thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-16, Tom wrote:
Hrm...
This is actually a really good thread for me. The game I'm working on now is actually situated to run in the medium to long time frame.
Normally, I prefer shorter games. I think it's easier to do 6-12 sessions and be done rather than try to keep up a regular game night week after week. You get in, do your thing and get out. The other big advantage is that you can try a whole bunch of different things in a short period of time. Which is a big plus in my book...and it keeps a steady demand for new stuff out there, which is good for designers.
But for this particular game I'm building, I'm asking players to think about the choices they make to balance short-term and long-term goals. It's also looking at how characters grow and change when the resources and abilities they've grown dependant on, shift from under them. All of that stuff requires that you have time to explore things.
So. How am I addressing this to sustain long-term play? It's a *very* tough question. I'm working hard to hash it out. But basically, I'm going to provide options to follow two of the main solutions outlined above:
1.) Invasion of the Body Snatchers—when a PC dies, reaches a satisfying endpoint, or simply ceases to be interesting, I want to encourage players to simply look around the cast of NPCs and grab someone who's more relevant. The old PC pushes back to NPC status and over time, may make a re-appearance.
2.) Story arcs—Generally speaking, PCs face Problems (e.g. "I need to lift that rock", "We need to outrun those guys", "Our town's only well has run dry".) These problems (currently) are qualified in terms of Size (small, medium, large) and Scale (individual, group, community). So you can have a small personal problem ("ow, I stubbed my toe!") or a large group problems ("that gang of bandits in the hills") or a medium community problem ("our town government is shot through with nepotism").
As you might expect, a single PC can deal with an Individual problem, a group of PCs can probably deal with a Group Problem, and the PCs working with a large number of NPCs can probably handle a community problem. The thing is, those Community problems, even the small ones are just enormous, and they can spawn other problems. So if you go to fight the Town's nepotism with an election, that might spawn a Large Group problem in the form of the election commission being made up of family members with ties to the government.
So the idea is that you attack the community problems piecemeal to spawn off sub-problems that you and the other PCs can handle and work to get the community behind you so you can finally finsh off the Community problem.
Great. That takes care of the medium-length play. To transition to a longer-term game, resolving those Community problems creates changes in the community. Some of those changes are good, some are bad (a la Underground). Things that get worse become a rich field of potential Community Problems. Decide which one(s) you want to go after and you can start the whole process all over again.
Admittedly, I'm glossing over a lot of stuff here, in part, because I don't have a complete end-to-end model just yet. But I'm pretty sure there's a solution in there.
