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 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 ?

Thierry Michel wrote: Isn't that somehow related to the increased resistance to arbitrary character death ?

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

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: 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.
[...]
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.

Very interesting discussion. I think this coincides with the recent thread on generating play from character design. I have come to think that not only is the ongoing campaign a particular type of game, but that its also mostly an ineffective game as described above. Even the goal that the campaighn game seeks is not addressed by its methodology; it seeks a sequence of stories but that would be better addressed by a non-campaign approach, IMO.

When reading Egri's book I was struck by the extent to which he insisted that everything in the designed work should reinforce the premise. This was also relevant in foreshadowing, and I think the principles should be applied more strongly to RPG (in lots of ways). So I have come to think for example that we should really only express for a character those attributes which are of direct relevance to the story; and more particularly, to THIS story. Campaign play defines a character outside of any given story, but I think we can differentiate between the persona of the character and the mechanical expression of the character. So that you would design a character for a story as an expression of this fictional person, and then re-express them mechanically for another story.

If a character in linear media had a skill, but they never ever used it in an adventure about which you read, how would you know that it existed? You wouldn't and couldn't, for it doesn't. In RPG a character with useless skills is deprotagonised; they are in the wrong story and they are not having much of a bearing on its resolution.

This is something I am rather groping towards, but I think it should be possible to re-approach the conventional structure of designing characters and then stories about those characters (or more often, simply incorporating them). The alternative would be to design the characters for the story, and represent only those aspects of the characters which have a bearing on that story. I can see ways to be more open and have story-less, perhaps setting related values, but there might be ground to discover by aiming at a mode of play which starts and stops explicitly, and which portrays only the premise supporting elements of those characters. My hope is that such a mode would produce premise supportive (although perhaps not necessarily addressing, I don't know) activity automatically without it feeling restrictive, as the player would still be empowered to act in every arena that was important.

On a related note, I have a questrion about kicker-driven play which mihgt be relevant to this discussion basd on the thoughts I outlined above. When you have characterrs generating there own premises - of which we have seveal recent cited examples - how do you manage the framing such that none of them terminate prematurely? I am aware that kicker design is intended to be carried out well prior to actual play, but is merging the timing of kickers resolutions an explicit part of the GM's wotj with them?

I'd like comments fomr those who have used kickers to set up play how they felt about using those characters in continuing play - do you feel like they required new kickers to engage with a new story (as opposed continuing to wander about) or conversely, does anyone feel explicit new kickers would have been intrusive? Well, any thoughts appreciated.

I think the beginning/end issue is really the thing that gets me. It's the difference between a movie (say 2 game sessions) and a miniseries or trilogy (perhaps several weeks or even months of play). I've had many very satisfying 1-2 night "stories" and some of my fondest memories involve "campaigns" that both started and ended and which went on for as much as 6 months.

It is all about the story for me, in the long run. I love the thrill of the duel, as it were (see TROS mechanics for combat), but when it comes down to it, the story needs to be worth retelling to someone who isn't a gamer (see TROS SA mechanics).

the 20-year campaign, I think, is really a combination of these things, ala Robert Jordan. He's running a 20-year campaign in his WoT series--and in the eyes of many, it's a lot of fun and very successful (regardless of whether many of us as individuals love or hate what he's doing with his 10,000 literal pages without a solid ending...). WoT is what the 20-year campaign can create at its best. (Well, best is subjective...)

Jake

Marco wrote: 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.

Hey all,

To use an analogy, I would like to address dramatic improv. Having done a fair amount, mostly in school, I would say that good improv goes something like this: the actors are given a rough sketch of a situation; they go through the motions as their characters, reacting to the situation; someone introduces a critical piece of information leading to a conflict; the conflict escalates; the conflict is resolved; the actors quickly find a way to end the scene gracefully. Sometimes, we get a series of peaks, but to be good in the narrative sense, each conflict needs to be resolved in a way that leads to even greater conflict. Once the highest peak is reached, the energy quickly leaves the scene.

How does this apply to mini-series and campaigns? It applies in the sense that good dramatic form is roughly the same in any media. What works for books works for movies works for theatre works for role-playing. Improv simply works as a good analogy because many campaigns start with poorly defined characters thrust into a situation.

Later,
Grant

Hi ThreeGee,

The improv thing has been discussed in various contexts, but you bring up an interesting point. My only problem with it as a model, though, is that it does tend to presume a pretty short run. I guess this is my problem with some Nar-type games that are heavy on the improv ideas: they really work best for one-shots. (Some of them are written so, of course.) I do believe that a long-running (I'm talking a year or so, not 20) campaign can be wonderful, and is not a myth, but there has to be a lot of thought about long-term goals (in terms of meta-stuff, not just in-character issues) done by all the players. I think the big problem is when a GM thinks, "Hey, I've got this great campaign world all laid out, and then it will just run itself." The players, given no long-term guidance or structure, just wander along some story threads, then lose interest. If the GM forces long-term structure by designing a campaign arc, you've just got a long mini-series, not an endless campaign.

John Kim wrote:
Actually, I think that there are intrinsic qualities to RPGs which cause this.

Marco wrote:
If the situation involves a very specific set of events with a definite conclusion (not a pre-planned conclusion, just some logical stopping point) then it's more likely to be satisfying if the characters are wrapped tightly into the situation-design.

Hi everone,

Gareth: to answer your inquiry about Kicker resolution. I've only used Kickers once, but it seems to me, like improvised music, like sex, the players all sense the climax starting up -- either within themselves, or off a cue from another player. The players are either in tune with this and decide to come along for the climax -- or they don't. As Ron pointed in one of the Sorcerer books (somewhere), there's a fine tradition of Protagonists "showing up" just as the movie is about to finish. I don't think there's anything wrong with the for RPGs. Again, though, it's not a matter of "real world" logic, or whatnot -- it's a matter of responding to story. When the story is starting to climax, you can choose to participate - or not.

Jake (and all): I, too, think long term stories are possible. As you point out, the beginning/issue is key.

After thinking it over a bit more, it occurred to me that the AD&D model of the campaign is especially strange. What is the campaign "arc" at its purest form? Starting at first level and rising. There is no real completion built into it. Remember that in the basic rules there were upper levels to reach. And then supplements allowed you to exceed those. And then become gods. I think this encouraged a style of "onward and upward." Again, the campaign just kept grinding on because, well, it could. "Where are we going?" Further. "When will we get there?" We don't. (Or rather, We get there when the group actually can't play anymore.)

Keep in mind that my comments upthread were in reference to folks frustrated with games "petering out" -- which I think is more likely than not without any kind of shape built from the beginning. But I'm sure there are folks who had a blast just playing and playing and playing.

Christopher

The comparason to soap operas intrigues me. Maybe there's a lesson there that can be applied to RPGs somehow. One thing I've noticed about Soap Operas and things like Soap Operas (pro wrestling) is that it is really, really easy to get caught up in the story. You watch one, maybe two episodes and you can wind up hooked. This makes it hard to get out of the habit because you remain constantly hooked. What is actually going on and how can an RPG mimic this?

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: The comparason to soap operas intrigues me. Maybe there's a lesson there that can be applied to RPGs somehow. One thing I've noticed about Soap Operas and things like Soap Operas (pro wrestling) is that it is really, really easy to get caught up in the story. You watch one, maybe two episodes and you can wind up hooked. This makes it hard to get out of the habit because you remain constantly hooked. What is actually going on and how can an RPG mimic this?

I spent two hours waiting for someone in a bar yesterday afternoon, scribbling away on little scraps of paper about soap operas and RPGs. I'm not going to post all my thoughts on this here (applause, sighs of relief), but here's a few points:

1. Soaps are extremely good at a limited number of things, so using them as an RPG model will tend to encourage your game in certain directions.

What soaps are good at: (1) continuing forever; (2) highlighting interpersonal drama; (3) handling very large casts of characters; (4) sucking in and holding an audience.

What soaps are not good at: (1) extended action scenes; (2) dominant story-arcs; (3) focusing intently on one issue or set of characters.

Much of the usual RPG model focuses on things which soaps aren't good at. The example of "24" has been used, but that's not really a soap. It will end: that's pre-determined. Soaps are not the same as cliffhangers.

2. The episode structure of the true soap (General Hospital, Days of our Lives, etc.) has to be abstracted from the weekly structure for RPG purposes. If you've ever watched a soap for a couple weeks straight, you know that nothing happens Tuesday through Thursday. On Monday you have a setup of stuff left over from Friday, and on Friday you have resolution and some new stuff. So for RPG purposes, since nobody wants to play the same scenes session after session, we have to think about the entire week as a single session.

3. The session structure of the soap-week, as it were, is built on a series of loosely linked cycles. We have, let's say, 6 plots running simultaneously.
-Between the start of the show and the first ad break, most or all of these plots are touched on, at least briefly, and there is an exposition of what went before as well as a setup of this week's dramatic problem.
-Between the first ad break and the third, we return to each plot, not necessarily in the same order as we first did, and we milk the week's dramatic problem by introducing a delaying factor (a mystery, a confusion, a new character arrives and holds up the private conversation between the main two, etc.); this delaying factor is also a source of tension within the dramatic problem.
-Between the third ad and the show's end, each dramatic problem is concluded in cliffhanger style: it is brought to an emotional and dramatic "high," then cut to reaction shots ("oh my god!" "my baby!" etc.), then end.

4. If we imagine this as an RPG session, you're going to have to have a lot of balls in the air at once. Every PC must have his own personal plot; the other characters in that story should be played by other players, but the focus is on the main PC. The group of PCs (assuming we don't want to discard this entirely; I personally cling to the PC group atavistically) should have one and possibly two running plots. There should be at least one background plot; here the GM may play all the characters, but can certainly farm out a lot of them to players. By a background plot I mean essentially, "Meanwhile, the villainous rich manipulator is discussing his plans with his current henchmen."

As the game session rolls along, you cut from plot to plot quite rapidly. At the start of the session, each scene focuses on some dramatic tension or issue for that plot thread; as soon as the drama looks like it's approaching climax, you cut to the next plot. In the latter part of the session, you actually have the climax occur (fight scenes would be included here). As soon as the highest point of tension is just barely past, you cut. This then tells you where to begin that same plot next time: in denouement, leading to drama in reaction, leading to new climax, etc.

5. These several plots have their own dramatic arcs, and are not synchronized. If a plot is quite dull right now, background it --- spend less time on it until it begins to build again. When a plot comes to an end (they do), you introduce a new plot for the same slot. You won't have lots of plots ending at the same time, so there's never really any way to end the campaign with a bang: you just keep going, and going, and going.

If you think this is long, you should see my actual notes! :>

contracycle wrote: ...We should really only express for a character those attributes which are of direct relevance to the story; and more particularly, to THIS story. Campaign play defines a character outside of any given story, but I think we can differentiate between the persona of the character and the mechanical expression of the character. So that you would design a character for a story as an expression of this fictional person, and then re-express them mechanically for another story.

If a character in linear media had a skill, but they never ever used it in an adventure about which you read, how would you know that it existed? You wouldn't and couldn't, for it doesn't. In RPG a character with useless skills is deprotagonised; they are in the wrong story and they are not having much of a bearing on its resolution.

John:

Then the real issue isn't about the ultimate utility of skills at all; it's about the percieved cost/protagonism ratio.

While a skill isn't being protagonizing, it's deprotagonizing, on the grounds that it probably cost you some kind of Currency to get your hands on it, and now you don't have that Currency to use more immediately.

In every RPG I've played, there has been a great deal of not-immediately-game-related detail, but none of it has been unseen; we traded character histories and dreams, tossed around discussions of their thoughts. This was really protagonizing, but a whole lot of in-game stuff wasn't, because it had no impact. To me, "You cannot be sure it is useless" just says to me that "you don't know what your game is interested in".

How this relates to the topic at hand:

The "you cannot be sure it is useless" attitude, IMO, can lead to dysfunctional "campaign" play; players cling to their characters in an attempt to squeeze protagonism out of every game element that they paid for, because so much of it was taken "in case". Every case of "in case" I've seen was secretly a situation where the player wanted to use that ability, not one where the player thought that the ability would have future utility.

John Kim wrote: In RPGs, there is a further reason to have useless detail -- because you cannot be sure that it is useless. Having characters complete with "useless" detail empowers improvisation. For example, you might think that gardening is a useless skill for the story -- but unless you plan in advance what every scene is going to be, then you don't know for sure.

Lao Tzu wrote: Tools
Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.

Four willows weeping wrote:

The "you cannot be sure it is useless" attitude, IMO, can lead to dysfunctional "campaign" play; players cling to their characters in an attempt to squeeze protagonism out of every game element that they paid for, because so much of it was taken "in case". Every case of "in case" I've seen was secretly a situation where the player wanted to use that ability, not one where the player thought that the ability would have future utility.

clehrich wrote:
As a game player, I design a character with a range of skills, abilities, background hooks, and so forth.

If after the whole campaign is over I find that I never got to use some of it, then to that extent I have been somewhat deprotagonized. But the point at stake isn't whether I should have designed these things into my character: it's whether I have created and been allowed to create an opportunity to use them.

Contracycle,

clehrich wrote:

As a game player, I design a character with a range of skills, abilities, background hooks, and so forth.

Sure, but why. This is the way we do things by default, and at the moment. We could, I hope, design character ans story at the same time or near enough.