> That is, that when you take a campaign premise and design a
character
> for it, what that character will be doing for most of their time
in the
> near future is something you're interested in playing.
Jane, I'm not entirely sure that's fair. The idea is that what the character will be doing for most of the "on-screen" time is something you're interested in playing. Look at the Icelandic sagas - lots of great stuff is going on. But also, a lot of time passes. Do we focus on most of Njal's year - spent farming and herding and dealing with family stuff? No - most of that goes on "off-story". The narrator makes us aware that is going on and occasionally even works it into the plot.
That allows me to develop big themes and big events - a lot goes on in Dragon Pass from 1609-1634 (the tenative timeline of my story arc). But my player characters will still spend most of their time farming, herding and dealing with family stuff - but most of that goes on "off-screen". I try to make the players aware that is going on and occasionally even work it into the plot.
> It now seems that we also have "people to whom something
interesting to
> the players happens once in a blue moon" as a character concept,
which
> simply isn't something I'd ever considered. I can quite see that
that
> would make the time pass faster, as you skip from high-light to
> high-light. I'll have to give it some thought, since other people
seem
> to find it such fun, but as a general rule, if I'm playing a
character,
> it's because I *am* interested in what they do with the whole of
their
> life. If I wasn't, I'd play someone else.
I think this just depends on the campaign concept. My Gloranthan games tend to borrow a lot from Icelandic sagas - social conflicts that spiral out of control and result in big conflagrations. Takes a lot of game time and game sessions to develop the story - for instance, I've been joking that my first twenty sessions were just setting the scene for the main story. My story arcs tend to spread over an entire generation (the Taming of Dragon Pass campaign took up over twenty-five years of game time).
Other games or stories are much more concentrated in time - I've been in some brilliant games where the entire story arc was spread over a few weeks or months. Heck, even the Lord of the Rings story took place over a six month period. It just depends on the story you are trying to tell.
Jeff
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