move away and the campaign dies. The new shiny comes along and everyone jumps ship. Whatever. There are a billion reasons why the campaign died. But, almost all those reasons can be summed up as: Time.

Time kills campaigns. The longer the campaign goes, the closer the chances of the campaign imploding approaches 100%. I've actually had three satisfactorily completed campaigns in thirty years. Three. So, when DM's tell me "it's the journey" that's important, I really, really have to disagree. I've done the journey. I've done the journey so many times that, by and large, that's all I've ever done.

So, for me, and only for my taste, I would much, much rather go through ten campaigns that were shallow and simple but actually come to some sort of resolution than slog through yet another deep and meaningful one that dies halfway through. I have no interest in that game anymore. I don't want to play. No matter how good it is. No matter if Gygax himself rose from the grave alongside the greatest role players in existence, I still don't want to play in yet another campaign that dies before the end.

Getting to the end is the primary, key criteria for a campaign for me now. Everything else is secondary. Nothing else is as important. At least, not to me. Which means, to me again, you skip over anything that is not directly related to achieving that end point. And, if you want a new end point and keep the characters going? Great. No problem. But, without end points, I have no interest in the campaign.

So, if I go to hire someone, I want a scene that takes about as long as the Mos Eisely cantina scene to play out. What a total of five minutes and done? That's the pacing I'm looking for. My perfect campaign would be one in which you could achieve everything that is achieved in Star Wars A New Hope in exactly the same time as the movie lasts. In two hours of play, we would go from Tatooine to blowing up the Death Star and I would be the happiest gamer alive.

Now, I realize that that's never, ever going to happen. I know that. And I'm being a bit facetious. But, at the core, I still feel that way. Full, FULL throttle. Scenes should last twenty minutes max. Combat might be a bit longer, depending on the system. Anything, be it combat or non-combat, that takes longer than an hour, maybe an hour and a half to resolve better be the climax of the campaign or I'd much, much rather just skip it.

 

[Campbell]

I am sympathetic to the need to build up to meaningful drama. Still, I feel there is right way and a wrong way to do it. The stakes in any given situation need not be life and death, but they need to be of interest to your players. If you want the players to engage with the desert expedition give them a reason to be interested in it. If nothing is at stake no meaningful characterization can really occur. If there is no player buy in then all that wonderful setting exposition will do you no good. It will go in one ear and out the other, even if it could prove useful down the line.

I'm currently playing in a Legend of the 5 Rings game set against the backdrop of the War of the Spirits. Our player group consists of a group of young Scorpion clan samurai recently who are currently struggling to wrestle control of the City of Beiden away from outside interests who have taken over while the Scorpion clan was in exile in the Burning Sands.

While the eventual focus will be on dealing with much larger threats to Rokugan as a whole, our GM has used the situation we are now facing as a means to seed setting information that will be useful farther down the road. Still, it doesn't feel like the focus is on those larger setting events. We are being exposed to it mostly in our efforts to quell upstart peasants, find a way to remove the influence of a rival samurai clan, and oust the city's current leadership. It feels like our personal stories are shaping the game which will make the later events more meaningful. All without feeling like we're being forced to engage in elements not of interest to us.

You can build up drama and engage players at the same time. Let conflicts naturally follow from each other. Stay focused on player buy-in and weave events together. Stakes need not always run high, but in my experience they always need to be important to players to keep them highly engaged.

Of course the people I game with are not all that interested in exploration oriented game play, and what works for one group will not necessarily work for others.

 

[pemerton]

I can certainly see the PC's wanting to get through the desert as quickly as possible so they can get on with their goals at the city. It does not follow that the players can derive no entertainment from the challenges on the way to the city.

Nor does it follow that they can. And [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has already told us what his opinion of his entertainment options is. Are you really saying that you know better?

Hussar has stated repeatedly he wanted to avoid the desert because it would bore him, but I've yet to see where that certainty there is nothing to hold the players' interest in that desert.

Is he really obliged to prove it to you?

I mean, from time to time I read a novel. Suppose you come along and tell me to put my book down and read this other one which is really good. Well, maybe you're right. Maybe it is good. But I'm reading the one I'm reading and would like to finish it, thanks. Hussar has an adventure he's on, and stuff he wants to do, in City B. What is the special virtue in putting that to one side to experience the GM's conception of a desert?

What was the goal in the city? To beat the Big Bad? Does that mean any obstacle between us and the endgame battle should be skipped over?

Perhaps. Tell me more about the game, the mechanics, the participants, etc. I don't believe we can get an answer a priori.

Perhaps to locate the Holy Maguffin? So anything between us and holding the Holy Maguffin in our hands should be handwaved?

Again, perhaps.

Also, the fact that you see the scenrio possibilities in terms of Big Bads and MacGuffins is itself suggestive. As best I recall Hussar hasn't told us what was going on in City B, but there can be a lot of story options in an RPG beside Big Bads and MacGuffins.

But consider the example 'module' for Burning Wheel. I don't know, I imagine for some new groups this was a lot of fun. I'm looking at the text though, and I'm finding I have a hard time caring about who gets the sword and even less (because of my rebellious nature) because the story teller tells you that that is what this scene is about. Now maybe if I struggled to get to the treasure, and then found it was indivisible, maybe I'd have an emotional investment in who gets it. But - and keep in mind how much I like to argue - I can't work up any passion over a sword that is just handed to me with a character that this is my first scene playing. My first instinct would be to suggest to the group we dice for it.

This seems to confirm what I'd already expected, namely, that you prefer a different sort of RPGing from the default BW style.

I get the impression that, to the extent that character figures in your RPGing, it is as an object of exploration. BW isn't primarily about exploring character - the idea isn't to understand your PC and then to play him/her. It's to play him/her and thereby understand him/her. To that extent at least, its aesthetics are Nietzschean (and more generally existentialist).

 

[Hussar]

Also, the fact that you see the scenrio possibilities in terms of Big Bads and MacGuffins is itself suggestive. As best I recall Hussar hasn't told us what was going on in City B, but there can be a lot of story options in an RPG beside Big Bads and MacGuffins.

Really, why should it matter? What difference does it make what's going on in City B? For that matter, why does it matter that we want to go to City B?

Shouldn't the fact that we want to go to City B be the primary issue here? To be 100% honest, it was so long ago, I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact reason we wanted to go to City B too. As I recall, we had arrived in the wasteland as a result of a Plane Shift spell, and thus had no control over our arrival point. The city was where the reason we had Plane Shifted in the first place was located. It's all a bit fuzzy now, so, I might have the details a bit off.

But really, what difference does it make? So what if going to City B is to retrieve the MacGuffin or kill the Big Bad? Great. If that's true, why am I pissing about in the desert? Because the DM is going to make stuff available to us so that we can retrieve the MacGuffin later? Or defeat the Big Bad?

Well, if that stuff is absolutely required, then how is that not railroading? Forcing a player to do something they don't want to do is the basic definition of railroad IMO. If my choice is, "Do this thing you don't want to play through or automatically fail in what you do want to play through" then that is a railroad IMO. Note the choice of "play through" there. I'm not saying there should be no challenges. Not at all. My point has always been, why force players to do things that they don't enjoy doing? Having challenges is part and parcel of gaming. That's why we're here after all. But, having challenges should not be synonymous with being bored out of my skull.

 

[N'raac]

I would absolutely ADORE this DM. That's being 100% honest. Someone who skips over the minutia to get to the point? Fan-freaking-taastic. That's my ideal DM. That it's not yours is perfectly fine.

That requires “minutia” be defined. To me, the big fuss over one creature in a dungeon setting is minutia. To you, that Grell was the be-all, end-all of the game at that point in time. You wanted, it seems low level bit player cannon fodder, and the GM wanted NPC’s with some actual persona. What were half a dozen L1 Warrior guards going to do? Randomly suck up a half dozen attacks from the Grell? To what end? I think the point was made much earlier in the thread that, if these guys are just backdrop scenery, then they probably get scooped up and eaten by the Grell as background scenery, with no impact on the outcome of a battle.

Again, I'm not saying that this will be true every time. Sometimes trekking across the desert might be perfectly fine. However, since there was absolutely nothing to make the desert meaningful to us beforehand, thus we had no real reason to interact with the desert, my point is, just skip it.

Again, ”we” the characters or “we” the players? The characters want to get to the city, so they will use their resources to do so as quickly as possible. “We” the players, however, should be capable of recognizing that we don’t know the whole adventure arc, nor what is in the desert that might add to the gameplay. And, as has been pointed out a few times recently, I’m still not sure what was in the city that make everything else pale in comparison, and excited the players so much that they couldn’t bear any time be spent on the journey to that city. Nor am I sure how it became the goal – presumably, there was some GM exposition in that regard that wasn’t skipped over to “get to the action”.

Since in both examples I brought up, I had to slog through scenes I didn't want to and explicitly said that it was this slog that drained all the enjoyment out of things for me, I'm not really sure what to say here. We didn't jump to the end city. We didn't go straight to the Grell (and I KNOW I said that - talking about spending time hiring hirelings and whatnot).

For the desert, my question is how you can know up front this will be a mindless slog before setting foot into the desert. For the hirelings, clearly you were not into the hiring of the NPC’s. Again, however, I’m back to whether this impatience was shared by the other players, or whether they were enjoying the role play of the interaction with the NPC’s.

You keep coming back with this “well, it’s not my game and that’s fine” comment that’s inconsistent with your belief it’s appropriate to get “shirty” with the GM when the game does not bend to your implicit wishes. [btw, since others have noted the same “whatever that is” meme – from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shirty “shirt·y(shûr t )
adj. shirt·i·er, shirt·i·est Chiefly British
Ill-tempered; angry: "He saw how shirty she was about it" (P.G. Wodehouse)”.

So if this is just a difference in play styles, move on, live and let live, why are you getting shirty about it?

I was thinking Star Wars has been discussed in enough depth elsewhere, but the two deserts line up nicely, so let’s drag that out, at the risk of someone getting shirty.

Let’s look at C-3P0’s player. He doesn’t want to go through the desert. Slogging through the sand in his gears will just suck all the fun out of the game, and there’s nothing meaningful in the desert anyway. Just cut scene to the spaceport so we can get back to whatever it is these droids have to get back to. GM says “OK”, so we never meet the jawas (just some desert random encounter anyway), get captured (GM railroading at its finest), get purchased by the Lars farm (just GM setting and Mary Sue NPC wank anyway), meet Luke or come into contact with Old Ben. But I’m sure it will be a great campaign as the droids walk into Mos Eisley and are quickly picked up by Stormtroopers realizing that hey, these are the Droids they’re looking for. Then they get their memories wiped. TPK, no more game, but hey – it finished, so it’s all good, right?

Nor does it follow that they can. And @Hussar has already told us what his opinion of his entertainment options is. Are you really saying that you know better?

That depends on which “you” we are discussing. If I am “you, the internet poster”, then I am guessing, as I don’t believe Hussar has told us what happened in the desert, or even what, if anything, prevented the scene being skipped over due to the centipede ride. I’m just asking how Hussar gained his precognitive powers to know with certainty precisely what the desert would hold, and expressing my sympathy that those powers didn’t manifest earlier and prevent him joining a boring group whose playstyle was incompatible with his.

If I am “you, another player in the game”, then I may well want to see what the desert holds. Let’s play the game. Centipede? Cool – how do we ride it? Playing out that ride may be just as cool. Or maybe my character has a morbid fear of insects – how will it play out when my character refuses to ride the blasted thing? Probably someone getting shirty because my insistence on playing my character to his personality impedes rapid desert crossing. Perhaps my character is a desert nomad, and this desert travel is his opportunity for some spotlight time, so I very much do want to play out desert travel. I have no way of knowing what the actual other players wanted, but unless they were also getting shirty at the very thought of rolling a die before reaching the city, I suspect they may have been more amenable, or dare I say even interested, at playing out the travel to the city.


Or am I “you, the DM”? Well, if I am, then I absolutely certainly know far more than Hussar about what the desert holds. I know whether it is likely a 40’ moving centipede charging across the dunes would avoid, deter or attract the encounters that wait within. And I know whether there are reasons as set out above to lean towards, or away from, playing out the desert travel.

But I was neither the DM nor a player in the game, so I’m still waiting, obstinate internet poster that I am, for Hussar to tell us what was so important in the city, or how he could so clearly foresee desert travel being nothing but a slog. Maybe he already knew this GM had a hard and fast rule that a mile travelled means 15 minutes’ description, regardless of any activity during the journey. But if so, I’m not sure why he was still at the table slogging through it.

Is he really obliged to prove it to you?

Certainly not. But neither am I required to simply believe he is 100% in the right and no alternate view can be valid. He even states his own agreement that this may be a perfect game for different players. Maybe it was – I’m not hearing about the agreement of the other players at the table that the GM should get on with it and just fast track past the desert.

I mean, from time to time I read a novel. Suppose you come along and tell me to put my book down and read this other one which is really good. Well, maybe you're right. Maybe it is good. But I'm reading the one I'm reading and would like to finish it, thanks. Hussar has an adventure he's on, and stuff he wants to do, in City B. What is the special virtue in putting that to one side to experience the GM's conception of a desert?

Simple solution – just skip past all that exposition crap in the middle, get to the POINT of your book in the last chapter and then you have lots of time to read the last chapter of my novel. That’s much better then reading all the boring stuff in the middle, right? How many chapters do you skip when you read a novel? I don’t typically skip chapters – that’s a sign I should just skip the whole book. And crossing the desert would be the chapter(s) immediately preceding arrival at the city on the other side, at least in most books I’ve read. Unless that travel is lacking anything interesting, in which case we get a brief description of hot, dry travel and move on – but in that case, there wasn’t much point to having a desert, was there?

Also, the fact that you see the scenrio possibilities in terms of Big Bads and MacGuffins is itself suggestive. As best I recall Hussar hasn't told us what was going on in City B, but there can be a lot of story options in an RPG beside Big Bads and MacGuffins.

Exactly as you say, Hussar has not told us the reason for the haste to get to City B (for the players or for the characters), so I can’t do much more than speculate with general tropes. If Hussar would care to enlighten us, perhaps these “what if’s” could be more specific, but I rather suspect that, if Hussar felt this would skip the discussion ahead to the good stuff, he would already have provided that information.

I get the impression that, to the extent that character figures in your RPGing, it is as an object of exploration. BW isn't primarily about exploring character - the idea isn't to understand your PC and then to play him/her. It's to play him/her and thereby understand him/her. To that extent at least, its aesthetics are Nietzschean (and more generally existentialist).

I don’t generally find Nietzschean or existentialism to be words I associate with fun leisure activities, but suit yourself. If I want something all about someone else’s character, I have fiction for that. I have no particular desire to play a randomly generated personality created by the game system, thanks all the same. At least fiction will have a character created with a purpose.

 

[Hussar]

That requires “minutia” be defined. To me, the big fuss over one creature in a dungeon setting is minutia. To you, that Grell was the be-all, end-all of the game at that point in time. You wanted, it seems low level bit player cannon fodder, and the GM wanted NPC’s with some actual persona. What were half a dozen L1 Warrior guards going to do? Randomly suck up a half dozen attacks from the Grell? To what end? I think the point was made much earlier in the thread that, if these guys are just backdrop scenery, then they probably get scooped up and eaten by the Grell as background scenery, with no impact on the outcome of a battle.

Umm, a grell isn't exactly that big of a monster that having half a dozen spear carriers wouldn't be helpful. Grell are CR 3. Six guys with longspears would make about as much difference as a decent Summon Monster 4 spell granting me 5 Celestial Giant Bees. Is it going to make the fight a cakewalk? Nope, but it's certainly going to help.

Which is the point of getting half a dozen hirelings in the first place. Yup, the GM wanted all this persona and stuff. I simply did not care. I certainly did not care enough to spend about an hour and a half of game time screwing around getting these guys, which is about what it took to roleplay through the ten or so interviews, knocking off about four of them, and then taking the best 6 of the lot.

My point is that it should have taken about 6 minutes.

Exactly as you say, Hussar has not told us the reason for the haste to get to City B (for the players or for the characters), so I can’t do much more than speculate with general tropes. If Hussar would care to enlighten us, perhaps these “what if’s” could be more specific, but I rather suspect that, if Hussar felt this would skip the discussion ahead to the good stuff, he would already have provided that information.

And my point has always been the same. What difference does it make. I DID NOT WANT TO PLAY THAT OUT Can I say that any clearer. Is there some part of that you don't understand? What difference does it make why I didn't want to screw around detailing how we make saddles, making skill checks to ride the creatures, etc. etc.?

You are taking the position that no matter what, I should play whatever it is that the DM has put in front of me. I should be grateful that he has put anything at all in front of me and play it out to his satisfaction.

Screw that.

I am not interested in satisfying you. I'm just really glad I've finally found a group that is just as impatient as I am with minutia. Would the encounter with Jawas be minutia. Not really. But, that's never been my point. My point was always about the DM enforcing skill checks and, in my mind, mindless tedium and slavish adherence to mechanics at the cost of pacing and excitement and fun at the table.

Heck, if you were the DM in the Centipede example and you said, "Ok, you hop on your centipede. YOu make pretty good time. You spot a massive iron mechanism rolling across the desert some distance away, what do you do?" I'd be pretty happy. You skipped over the minutia (making saddles, rolling multiple skill checks, bombing random, unavoidable encounters that are NOT RELATED (note the Jawas are very related to the plot) to the plot of the game and got to the point. Fantastic.

Which has been my point all the way along. GET TO THE POINT. Escape from the Imperial Star Destroyer, Land in Desert, Spend half an hour of game time trying to explain how you are keeping sand out of your circuits, Get Captured By Jawas. Which of those do you think I would want to play through? Some people want to play through all of them, and that's fantastic. I don't.

 

[Hussar]

Giving this a bit more thought.

One of the rules in 3e that I absolutely loved when I first saw it was Take 20. This was novel for me. Previously in D&D, you almost never had rerolls and any failed roll you had to stick with. Now, you could just turn to your DM and say, "I search for traps on the chest, Take 20. My check is X" and you got on with things. I adored that rule.

I remember another poster who no longer posts here, Raven Crowking, lamenting this rule because it took away from the exploration game. You no longer had to describe how you searched something, you just did it. To me, that was a very big step forward. You don't have to go through the check list of possible trap locations every time you searched a chest. All of what I consider to be minutia vanished in a puff of mechanics. (I believe they smell of licorice. )

Or, another example. I'm currently playing in a 4e Dark Sun game. One nifty little rule in Dark Sun is how they handle food and water. In previous editions of D&D, you had to go through a number of hoops making sure you had enough food and water to stay healthy. Did your food rot? Did you have iron or standard rations? Etc. In 4e Dark Sun, you have Survival Days. A survival day costs 5 gp (or the Dark Sun equivalent) and weighs X pounds (I forget the number now). Every day, you mark one off and that's the sum total. Simple, elegant, easy peasy. I LOVE it. Need to feed your caravan? Fine, buy X Survival Days and there you go. Done.

Now, I get that some players don't like this. I totally get that. I know that people want more detail. They love that kind of thing. Great. Totally understand. Not my bag anymore. I don't want to know how many pounds of salt I'm carrying. I don't care about how many waterskins it takes to keep me and my kank watered for the day. I simply don't care.

Which brings me back to our two whipping boy examples. The minutia, or at least what I'm calling minutia, is not things like sandstorms or bandits or whatever. It's things like detailing saddles, learning the life story of an NPC that is going to be on camera for all of five minutes, haggling over the price of crossbow bolts.

That's what I'm talking about. My position has gotten blown way out of proportion. Figured I should at least make a stab at trying to bring it back down to earth.

 

[Celebrim]

But, something I've realized is that despite playing in literally over a hundred campaigns over the years, I can count on one hand the number of campaigns that have come to a satisfactory conclusion and still have fingers left over.

That's a good point. Generally speaking, I find it hard to 'complete' campaigns because people move away or have other life changing experiences. Continuity is a huge problem. But even in the campaigns I was in that went 5 years or more, they never had 'a' satisfactory conclusion. They were satisfying campaigns so no one wanted them to end. You might could say that they had had several satisfactory conclusions, multiple places where we could have ended having said "There we did what we set out to do.", and like a popular story the author never wanted to put them down so they became serialized into a seemingly never ending series of novels. As I said, D&D was concieved as an open ended game. It's all about the journey. If you ever do get to a destination, you'll find its just a stop in your longer journey. To a certain extent, the campaigns that came to 'a satisfactory conclusion' were satisfactory because no one was having enough fun to want to keep playing them.

So, for me, and only for my taste, I would much, much rather go through ten campaigns that were shallow and simple but actually come to some sort of resolution than slog through yet another deep and meaningful one that dies halfway through.

My current campaign as it was concieved was nested in three major increasingly ambitious story arcs. However, if the main story arc is completely - thwarting the Esoteric Order of the Golden Globe - the campaign is by no means over nor will the stories be over. There are already huge lose ends - like the undesired triumph of the Nautians in Amalteen. And there are likely to be personal stories and missions that aren't going to be fully tied up. Moreover, I also know that there really never needs to be an end of nesting. There is always some greater evil behind the lesser. There are several story lines that would allow this campaign to open up into a full planescape style campaign should we reach the projected end of the current story line. The longest campaign I was ever in went on to the point that the players were starting families, raising children, running empires and had generally reached the point that we were more often adventuring with our original NPC's former retainers than with the now uber-powerful semi-retired original NPCs.

So, if I go to hire someone, I want a scene that takes about as long as the Mos Eisely cantina scene to play out. What a total of five minutes and done? That's the pacing I'm looking for. My perfect campaign would be one in which you could achieve everything that is achieved in Star Wars A New Hope in exactly the same time as the movie lasts. In two hours of play, we would go from Tatooine to blowing up the Death Star and I would be the happiest gamer alive.

For a story as simplistic as the New Hope story, there isn't really any reason you couldn't finish it in ~12 hours of game play. Arguably, I've already done a story that is about seven times as long as the story of a New Hope. Consider my aborted attempt to turn it into a story hour, which died when I realized that in a simplified narrative form the first session of play was still going to be 20 pages or more, and I'm currently out at around 50 sessions. Just a brief summary of the campaign in story form would be a 1000 page novel. Even just a summary of the major events would run probably 20 or 30 pages. And, we are roughly half done with my conception. 'A New Hope' is like 90 pages of story. My goal is of course to hit 'A New Hope' like highs ever 100 to 200 'pages' or so. It doesn't always work that way, but we've gotten a couple. However, 'A New Hope' isn't a campaign. It's just the first module. If you did 'Star Wars' as a campaign, you'd probably want at least 80 hours of play. And even the original trilogy isn't the whole story, because like any good campaign the participants don't want it to be over.

I'm not sure what is going to address your need for epiphinany, closure, etc. in a game. My sense is that you need to stop playing campaigns or lengthy adventure paths and settle on a more episodic format - television rather than movies. A television series like 'Babylon 5' or 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' with this fully concieved multiseason grand story arcs aren't going to work for you. Intead, you need to be looking to a campaign done more like 'Star Trek' - 45 pages of script and then wrap up the story. Repeat as long as you can keep interest in the format. You can't rush the telling of a story and expect it to work. You need that time to develop the story. I'd be seriously worried that by going 'full thortle' through stories you wrap up campaigns without actually achieving the emotional satisfaction you were searching for at the destination.

 

[billd91]

My point is that it should have taken about 6 minutes.



And my point has always been the same. What difference does it make. I DID NOT WANT TO PLAY THAT OUT Can I say that any clearer. Is there some part of that you don't understand? What difference does it make why I didn't want to screw around detailing how we make saddles, making skill checks to ride the creatures, etc. etc.?

But did you think about the DM and what he wanted to play out or is he just the screen monkey to dance for your tune. You've been posting a lot about how he should follow your clues. Where's your consideration for him?