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Kestral posted:Stopped clocks etc etc But let's just say I don't think the MYFAROG critique of the practice has to do with defending bodily integrity
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Nov 13, 2023 02:32
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It's been discussed a few times in the thread: Gloomhaven. One of my friends got it for Christmas last year, so a couple of us have been playing it through 2023. For me, it's....eh. Strategy games can be fun but for me, there's just so much going on in a Gloomhaven game that I always feel like I'm making dumb moves. I do like the ongoing story, though. Not that it's all that much better, but for me BSG is a much more fun party game.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:49
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I've never finished a campaign, and honestly I don't expect to anymore. Which is why most of the games I've been looking at recently are one-shot friendly, or just solo/journaling stuff.
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Nov 13, 2023 03:14
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With the persistent character stuff, and the way my friend wants to play all the time, Gloomhaven is more job than fun.
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Nov 13, 2023 03:41
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Gloomhaven is hella fun but it's definitely a heavy game complexity-wise. My friends are avid d&d players and they struggled quite a bit before developing efficient play habits. It's a shame the app will forever be stuck with the first edition rules because second edition is a marked improvement in pretty much every regard from what we've seen in previews
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Nov 13, 2023 10:47
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I think most GMs go too big, I aim for a campaign to last 20-40 sessions, depending on how the story arc is in my head. You try and do a 3 year epic, and people burn out. My longest complete campaign is a starwars on at about 60 sessions, but it was broken up into 3 "films" with a different campaign in between.
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Nov 13, 2023 12:53
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20-40 sessions seems like a hell-slog of campaign to me. At 10 sessions most people I know are sick of their characters, the ruleset, the setting, or all three.
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Nov 13, 2023 14:38
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Given the percentage of the hobby that is D&D, I would say most GMs starting a campaign buy a campaign book and expect to finish that book. If those books are unrealistic in scale that's not really the GM's fault
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Nov 13, 2023 14:39
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Tulip posted:20-40 sessions seems like a hell-slog of campaign to me. At 10 sessions most people I know are sick of their characters, the ruleset, the setting, or all three.
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Nov 13, 2023 14:57
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we're going onto session 26 of LMoP for 5e and i think it may be the big final boss fight. there's still a bit of exploring to do after if they want and an addendum so it may go as many as 30 sessions im guessing. this was level 1-5 for these PCs, and the first time the players have played D&D for all of them. but it felt like appropriate length for sure. it took about a year thus far. all my players except 1 want to keep going with their current characters even. and the one that doesnt just wants to change up her character and continue on as a level 5 onto the next adventure (thinking to run phandelver and below) i can see that being a long slog if you're the type that hops around from game to game/flavour of the month type stuff tho. its a big world of rpgs these days, lots out there to sample
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Nov 13, 2023 15:05
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Personally I think games tend to get better the longer they go because people are getting more and more depth from their characters because of how long they've been playing them, and the game itself builds up more and more history to draw from. But very long running games are also much harder to do for various reasons, not least of which is the fact that most systems simply can't take it. Currently 100+ sessions into my Burning Wheel game and going strong.
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Nov 13, 2023 15:07
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It’s a very generational thing. Narrative players seem to prefer shorter campaigns because it keeps story beats coming. 5e level tactical players prefer medium length in order to have time to explore character options. OSR players like hundreds of sessions that create their own mythology.
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Nov 13, 2023 15:29
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Kestral posted:Stopped clocks etc etc No, it's more of an islamophobic and anti-Semitic upset with it.
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Nov 13, 2023 15:35
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I'm glad I'm playing Gloomhaven but also kind of miffed that I didn't wait until 2nd edition came out cause there's no way we're making the switch
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Nov 13, 2023 15:49
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Colonel Cool posted:Personally I think games tend to get better the longer they go because people are getting more and more depth from their characters because of how long they've been playing them, and the game itself builds up more and more history to draw from. But very long running games are also much harder to do for various reasons, not least of which is the fact that most systems simply can't take it.
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Nov 13, 2023 15:56
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I run two sessions a month and aim for 6-12 months for most campaigns, depending on how much room the game has for interesting narrative or mechanical development. The last campaign I ran was Band of Blades, which lasted for a ~20 months. e; oneshots are anywhere between 2 and 10 sessions, depending on whether or not the people playing want to keep playing longer. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Nov 13, 2023 |
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Nov 13, 2023 16:11
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Lemon-Lime posted:e; oneshots are anywhere between 2 and 10 sessions, depending on whether or not the people playing want to keep playing longer. What… hmm. I’ve never seen anyone refer to a oneshot and not mean “meet once and play a scenario, sometimes we go really slow and have to do it over two days.” What do you call those?
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Nov 13, 2023 16:28
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Chakan posted:I’ve never seen anyone refer to a oneshot and not mean “meet once and play a scenario, sometimes we go really slow and have to do it over two days.” What do you call those? I mean, they obviously stop being a proper oneshot if we keep playing for 10 sessions, and turn into single-arc mini campaigns, or however else you want to describe them. A single 3-4 hours long session is never enough to explain the system, do character creation, and actually get to play through anything, so my actual oneshots are always 2-3 sessions anyway.
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Nov 13, 2023 16:46
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It's worth mentioning that, looking at my adventure list, our campaign only ran for about 14 sessions- we had a couple skip months due to scheduling, and played Spirit of 77 for a couple of months when we were down some people. That said, winding it down felt like a natural point to conclude. edit: we had an ice cream cake to commemorate it, and I did get some campaign art made of the town mascot  
Vulpes Vulpes fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Nov 13, 2023 |
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Nov 13, 2023 16:59
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm glad I'm playing Gloomhaven but also kind of miffed that I didn't wait until 2nd edition came out cause there's no way we're making the switch My group went on hiatus when the pandemic started. No way they'd ever want to switch if we did reconvene. Also, I have nowhere in my house to put another one of these games. Frosthaven is still in the box, for Christ's sake.
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Nov 13, 2023 17:03
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Jaws of the lion is definitely a good way to learn Gloomhaven. Playing that was the first time we didn't bounce off the game. It's also forgiving enough with sub par tactical decisions that you don't need to agonise over every move.
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Nov 13, 2023 17:16
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Griddle of Love posted:Jaws of the lion is definitely a good way to learn Gloomhaven. Playing that was the first time we didn't bounce off the game. It's also forgiving enough with sub par tactical decisions that you don't need to agonise over every move. The RAW when you fail a scenario are pretty brutal. You have to... replay it! It also sucks when they have failure conditions other than everyone dies.
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Nov 13, 2023 17:25
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ninjoatse.cx posted:The RAW when you fail a scenario are pretty brutal. You have to... replay it! It also sucks when they have failure conditions other than everyone dies. All Gloomhaven scenarios have that, though - you can survive a tough encounter, then just run out of cards. It’s not as bad as Dungeon Saga was but it’s also harder to replay. Are there any good new tactical board games of that type that support more players?
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Nov 13, 2023 17:30
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ninjoatse.cx posted:My group went on hiatus when the pandemic started. No way they'd ever want to switch if we did reconvene. Also, I have nowhere in my house to put another one of these games. Frosthaven is still in the box, for Christ's sake. GH2e is gonna be awesome but yeah it's not gonna be a thing you can switch a campaign to.
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Nov 13, 2023 18:02
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I run a session a week that lasts three to four hours on Saturday Evenings (I'm on the West Coast, and most of my players are scattered across Wisconsin, but I have one in Maine and another in Texas). My campaigns generally last fifty to sixty sessions.
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Nov 13, 2023 18:17
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I aim for 10 to 15 sessions for a game anymore. I used to run longer stuff, but I start getting antsy around after a season or so. If I'm playing rather than running, that usually means playing a few different characters over the course of a game as the other person in my ground who's likely to run goes for longer stories.
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Nov 13, 2023 18:43
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CitizenKeen posted:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stormandroot/the-wildsea-storm-and-root/description Oh, I apparently backed that one, OK!
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Nov 13, 2023 19:55
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:It's worth mentioning that, looking at my adventure list, our campaign only ran for about 14 sessions- we had a couple skip months due to scheduling, and played Spirit of 77 for a couple of months when we were down some people. That said, winding it down felt like a natural point to conclude. This rules. We've done three "episodes" over about 4-5 sessions, but I've had to put ours on break because I'm a forever DM and have a life. Our eps so far: 1. The Lizardman of Petersham, MA - this was a lizardman who lived in a swamp nearby, but the expansion of a sewer into its habitat had it hunting humans around town. 2. The Unknown of Bozeman, MT - a human that looked so ordinary, people couldn't accurately describe it. It was killing people trying to create a mask for itself so people could remember it. 3. High Rise, High Danger - this one was fun because it recalled their characters from a Spirit of 77 one-shot. One of the characters in So77 was trying to start a cult, so I fast forwarded a year and had her working with Mammon, the Lord of Greed, to give her the power to make the cult legitimately mystical. It's a fun game but I'm not super in love with the need to find a monster's weakness every time. It makes it more procedural than the shows the game emulates imo. I ended up throwing that out as a requirement and made it more a bonus to fighting the creature if they did in fact figure it out. It's also a bit of a challenge to get these bite-sized enough to work in a session or two. If I were running this in WoD any of those could have been more sprawling mini-campaigns rather than a long one-shot, but that's more on me than the system.
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Nov 13, 2023 20:24
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Chakan posted:What… hmm. Yeah that's what oneshot means.
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Nov 13, 2023 20:50
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My group's games are a mix of being in for the long haul but also individual sessions being kind of short so stuff kind of drags out a bit. Especially since people have lives and children, so we do optimistically about 2 hours during our weekly games and some of that is inevitably going to get burned on getting back up to speed from last time. The group will have been going for 8 years sometime this coming January and we've gotten through three full campaigns of varying lengths, with periodic side games as diversions to keep things from getting too stale, and are most of a year in on the fourth campaign.
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Nov 13, 2023 21:08
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Subjunctive posted:Oh, I apparently backed that one, OK! I'm hoping it hits the same physical quality as the core book, which is gorgeous. I've been through some of the PDF material, and it's still great setting fluff that you can use in your games. When you make a completely original setting, you have to balance having enough detail that the GM knows what's going on, and in leaving them room to create their own stuff.
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Nov 13, 2023 21:20
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The groups I've gamed with over the years have all used "campaign" to mean a long or even indefinite-length game with the same system, setting, players, and characters*. "One-shot" has meant a short adventure intended for a single play session, but with allowances for running out of table time and wanting to finish the story maybe becoming a two-parter. Often to try out a new system that someone's excited about but also it's been a "hey, we're all going to be in town in a couple weeks, let's hang out around a table, get buzzed and roll dice" in that beer-and-pretzels sort of way. At some point I picked up "miniseries" as a term for a game with an intended limited run and story arc, often 4-6 sessions. It's usually the next stage in a new system if enough people enjoyed the one-shot trial run but those tend to be less narrative. A few times we've liked what we were doing enough to turn it into a full campaign. *Allowances for player attrition and new joins, PC death, etc and once or twice a system change. Game of Theseus?
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Nov 13, 2023 21:26
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Well Played Mauer posted:
Ha, I'm keeping the opposite in my back pocket- running So77 and bringing them to Fortston, the haunted Nova Scotia town their MOTW characters ended up saving in the far flung future of 2023. Either that, or just running In the Mouth of Madness substituting Nova Scotia for New Hampshire.
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Nov 14, 2023 01:50
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Tulip posted:20-40 sessions seems like a hell-slog of campaign to me. At 10 sessions most people I know are sick of their characters, the ruleset, the setting, or all three. Wait, really? Ten?! Out of curiosity, how long are the sessions you play? And how much is eaten up by unrelated chat? I've played with the same group+characters for around three years (we finished the campaign and started a new one recently) playing each week - and we were still keen to continue. Same for the other campaigns I've played. We tend to only play in evenings/afternoons though, so not full-day affairs, which would probably accelerate campaign-fatigue, somewhat.
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Nov 14, 2023 03:28
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The campaign I have been running has being going on for... *checks notes* 112 sessions now. Each session being 3-4 hours long. The previous one run for 76 sessions, though the final arc had to be condensed and cut short because I got drafted.
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Nov 14, 2023 06:50
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My longest-running campaign as a GM was over about 2 and a half years and I would ballpark guess we got in around 50-60 sessions (each at 3 hours long). For as much fun as it was, it was really straining to GM after awhile and I'd probably aim for <30 in any given future campaign.
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Nov 14, 2023 07:26
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Major Isoor posted:Wait, really? Ten?! Out of curiosity, how long are the sessions you play? And how much is eaten up by unrelated chat? I've played with the same group+characters for around three years (we finished the campaign and started a new one recently) playing each week - and we were still keen to continue. Typically I'd say about half an hour of unrelated chat, 3 hours of session, so about 30 hours before everyone is just totally worn out on the campaign and ready to move onto the next one. That's the higher end, though not the absolute cap, most campaigns are quite a bit shorter but we've had a handful of longer ones. We had a promethean campaign than got into the 20s before the GM (me) came to just utterly loving hate the whole thing. Almost every campaign is a new system and I think we average about 3 sessions before we start noticing cracks in the system that bug the crap out of us. There's quite a few where people come to session 0 with criticisms of the system, though the most disastrous was LANCER where a player declared that they would rather not play any game than keep playing LANCER by about an hour into session one.
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Nov 14, 2023 08:04
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I played in a weekly campaign for a little over two years once, so we probably got to like 80 sessions before it ended. 10 sessions seem like a decent length campaign (especially if you keep the pacing nice and tight) but generally the people I know and myself like playing out characters they enjoy for a long while.
Whirling fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 08:11
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If all goes as predicted, my 5e game will wrap up in the first week of December on Session 288, seven years after it started. The players started that game as tweens and are either in college, the back end of high school, or working. I could not be more proud of each and every one of them, and immensely grateful that they gave me the chance to run One Of Those D&D Games that occupy a particular space in the hobby's lore. And jesus christ I cannot wait to play Blades in the Dark again in January, and never touch an edition of D&D past 2e ever again.
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Nov 14, 2023 09:04
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We're playing a weekly Avatar Legends game for a little over a year and a half now. About 25-30 sessions in we switched to using mutants and masterminds instead, with one player also changing characters. We're still going strong, seeing seeds develop that were planted at the very beginning, and having only missed maybe 10-15 sessions in that time.
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Nov 14, 2023 12:17
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