>From: "Mark Galeotti" <mark_at_...>
>My entirely subjective sense is that as HQ is largely played by people of a
>certain age, with jobs, possibly kids, and generally lives, that while (a)
>may be the ideal, the other approaches come
into the picture a lot more.
Well, my guess is that people mostly set out for A (the indefinite game) still with HQ, despite the fact that it doesn't usually work. In fact, it's my opinion that generally it never worked particularly well. That is, when you play an "indefinite" game, they tend to collapse for bad reasons. Somebody eventually moves, or the characters just get played out, or something like that.
In fact, most "indefinite" games seem to me to have an unwritten clause that at some point when the characters have gotten pretty far along that the GM will come up with a climax to the game - this is the first "fix" discovered to this problem. But the thing is that, from what I've seen, this rarely if ever actually comes about, because there's no way to really guage progress. Worse, when they do come about, they're often contrived and put into play because the players are getting bored - at which point it's really probably too late. Play is adventure after adventure until it just becomes old.
It seems to me that all games should somehow have some sort of arc specified for them. Unless you're really going to be satisfied with a game that ends when people get bored or it ends abruptly due to a problem, then you should have a general idea of how the game is going to end, IMO. Not in terms of events neccessarily, but in terms of characters, or just time played. Is the story told? Have we played enough with these characters?
This means a lot of discipline in some cases, and shutting a game down sooner rather than later. Again, I think what happens is that people assume the "D&D Standard." Meaning something like 15 sessions per level times 20 levels or 300 sessions. Meaning that they're planning on 8 years of real time passing before they're finished. That's a fine goal, but probably just not practical in most cases.
If you can swing it, great. But why not shorten the expectation dramatically, and then agree to play "sequels" with the same characters if people are still interested in playing those characters? This way you can have several climaxes over time, and have them more consistently, since you're informed that you need to be driving on them. Instead of waiting for it to just happen at some point while playing adventures that maybe only tangentially relate to the arc.
And it also means that if/when it's time to change personell, you have an opportunity to do this in the least problematic manner. Both players and characters. In practice a lot of people do this informally, because they've had to learn the hard way that it's what works given that most RPGs simply do not talk about this sort of thing (they simply posit indefinite play as indefinitely unproblematic). So, if you're saying that you're thinking of putting in some notes about paying attention to this stuff, I'm all for it.
Mike
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