thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-14, Matt Snyder wrote:
What is the demarcation of long and short play? Is it more than 12 sessions? Is it measured in sessions? Is it measured in "we played that game for a year" (or more)?
I don't think there's bound to be a single answer, obviously. But, in your examples, you point to Dogs as good for, say, 10 sessions. That's reasonably long (medium?), as it's probably 10 weeks or more of real life passing by. But, does that real life gauge matter? I dunno.
I'm also REALLY interested in this question: What are the ways in which a group recognizes this game ends here or there? In many games, they are explicit and unavoidable MLwM comes to mind, naturally.
For example, Nine Worlds is intended for ... um, let's call it medium length play. I'd ROUGHLY estimate 12-20 sessions as ideal. But, in my original edition, there was no means to end story arcs. They spiraled upward until ... no one cared any more. Ron's group did exactly that. They never really ended their game, because they just couldn't see where to close it. Ron and I talked a lot about that, and that's why I revised the game with the Aristeia rules—a character end game.
Ron's group reaching that "Um, what do we do now?" point is very interesting to me. They ended the game not necessrily because it was, they agreed, over. They ended it because they couldn't agree how to end it "properly."
This makes BR go "I just finished a game my players defined as "medium" length...."
It was 25 months long, with probably 50 sessions and 250 hours of actual play. To them this was sorta of medium length -- not long, certainly, but not short.
So I'm guessing by that definition 10 games is pretty short.
This makes MS go "Wow!"
That's a medium campaign? Holy smokes! It's as long as almost any game I've ever run. It's interesting to see how different interpretations of this can be.
This makes BR go "The other game they're playing is ongoing for 4 years..."
.. and they say it probably "only" has another year left. That's the average length of a long campaign for them. Sometimes they get frustrated with me because I don't have the patience for games that go longer than 2 years.
