*looks nervously both ways* anybody else...not like one shots very much?

#25

Gus brought up the observation that one shots are unsatisfying because of a lack of character development, whereas long term campaigns are far more interesting.

This is very true in a sense; certainly, the longer the game, the more room there is for development and evolution.

However, in practice I often see the opposite trend. There is a sort of flip side to this observation:

In one shots (with games designed for that!) I see dramatic character development take place regularly. (Again, consider something like Witch or Dog Eat Dog, which reliably produces personal epiphanies and character transformations in every game.) In many “indefinite duration” campaigns, on the other hand, I see people shy away from development and evolution and stall progress in every way possible.

The result is that (in my experience) good short form games see a lot more character development per unit of time than the typical open ended campaign.

The best games are campaigns where everyone treats each session as a potential ending point or one shot, but the game continues due to sustained interest and enthusiasm. That’s like the best of both worlds, when it can be pulled off.

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#26

Gus,

It’s funny how we seem to get into these debates with regularity lately. :slight_smile:

I can clarify on this point:

Of course, there is always greater investment in characters and more development when the games are longer in duration. That is fairly tautological: spend more time with characters you love, and you will be more attached to them. Of course!

It’s like watching a several seasons-long tv show, compared to a single movie: you will feel more shock and more “feels” when a character you’ve watched for years croaks. Of course.

What I’m talking about is, rather, a matter of efficiency: how much of this can we get per unit of time?

Although this metaphor is no longer true in the television/movie world, I think you and I are both old enough to remember when this was pretty much always the case:

Yes, in a long running tv show, you will get more emotional attachment and more character development.

But a high budget movie, although it’s shorter, can be of much higher quality. More work is put it into it and it’s all very focused; better writing, better editing, more care.

In this analogy, a two-hour Hollywood film creates much more impact than two one hour episodes of a typical tv show.

The effect per unit of time is more dramatic.

Again, everything depends on the game being played, and the players. I agree that most typical trad gamers, playing a typical trad game, won’t get much out of a one shot. But that’s just because they’re used to things moving very slowly; a single session of a long running campaign will be just as lacking in impact (anyone who’s ever sat in on a single session in the middle of a long running campaign can see what I mean - unless you happen to luck out and show up for a particular climactic session, you’ll probably be bored).

Hopefully that clarifies what I’ve seen in my experience. (I’ve seen it go either way, basically, depending on the attitude of the players and their skill set.)

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#27

I like the approach mentioned by @calris of scheduling a block up front (3-8 or whatever sessions), then checking in about the next block. New game? No time? Etc. I want to try to do that!

I also do want to try one shots again, as while I still think certain systems lean this way or that, people do make the most different. When I’m not in China I should give the gauntlet Hangouts a try…

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#28

I generally pride myself on a large vocabulary but tautological was a new one for me!

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#30

I tend to like shorter “campaigns” as well - some of my favorite experiences have been games we intentionally planned for 4-10 sessions, regardless of system. I’ve had 10-session D&D 5e campaigns that were incredibly memorable, for example: we explored a particular story arc with room for a few small side stories to explore characters’ specific backstories.

In fact, regarding systems, I’d point out that some “traditional” games excel on this. As an example, take a look at Call of Cthulhu: adventures typically run for a handful of sessions (maybe 1-4), at the end of which it’s understood that many of the PCs will be unable to continue for various reasons.

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#31

I agree that there isn’t necessarily a link between “Traditional RPG” and “Designed to run for a really long campaign” – though I definitely think Trad RPGs have a greater percentage of games designed for that length, partially because very, very few indie/experimental/whatever you want to call them games design for this. That certainly doesn’t mean that Trad RPGs never design for shorter game lengths, however.

In fact, I think it’s worth the historical call-out that a lot of the reason you see a so many newer games designed for the one shot/short campaign format is precisely because the designers of those games found the pacing and amount of “character moments per hour” in older games to be lacking. This isn’t some sort of elitist “Ptui, Grognards. I bite my thumb at you!” movement, this is a reaction to lived experience. Of course, part of this reaction is ALSO the “I don’t have time in my busy adult life to play a game that lasts for years.” So there is also the element of “If I can’t play a long game, I want to jam all the character stuff I can into a short game.” here.

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#33

My only long campaign of non D&D was a DW campaign that I think went about 10 sessions. By the end, some characters were hitting 7-8th level. They pretty much succeeded at everything. I’m pretty sure that was on me to adjust the challenges they were facing. I assume they had fun - they said they did.

Someone up-thread mentioned maintaining a mechanical power curve that still also held interest. While more moves can be fun; I think there’s also an opportunity with some games (AW may be the best at this from games I have read) for the PCs to branch out politically and socially; ie take over the world.

I can imagine Freebooters of the Frontier having an Epic Level game, after the Freebooter has gotten his 10,000 silver pieces. For example, turning from a freebooter to a Freeholder or something. Completely shifts the game however from an homage to old school emergent play into something more like what I imagine Pendragon or Legacy Life among the Ruins are like.

Not sure if that’s something @jasonlutes has any interest in exploring though.

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#34

One of the frustrations I have with very long-running campaigns is that I have difficulty remembering the characters and story in between sessions. I need to take copious notes and revise them before sessions in order to follow along. The joy of the one-shot is that I can hold it all in my head at once and manipulate my character (and often other threads too) into a satisfying conclusion.

Having said that, in retrospect it’s the long-running games which I tend to remember most clearly. Not specific moments of the game, especially after a few years, but I remember all my characters and what they were like to play. I have played many, many one-shots - easily 80+ sessions at this point - and I only remember the characters I played from maybe two or three of them.

…

It might be helpful to distinguish between character advancement and character development. Advancement: the numbers get bigger, they learn new skills, they fight bigger monsters. Development: by overcoming or succumbing to their flaws, they becoming a different person.

I think it’s broooadly true to say that games optimised for short-term play are more likely to be interested in development, while those optimised for long-term play are better at advancement. I’m not sure it would be possible to do satisfying character development in a truly long-term or open-ended context. I am not aware of any successful examples of this from fiction: there are certainly very long character arcs (the Fool trilogies by Robin Hobb come to mind) but they all have a bounded nature.

Soap operas are the only truly open-ended form of fiction we have. If you watch how the characters develop in them, it tends to be that once a character has their climax and finally changes for the better (or worse) they leave the show. Sometimes they fade out of the story for a while and come back basically as they were before, ready to do their character arc again. (This is called the ‘character reset button’ in the UK.)

In an RP context, I don’t think I’d really want to continue playing that much once my character story was resolved—either by rolling a new character or resetting my development.

I’ve been enjoying some bounded miniseason campaigns recently (we aim for four sessions, then add more if needed to conclude). These tend to have strong character development, at least as I play them. But I would be really interested in an indie-space game which attempted to do character development on a very long-term scale.

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#35

Can you give an example of how you get invested in a longer-term arc? Because I noticed a tendency myself that people just start to play themselves after a few sessions.

I agree with this. Most of the Forge games I played (Kagematsu, My Life With Master, Fiasco, etc.) were mostly about setting up Freytag’s pyramid in every scene, where you introduce a problem and solve it in the same scene; rinse repeat. It gets boring because the whole structure becomes transparent to me, and the overall arc is just one adrenaline shot after another. The continuous hunt for The One Roll, in every scene, that makes or breaks the whole outcome.

Since a few years back, I become fond of the slow play for one shots and, when playing collaborative storytelling, I noticed that the stories we were really engaged in had the same structure with a few scenes that introduces the characters, a few scenes that sets up any kind of trouble, a few scenes that have the characters go at each other, and a few scenes to stitch together everything – Freytag’s triangle. Whenever we skipped the introduction part, the story turned bad because no one was really invested in their character/story, even if they created them.

But we also need slower moments within each segment (ex. rising action, climax) of the pyramid. A comedy show doesn’t consist of an hour of good jokes, because we would just raise the bar of what’s “good”, so it needs its slow play – the down period that makes the good jokes become great.

That said, I can get all this in a one shot (4-6 hours), but I need enough time to get invested in everything. I’m also more about creating good stories together with my friends nowadays, than acting in character. And when it comes to that, I can even get really invested in a story within an hour. So much that the story still lingers in my head for months, but that’s because the focus of my games is to make the participants think and create engagement through that.

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#36

Thanks, Rickard! I was very happy with that post.

Have you written anywhere about your approach to creating “slow play” in one shots, and what enables it?

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#37

Recently I’ve been playing more one-shots or 2-3-shots, and haven’t played a proper long campaign of anything for a while. (And my only long campaigns have been various editions of D&D.)

I’ve been finding the one-shots much more satisfying, for many of the reasons that others have already said. I feel like I’m getting a complete and satisfying story, while so many of the longer campaigns I played felt like they never got around to the good part. I often found myself excited to sit down for a session, only to leave disappointed — 4 hours and that’s all we have to show for it? I definitely think part of it was D&D — it’s easy to get bogged down in combat and minutiae, and there aren’t a lot of interesting mechanics for character drama or growth that isn’t tied to power.

One of the things I’ve noticed, as someone with a TV-writing background, is that one-shot games have a set structure. Everyone at the tables knows, whether the game is designed for one-shots or not, that the story ends at the end of the session. So you can parcel out story in a way that makes sense for the game and builds toward a satisfying conclusion. You get a very movie-like arc.

On the other hand, games that are built for long-term campaign play tend to punt on session structure. So while long-term campaigns ostensibly feel like a long-running beloved TV series, they rarely have the sort of episodic rhythms that even heavily serialized shows have, building a satisfying arc with an intriguing conclusion, etc.

One of the things I find really intriguing right now, as a designer, is what I see as an under-explored space: Games designed for campaign play that have the session structure of a one-shot game. For example, I’d love to see more games that are designed to feel like, say, the MCU — each session is a complete story, but they all connect and build a larger narrative. I want one-shots with sequels.

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#38

@Jeremy_Strandberg touches on this in his thoughts on further developing Homebrew World for campaign play:

My eventual plan for this is a framework where:

  • Each adventure is hard-framed at the beginning and the end, as it’s own “episode”. So, like, as the first adventure ends, we’d epilogue or otherwise wrap things up, but specifically NOT follow the PCs back to town or find out “what happens next.”
  • The second/next adventure would be framed much like the first: in media res, at the door to the next dungeon, in the middle of the next interesting situation. Lots of Q&A to establish what they’re doing here, etc.
  • Use semi-standard “love letter” style moves to help determine what happened between adventures. These would serve to (mostly) reset gear (and maybe XP), to support longer-term character development and the pursuit of longterm goals, and to give the sense of a world living and breathing and moving between sessions. The options would be stuff like Squander Riches or Make Things Right or Dig Into a Mystery or Pursue a Goal . The outcomes of these moves would help launch the next adventure, possibly providing motivations and details. (This will, I think, be the hardest part to pull off well.)

The end result would, if done correctly, feel like a collection of classic adventure short-stories. You don’t see where Conan goes off to at the end of one adventure, or how he got where he is at the start of the next. That’s all established off-camera and (maybe) revealed later.

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#39

My brain is making the connection to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (or was it Reinventing Comics?) in which he talks about how the panel structure is also using the space between panels to tell a story. From a design view, the shape of panels dictates and is dictated by the negative space around them. From a narrative view, the info not included in panels is as important as the info included; you can swing the view across huge distances, back and forward in time, or create ambiguity for the reader to inject meaning into.

If we consider the “panel” of a ttrpg to be a session, than we can think of the space between panels as the parts of the game not actively played, either between sessions or as travel/downtime skipped over during play. One option would be as @Tuirgin quoted above me, using the “negative space” to frame the subsequent session. If we want to get really experimental, we could structure a series of oneshots like the individual drill downs that occur in Microscope, allowing for incredibly disjointed one-shots that tie into an overarching narrative. If we break the one-shots apart so that they do not need to correspond chronologically we can play out stories where unexplained phenomena/relationships/artifacts are teased out in order of importance. Stories similar to the narratives of Holes, Cloud Atlas, or say Futurama.

I think the technology for these concepts probably already exists, but to my knowledge nobody has married them into crunchier systems yet.

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#40

That’s a great post, and I love the reference to Understanding Comics.

The “negative space” in roleplaying can be a really powerful tool, whether between sessions or not, to hint at and bring about character development or to create a sense of progression or depth when it comes to plot, setting, or theme. Rickard Elimaa’s Imagine plays with this on a very short scale in a way that’s really lovely.

@SamR, the only games I’m aware of that do episodic storytelling within a larger structure explicitly are, somewhat oddly, older games. Primetime Adventures (which has you plan out the “season”, episode by episode, and assign character “Screen Presence” accordingly) and In a Wicked Age…, which does so much more organically and in surprising ways.

S/lay w/me also has an interesting sort of structure for episodic, long-term storytelling.

I agree that it would be great to see more design in this space!

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#41

I am about 2/3 done with Monster of the Week, and I feel like it explicitly is about shorter episodes in a larger whole (I’m about to start the chapter on Arcs).

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#42

I’m not sure if it is explicit about the structure, but everything else about Monster of the Week, from the prep guidelines on down, drives the game towards an episodic format – it’s clear that the idea of “Some time passes between missions” is a thing since the healing rules basically say “If some time has passed since the last mission, remove all harm, otherwise, remove one.”

But it never quite comes out and SAYS that things are episodic, unless I am forgetting something.

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#43

@Paul_T: Suddenly, this week tautological was used at work. People were confused. I said here is an example…

“A longer research study takes more time.”

Thanks for helping me look smart in the office.

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#44

Wanted to give this thread some time for @jco to respond on my question because I’m really curious how we differ when it comes to starting to “feel” for the characters.

In all honestly, I haven’t given this enough thought but I really want to sit down with some people in the Swedish game design collective and discuss this face to face.

I can’t recall asking you if you played Imagine. I talked about Freytag’s pyramid in my last post but it’s not like all games/sessions need to follow that narrative structure.

Imagine is based upon kishotenketsu, and that narrative structure is about finding the mood and to reflect about the situation (making you think). Compare this to the Western narrative structure about the conflict. Every time, that I can recall at least, when we had moments of slow play in traditional games, it always brought forth a mood. Someone having a scene sighing over a letter; people helping out dropping tidbits of information to set the atmosphere in a scene; the slow pace in horror games where the game master had us scare ourselves about what could lurk in the shadows.

So … mood and contemplation, instead of conflict? Where “introduction, development, twist, conclusion” are used instead of the pyramid’s “exposition (introduction), rising action, climax, falling action (return), dénouement (reveal)”. Well, both have introduction which connects to what I said in my previous post about the danger of skipping it. I really love the introduction scenes for each character in Dogs in the Vineyard, to give an example of how it can be done. I would like to see more of that in other games.

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#45

@Rickard, it’s funny, because I just referenced Imagine a few posts above. I’m well aware of that game, as well as your various thoughts about kishotenketsu and story structure. But I’m glad you wrote that; I think it will be very interesting reading for other participants of the thread. Thanks!

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#46

Sorry, I’ve been reading this thread and really enjoying it, I guess I’ve been somewhat sheepish to contribute too much since others have quite a bit of experience and are saying very smart things!

For me, I really enjoyed building a shared history, and then sort of playing to that. Often, a mix of chemistry, chance, and stats can take your character in a way you didn’t expect. I once played a paladin in DW who, due to a mix of factors, started heavily skirting his code (a sort of bad lieutenant type) in a way I never would have expected when I made the character. And then as we played, it was fun to sort of tie what was happening to the shared history of the game. Being able to sort of create that together can be very satisfying. In my experience, people don’t just play themselves…I feel like over time their character builds up history and then they can play to that. There are a lot of factors.

I do also think that real character advancement mechanics can be pretty fun and exciting. This relates to another thread on crunch I made but I think it’s relevant. I’m trying to get into a VTM game and am making a character and you know, I have to make a lot of compromises, which feed into my character…as I level, I’ll have to choose what I care about, and the mechanics can serve to crystallize that. Do I want to be a better killer, or a better schmoozer? That will reflect the needs of the chronicle, as well as the character he’s proven to be and the character he wants to be. And then with that change, he will get more competent, which in turn will change how the narrative moves.

I find that stuff all very fun!

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