D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[Lanefan]

I honestly cannot imagine liking a single campaign enough to play it for ten years. I just can't. Two years is pretty much my ceiling. Anything longer than that and I'm noping out. I'm simply not interested.

Then again, I have largely zero interest in ten year serial TV shows, or ten year anything.

The idea that I would presume that a campaign I start today would still be ongoing in ten years is completely foreign to me. Doesn't matter if I'm DMing or playing. If you can't finish up the campaign in two years, I'm not interested.

Where my baseline when starting a campaign is that, ideally, it'll last until nobody's interested or until I die, whichever comes first.

And I don't plan on dying anytime soon.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm pretty sure that any 10 year D&D campaign is not going to be based around a single storyline from start to finish. But you might drop in shorter adventures, as episodes.

Correct.

Some adventures are part of (sometimes not obvious) "paths" where they connect to or are part of something bigger; others are pure episode-of-the-month diversions.

Including adventures on long-term hold (thanks, lockdown) and currently in progress, I'm on adventure 94. Including between-adventure downtime (usually good for a session or two each time) and off-cycle catch-up or updating sessions, last Sunday was session 1047. There's been in total about a couple of hundred* PCs, maybe half* of which are either currently active, on hold, or still out there somewhere.

There's been numerous sometimes-interweaving storylines, with two big long-term story arcs always lurking in the background and occasionally rearing their ugly heads when an adventure or two directly deals with one. And there's been a whole bunch of "episodic" adventures where something needs doing and a party forms to go and do it. Also, sometimes an embeded adventure path doesn't become clear until it's half-done and the dots get connected.

A single identifyable party lasting more than a half-dozen adventures consecutive is fairly unusual. Players cycle characters in and out, characters die and are replaced, or parties meet-disband-form. The gang I'm running right now is a party that was just formed via someone's recruitment efforts - much like an expansion team in hockey, they've got a few long-time veterans, some cast-offs from other parties, and some rookies. The long-time veterans, however, come from a party that went 10 adventures together (five of which were a true adventure path) and led into this one.

* - and of course now I'm curious; I'll run the numbers and update this post later.

 

[Maxperson]

Gotta love victim-blaming.

I think using the term victim is a bit over the top, but no he should not have been apportioning blame without having been present and having all the information.

 

[Lanefan]

No. The bandits jumped us, so they were between us and the exit. We had literally just gotten inside a ruin, fought some spiders that almost murdered several people, and then taken a short rest because we knew if we fought anything else without healing, we'd die. The Paladin used up all but a trace of his lay on hands to help out. We weren't second level yet, otherwise I would have been able to give folks song of rest, but as noted that would have made no difference anyway. The DM sprung the bandits on us in the middle of the short rest with no prior warning that there were any bandits to fear, ruling that because we hadn't finished the rest, we got nothing out of it.

The ruling about getting nothing from the unfinished rest is correct.

After that, however; yeah, even ignoring your fairly clear bias it seems the DM went overboard. The only thing you might have done differently (though you likely had no reason to think of it in this case) was go ultra-cautious and, after the spider fight, say "We're done for the day" and retreat outside to return tomorrow after a full rest.

Oh, and did I mention that more than half the group was brand new to TTRPGs? To the best of my knowledge, none of those new folks elected to try again, because this experience turned them off of tabletop. Not just DgD, tabletop. Not that I can blame them. They'd eaten a thing folks were raving about and it tasted terrible; why would they ever want to eat it a second time?

And as a DM with a group of new players, there's only one thing I'd have done differently: made it abundantly clear up front in the game write-up that adventuring is a very risky way to make a living, and most who try it don't survive for long.

After that fair warning, I'd let the chips fall where they may and leave it up to them to get themselves both into and out of trouble.

But not our enthusiasm for it. And it is that enthusiasm which actually decides whether the game lives or dies.

Remember my anecdote about the new player who, on her first character death, became even more determined to have the next one survive? That's enthusiasm for the game. That's a player who will make the game live. That's a player I want at my table.

No. They naturally assume that you won't take their story participation away.

Their story participation isn't being taken away, as long as one defines "story" to be that of the overall party or campaign rather than of one specific character.

There are MANY ways to lose that are not death or something equivalent to it.You already asked me about several of them, and I noticed you did not respond to the fact that I was anywhere between "eh, not my thing but it's fine" (level drain) and enthusiastic (limb loss), especially if these things build new story as a result of the loss.

I saw those responses; thanks for giving them. However....

But because half of DMs are stuck on this idea that death is the one and only consequence that matters.

...DMs looking for a hard-coded mechanical loss condition ends up "stuck on the idea" of death because in 5e, death is all those DMs have left. Level drain, limb loss, item loss, and most other long-term or permanent negative consequences that affect a player's ability to play a character have been excised from the game over the years and editions; I fully expect any form of body horror (e.g. unwanted polymorph, petrification, etc.) to be the next to go. Even short-term debilitations e.g. Hold Person have been heavily nerfed.

And that's why I asked about those alternate loss conditions, which earlier editions had and which - in the case of level loss and loss of magic items - oftentimes were seen by players as being worse than death.

A ludicrous notion, as though nothing in your life ever matters unless it could kill you. The birth of one of your children doesn't matter, the death of a spouse doesn't matter, the winning of a marathon doesn't matter, the loss of a devastating court case doesn't matter, your first kiss doesn't matter, *nothing except your death?" Come the frick on. Consequences and results matter all throughout our lives and the vast majority of them, indeed the vast majority of the ones that are most memorable and impactful to us, have nothing to do with death or even violence.

In a typical D&D campaign, I'd posit marriage and-or childbirth are fairly rare among PCs. And the big difference otherwise is that in real life we can only die once, where in D&D it's nowhere near so cut and dried.

Heroes lose sometimes. But the form and shape of that loss is different compared to random shlubs, because those differences make it more interesting for most players. Surely not all. Some folks love playing random shlubs, and the game should support them at doing so (better than it does, at the very least.) But it should not be mandatory for all players that everyone must play hours and hours and hours of random shlubs before they're permitted to play heroes.

I want to play the random schlub who goes on to become...well, maybe not necessarily a hero, but a big damn fish in the pond. I also want to play the other random schlubs who die trying.

And if you start out already a big damn fish and have thus already pretty much reached your ceiling, where do you go from there?

 

[Lanefan]

I've started using fantasy-appropriate Enworld handles for NPC names in our campaigns

I've only used one so far, and as fate would have it it was @Remathilis .

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I’m our games it’s very rare that anyone chooses to be an adventurer. Usually they have no choice. Last campaign we were a bunch of tourists caught up in a highjacking. Before that, escaped convicts, escaped test subjects, strangers trapped by a storm, etc.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Hell no. Bad DMs hide behind rules, or don’t know when they should ignore them.

A good DM can run a fun game with no rules at all.

Not everyone has the benefit of playing under a good DM. And no one seems to have any idea on how more people can become good DMs.

Have you considered hosting an online game so that people here can experience what playing under a good DM is like??? Or taking an apprentice??

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not everyone has the benefit of playing under a good DM. And no one seems to have any idea on how more people can become good DMs.

Have you considered hosting an online game so that people here can experience what playing under a good DM is like??? Or taking an apprentice??

Plus, again, this insistence that someone who runs the game poorly is a "bad DM," rather than merely an unskilled DM. Lumping together both ill will and mere incompetence does a disservice.

Rules are useful tools. That's why we use them.

I completely grant that a great DM can give you a fun experience regardless. Very few people are great DMs. Most DMs are mediocre--and get a lot of help from having good rules. That's not shameful. That's not "being a bad DM." That's being human.

 

[Hussar]

Where my baseline when starting a campaign is that, ideally, it'll last until nobody's interested or until I die, whichever comes first.

And I don't plan on dying anytime soon.

That’s fair.

It’s just that my degree of “not interested “ kicks in after about 18 months. After that? Yeah, I’m not really interested. Far too many other ideas to pursue.

 

[Scott Christian]

To experience challenge (because defeat ≠ death, because losses can be things other than losing your character, e.g. items, money, limbs, levels if that's your bag, values, face, personal quests, allies, homes...there is so much someone can lose.)

I understand there are other stakes. But you are leaving out the context of this particular game we are talking about - D&D. The one where rules actually explain how you can die. And then the makers of the game spend an enormous amount of the book explaining combat. They even came up with a system of hit points to let the player know their character is about to die. If you want to houserule "no death," that's cool. More power to you. But please don't make it sound like a large majority of players don't use the death rule. They do. However, the system just makes it really hard for you to die. (I would also add, it puts DMs between a rock and a hard place when playing intelligent enemies.)

To permit branching story; after all, you should never roll to determine success if it isn't the case that both success and failure are interesting results.

Of course the story branches. Win or lose, it can always branch. But that is a win/lose situation, not a win/win. I know you don't see it as a win/win scenario. You see it as the group loses something, just not their life. But what that win/win really means is the group gets to try again. They get to face the same bad guy and attempt a second fight. And if they lose, they can go for three times, or four, or five. Might it be a different place? Different minions? Sure. But eventually, they get to try again. Because they will eventually have spells and enough gold to track down anyone they really want. That is why it is a win/win. If you want to play that way, why not restart combat after a loss, like a save point?

What’s the point in watching an action or superhero movie? We know the hero will win.

Because a superhero movie doesn't have a random dice roll determining if something works or not. It has a script. It also doesn't allow the hero, if they live, to have consistently faulty strategy. There is a difference between a movie and a game. A game has strategy, especially a game where 2/3 of the rulebook deal with combat.