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All of the recent discussion about Heartbreakers and I had re-read the GNS article and for the first time felt like I got it from start to finish (yep, first time) had gotten me to thinking about a feature of RPG culture. Namely, the length of a "campaign" which in most groups and many RPG texts theoretically can go on forever. This is because it is assumed that an RPG makes a continuing story. Only the "one-shot" or more recent designs which favor a defininate ending departs from this concept.

First of all, I had been thinking about this, what is so hot about a continuing story? Well, it can good when done right, but what can't? This is how many TV series and comic books work. This might be why many roleplayer mistake this method as the only good method. However, in both TV and comcis there are problems when working with the continuing story.

In comics, even though certain titles and characters are probably never going to go away, there are definate crests and troughs in the production of the comic.

I'll put you an example, My comic collection used to be in the closet in the second bedroom, which is on the other side of the wall from the shower. Well, water leaded through and got on one of the boxes (the one on the floor) The result is several of the comics had pages stuck together because of the water damage but worse is that it all mildewed. Many of the effected issues were back issues of Spider-Man And you know what? I chucked them, which was my only option TBH, without a second thought.

In a comic's run, there are a few noteworthy story arcs for a number of reasons, possibly an especially talented creative team is working on the title or maybe the team hits on an especially pogniant story, and the rest of the title's run is just filler. Those are the Spider-Man issues that mildewed on me. Filler. To put it another way, there are some issues that you'll find in the back issue boxes at your local comics shop and there are other story arcs that get collected into a trade paperback.

TV shows are also telling about the fallicy of the continuing story because all TV shows everntually end,...at least the entertainment-type shows do. I doubt that the news is going anywhere. What happens is eventually the show just peters out. Figuring out when a show starts to go downhill has become an internet pastime at  Jump the Shark.com The problem here is that it's hard to end the show on a high note either emotionally or quality-wise because the writers have just run out of gas, the actors and the rest of the production team are probably burnt-out on the show, yet sad to say goodbye at the same time. I remember catching part of the last episode of Ellen. It was especially bad almost angry underneath about the show getting cancelled, and as funny as a root canal.

But that's those media, what about RPGs? In my experience, we tend to play in a game until the GM decides to stop for some reason. My personal play group is a bad example, because it has mostly been just the one guy GMing with other members attempting to run for a little while, with varying degrees of success and then suddenly quitting because they can't handle it for one reason or another. WHich leaves me with the one guy, who generally runs until A) he judges that the players are bored/uninterested in the proceedings, but this generally happens early if it happens or B) he gets "burned-out" on the game and stops it, regardless of where in the "story" it. I know I have several characters from several games who had been forced into retirement mid-story, never to be revived again.

I have heard of games that have lasted for years without stopping or breaking (unlike, say, David L Arneson's Blackmoore campaign which I guess still reconviens annually, but they only play once a year) but I haven't experienced these group personally so I can't comment.

I'll stop now and open the floor to comments.

The rpg crowd has this enormous romance about the sprawling ,never ending campaign that goes on for 20 years, usually on the same shelf that it keeps its nostalgia about the days of 12 hour gaming sessions.

The fact is that most campaigns do end. A lot of my gaming took place with a nearby university club, and long term stable groups were a rarity. People graduate,flunk out,transfer,move it was almost impossible to create a group that just went on year after year.

And for my part I'm not all that big on playing the same campaign for twenty years with Fred who plays the same grumpy dwarf.  I like trying out new things, so I early copped to the idea of building my campaigns around discreet storie arcs with beginings ,middles and endings, that way If a campaign ended at least it ended on a note of completion.

This is another area in gaming where the romance and the reality conflict.  People think in terms of the eternal campaign ,and ignore the reality and thus produce an unsatisfying campaign structure.

Because of this I tried to have some sort of Begining -middle-end structure not just for the scenario, but indeed for the individual session.  I began to move toward what I called the 'serial one-shot' ,the idea that each session (or scenario) represented a more or less discreet blaock taken out of a characters life and each of these blocks is it's own strory arc with mostly events of little acout occuring between them, this is different fromt he more or less continuous ,soap opera narrative, more like the structure of normal eposodic television shows, (In fact my style was influenced by a brilliant discussion of episodic plot structure for the MEKTON game).

I can only speak for myself.

Campaigns peter out instead of coming to a dramatic conclusion because once you've put a lot of time and effort into something it is hard to let go.  So, the whale sort of suffocates on the beach.

The appeal in a campaign is that Immersion is addictive.  If Immersion is one of your goals, a good campaign will faciliate it and make the feeling stronger than a short game.

I think there are two romances going on here:
First, there is the romance of the great epic, the eternal, beautiful tale that goes on as long as its characters live to support it, with the plots woven into plots, ending in a world-shaking climax that leaves nothing to be played.  Coupled with a poor understanding of episodic structure, a necessity in what is inevitably an episodic medium, that leads to the campaign that drags for ages, until the characters are too old or powerful to be interesting.

Second, there is the romance of player and character.  Cruciel just brought this up as I was writing my post.  This is something I've seen very strongly in my D&D groups - on more than one occasion, we see players from one game bring in their characters for cameos when they're GMing in other worlds.  Inevitably, these cameos involve a future, masterful and non-adventuring state of the character, one whose "stories have been told", so to speak.  Similarly, I've seen people get 'lost in a character concept' much to the detriment of play, violating the social contract with "clone characters" or those who don't fit with the established setting, but come complete with heavy background baggage.  After investing this effort, which is (in this dysfunctional state) all self-centred and focused on the character, and invariably in great quantity, players tend to want to keep playing with these characters, regardless of where the game goes.
(Incidentally, this leads to that weird feature of D&D games, the "character portability" issue, where player characters move from one game to another.)

More than romance, I'd put it as and out and out illusion.  The epic syndrome is that everyone looks to Tolkien's epics as the thing to emulate.  Later, as fantasy fiction would be sold primarily as part of a 12 part series(or whatever the publisher is looking for), many people would come to assume that fantasy/science fiction/murder mysteries/whatever is the same thing as the never ending series.  

Likewise with superhero comics, as the point was to get people to buy the next issue, never to "end" a well selling series.  It would take the idea of the cliffhanger ending too far, with a never ending series of events "find out next time..." until a writers would change.

Television on the other hand would at least start producing "ending episodes" right away to wrap up all the loose ends in the event that they would get cancelled that year, not to mention that tv pacing would focus on complete episodes over the 2 or 3 part "find out next time" stuff.

If you have any goals based in story, defined by presenting, addressing, and wrapping up a conflict, then you should probably have a general idea of campaign length in real world time, not by a list of goals(kill so-and-so, take so-and-so castle, etc.).  You'd also do well to check out examples of fiction, comics, movies and tv, and really pay attention to the pacing.

My highest recommendations go to several comics for pacing episodically, but with longer term stories:  Usagi Yojimbo, Sin City, and pretty much anything written by Larry Hamas.

Chris

Hi.

Just a pitch from the devil's advocacy side of things.

On the one hand, I think it's certainly true that the 20-year campaign is so rare as to be essentially irrelevant; these things have been known to exist, but they should hardly be necessary goals.  To rate a campaign on the basis of how long it ran, when you're talking multiple years as "good," is extremely problematic.

On the other hand, it's certainly possible to run a campaign for a couple of years.  Of course it'll go through highs and lows, like a TV show, but that doesn't mean that the campaign isn't fun for all concerned, overall.

One model here is what the X-Files tried (and ultimately failed) to do: alternate "one-shots" with "plot shows."  I did this in my Victorian occult horror campaign, with periodic monster stomps interspersed with more plot-oriented sessions.  If the players seemed to have a good idea of how to move forward with the plot stuff, we'd go with that; if they all seemed uninspired (or just really busy), we'd monster stomp a little and get energy back.  To make this work, it's really helpful to have the main plot actually have its own arc, which the X-Files didn't do (although they often tried to make it seem so); when you reach the very end of the arc, you end the campaign with a bang.

But I also think it's worth thinking about the soap opera model.  It's a very different structure of episodes, where scenes cut just as they reach high points, and you keep a large number of not-terribly-related plots in the air at once.  You'd have to have each actual high point pass just a bit (nobody wants to stop a scene just before the way cool fight scene or whatever), but if a scene doesn't look like it's building too much, you could just "cut away" to another scene and get back to that one when and if it seems appropriate.

To do this, of course, you'd also need a whole lot of characters for everyone to play; perhaps the Ars Magica idea of everyone having two or three regular characters who cycle in and out would be appropriate here.  You'd also have to set aside the classic "party" model, but that has enough problems of its own that I don't think this is necessarily a great loss.  In addition, I think the GM would need to hand out NPCs right and left, so that everyone's playing most of the time, even when their own favorite characters are not involved.

The essential point about a soap opera model, though, is that it really doesn't need to end, ever.  When a story arc ends, you add a new one in its place, but since you don't have all the stories ending their arcs simultaneously, you don't need to stop.  If it looks like the group wants an ending, you quickly wrap up the plots that don't seem to be going anywhere, fold everyone's favorite characters into the ones that do, and then send those careening towards a grand finale.

Speaking from personal experience, Clenrich's suggestion of a soap opera model is very functional.  

To expand on the model, having different story arcs steered by a different player adds more story threads and complexity than a single GM could probably handle.  While steering a story arc the player takes up the classic role of GM (as is appropriate to the group's idea of that role).  Naturally, each player will have a tendency to create a story thread with his characters as a central element - primary because the bulk of his authorial power rests with his characters, their settings, and their backgrounds (only because it preserves the authorial privileges of the other players).  This does spawn the problem that now the stories created just for your character you have to GM for, and hence you lose some Immersion.  But on the other side of the coin, this means you must involve the other characters in your character's personal story, creating more interaction between characters and upping the Immersion potential for the rest of the group.  

Part of keeping the "spark" that X-Files so lacked is the approach the Buffy TV show takes - they aren't afraid to change the premise of the show.  Buffy is not the same show it was in the first season, it has changed with the characters and the audience.  Major characters enter, and leave or die; they blow up the high school; and so on.  When the X-Files did this sort of thing it felt very meta-game (the actor got sick of being Mulder).

Now, for the soap opera model to really work for a rpg campaign you'd have to take the Buffy model a step further.  Buffy cannot let go of, well, Buffy; the core characters (Buffy, Xander, Willow) and conflicts (fight evil, naughty Hellmouth) remain the same .  Let this go.  Think of running a campaign more like a lattice work of spinoff shows than a single TV series.  Now speckle with the alternating "one-shots" and "plot shows" Clenrich mentioned.

This has a lot of challenges.  Different people creating seperate story threads (and keeping the details secret) can introduce some inconsistency and authorial disputes, it can also spawn some inconsistency in overall feel.  As stories complete for old characters and new characters phase in you'll eventually have a pack of characters who are all at different power levels; which can be somewhat challenging when scaling combat.  It completely trashes the traditional party model of roleplaying; which I'm all for, but may bother some people.  It forces all the players into a GM-ish role; which again I'm all for, but may threaten some players.  It makes it difficult to conjure up plot hooks because you lack authorial control over other people's characters; this is HARD if you refuse to make drastic changes to the character's environment.  There are more, but no one asked me to write a book.

However, if you pull it off you've got a complete set of fleshed out imaginary people contributing to an epic story.

I think my interest in the continuing story is that I always want to know what happened next. They all lived happily ever after is not really a satisfactory ending for me. Did they have another adventure? Did they find happiness in life? A series in which we return to the characters in their next story is very likely to draw me in to find out what's happening to them now. Isn't that why people are buying Harry Potter books? Is it the appeal of all those hot-and-cold Star Trek movies?

I've seen a lot of campaigns end. None of them ended because anyone wanted to stop playing; they ended because life got in the way, and the players were never able to get together to finish that thread. I still know what I was going to do at the next session of games whose next session failed to happen one and a half decades ago. I've got character papers filed away for characters whose lives were just starting, but whose players' lives went elsewhere. I never ran a game to the point that people lost interest, nor played in a game where I didn't want to come back for more.

I suppose a lot of the people with whom I've gamed have wound up in dysfunctional situations--marriages, mostly, to people who for one reason or another adamantly oppose their involvement with their old friends, although there have been other problems such as changing work schedules and jobs, lost driver's licenses, relocations just far enough that regular play is prohibitive. We've also more than once lost our place to play. There are a lot of challenges to keeping a campaign going.

I think, though, that it's difficult to know whether a campaign has gotten dull. I run one player in my forum game whose game often seems dull to me. He avoids confrontations, and although he's very good at it he doesn't much like combat. He manages to stay out of relationship entanglements with the NPC's I toss at him. Periodically he solves engineering problems, and becomes involved in major construction sorts of things. I find myself sometimes worrying that he'll lose interest, and trying to think of how to spark the game a bit--but he regularly sends me a thank-you note for taking the time to run the game that he so enjoys. I'm happy with the game if the players are having a good time, even if I'm not sure why they're enjoying it; I just want to know why they're enjoying it so that I can keep it interesting.

One day I'll get that original OAD&D group back together and finish the last level of that dungeon. They had everything in place, and I've still got the encounters written up on file cards waiting to happen.

--M. J. Young

Endings... There are so many ways to treat these.  In my opinion, the best way is to get a bunch of characters for a campaign, and play the campaign out.  When it's over, it's over.  I still keep the character sheets, because the characters can come back.  However, characters have always been there for the construction of an interesting story.  Example:

Star Wars.  It was a great three movies that told a story that showes the development of characters and their galactic influence.

Luke had the coming of age problems and the confrontation with his father.

Han had the acceptance of responability-

Example over.  Anyawy, when they started making comics and books about the characters beyond their relation to the original story, it was really bad.  Each character witnessed (basically) their full development.  The same thing happens in TV, novels, and other mediums all the time.  

My favorite way is to tell a story and then the characters live on having further adventures that aren't really important to their development.  Great examples of this would be much anime, my favorite being the Final Fantasy series (IV-IX anyway).  The characters are there to solve a conflict centeral to their world.

In RPGing my campaigns go in one of three directions.

A. It is based to tell a story of the characters.

B. It is based to give the players a sense of being in a world that they can interact with.

C. A cheap way to waste time and have fun.

None last very long =).

Hi.

I think M.J. and Eric touch on an interesting point: the campaign is the opposite of somethig that ends.

For something to have an ending, it has to have a beginning.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but most of the "campaigns" I've played had very soft beginnings.  "You're all young and want to adventure..."  

Even the typical "You're hired to do the 'thing' " scenario is soft once we add into the mix two typical situations: 1) there really is a story, but only the GM knows about it, and/or 2) the players have created background material for the PCs that actually have nothing to do with the scenario at hand, so, in fact, nothing about what matters to the PCs is being actively resolved in play.

Given all of the above, I think campaign play is an attempt to grope toward a resolution to something that is so poorly defined at the start that it simply has to keep groping forward in the blind hope of finding an end.

An "ending" is aesthetically pleasing: it feels right because something that was established at the start has been changed, resolved ended.  We start at one place (Lear is arrogant, willful and powerful), and end somewhere else (he ends humiliated, humble and broken).

I think that if the starting situation is clearly defined (via, say Kickers from Sorcerer), and the game play actually addresses the starting situation, and ending will usually satisfy.  There may or may not be a desire for more -- but this most likely would be its own discrete story unit.

I'd also offer that the model for this endless sort of play is more likely TV and comic books than the endless fantasy series.  In fact, I'd say the endless fantasy series is spawned to please D&D players.  

The truth is LorR is long -- but not endless.  It is compact in purpose: circumstances are established, the characters take action, interact with many characters and environments.  The story ends as the problems set before them at the start are completed and a new "self" is revealed that hadn't been there before.  These last two points are defined from where they started the story.

The television series, for economic reasons, gives us characters who, for the most part, don't go anywhere.  There is seldom a "story" for the characters, who are changeless.  TV leads meet characters who they change.  In this regard, the Incredible Hulk and the leads of NYPD Blue are very similiar.  (As has been pointed out, the Buffy producers actually did snap this convention.)

The producers of a television series aren't looking for an end to their show, don't want to end.  If it could run for 30 years (without the stars asking for too much money), it'd be happy as all hell.  The reason most series wraps ups are lame is because there's nothing to wrap up. At best, you can have a party. But that's different than an "ending" that satisfies.

So what kind of "endings" do TV producers provide every week to stories that have no beginning?  Endings that satisfy enough -- but are not too satisfying.  Like junk food, which kind of fulfills the need of hunger -- but doesn't quite.  The person with an appetite for story shows up again thinking this time his needs will be met.  Kind of they are, but not really.

The same happens, I think with most "campaigns."  We keep showing up thinking we're getting closer toward something, an end to the campaign.  But if asked couldn't say exactly how we'd ever know it was over -- aside from the fact that we'd stop showing up.

When I played in Jesse's Sorcerer game, I knew that when my PC resolved his Kicker, "My son has returned," the story would end.

And damn, it did. In three sessions I felt as if more rising momentum had come to a sudden stop than I'd ever experienced in an RPG before.  (And remember, rising momentum coming to a sudden stop is the deffinition of a good ending -- whether the stop is physical like the end of "Aliens" or emtional like the end of "The Hours.")

The questions at hand, then, are:

Is there a beginning?  Is the momentum from this beginning rising?  Could it come to a sudden stop?  Unless these questions can be answered in the affirmative, there is nothing to be done but to keep groping forward and hope each week that some sort of satisfaction might be found.  Without these elements, we are left only with "play" -- which will continue until folks can't anymore.

Christopher

I think Christopher has hit on something essential: in order for a campaign to have an arc, like a novel or story, it must have a beginning.  All too often, we set up the group along the lines of:

Y'all meet in a bar.  You describe yourselves.  You decide to "go adventuring" or whatever.  If you have personal issues, those may come out in play, but aren't at stake now.  You decide not immediately to back-stab each other (or whatever) because you have the letters "PC" branded on your forehead.

This is of course an extreme, but let's face it, it's pretty much standard.

IMO, this is one major reason why so many games with a very explicit premise (in a loose sense) and required conflict are successful.  For example, in a classic WhiteWolf game, all the PCs are already bound together by being members of X secret alliance of super-powerful Y's who have a big beef with the Z's, who in turn are out to get the Y's.  This appears to obviate the need for much initial setup.

But I think it only appears to obviate the need.  In the setup described, the only real differences are: (1) instead of meeting in a bar, you are thrust into some sort of machinations of the Z's, and more or less make friends in a foxhole; (2) instead of having PC on your foreheads, you are all Y's, and can essentially make the required Masonic handshake; (3) you decide to be allies because the Z's are out to get you, and there's safety in numbers.

Is this really so different?  I don't think so.  The main difference, from my point of view, is that those "personal issues" that in the classic D&D adventurer group we decided to ignore are now all the same; they're central to the game, of course, but they're identical.

In my game http://auroragames.com/pdf/shadows.pdf" target="blank">Shadows In the Fog I'm trying to get around this a bit through the Group Creation Session, where people get to know one another socially, since they're really parts of the same social milieu.  Not that this eliminates the issue, of course, but it does mean that (1) mutual acceptance is based on social constraints, not a meta-game premise, and (2) your character's personal issues are entirely individual, and are central to the game without necessarily being a function of GM plot.  

Still, it's only a stab, and the game is really designed to run soap-opera style rather than with a continuous story-arc.

Isn't that somehow related to the increased resistance to arbitrary character death ?

Quote from: Thierry MichelIsn't that somehow related to the increased resistance to arbitrary character death ?

Hey, Thierry.

I'm not entirely certain what the "that" that you refer to is. If it is the concept of the continuing story, I think is yes and no.

The idea of arbitrary character death is a holdover from old D&D, which works well in that game because it's about killing monsters, gaining power but you may die at any moment. Other games really do not need the "die at any moment" element, but they have it anyway because of the nature of RPG design over the years. This is a whole thread in it's own right, I think.

But what we're talking about here is not based on increased resistence to arbitrary character death, although it may be an element of it.

I has been my observation that a lot of pre-planned scenarios get created separately from the characters: you can't reliably do that if the game is to have a satsfying classic narrative structure. I think that has something to do with continuing vs. classic-narrative campaign design.

-Marco

Quote from: Jack Spencer JrI'm not entirely certain what the "that" that you refer to is. If it is the concept of the continuing story, I think is yes and no.
[...]
But what we're talking about here is not based on increased resistence to arbitrary character death, although it may be an element of it.

I just mentioned it as a factor: the players can burn out the GM if their PC has, in effect, infinite life expectancy. It is their responsability to provide an end to the story in that case.