How Long Should Games Last

[hellfrog]

I think games and chars might have different lifespans, depending. I mean personally, my attention span is about 22 minutes long, but I’d say I can keep interest for a char I have really gotten into for about a year.

[Tez]

I’m terrible at starting new characters. A three month game would be an incredible challenge for me. I feel like I am still sinking into a character’s skin at that point. That said, there are games which have been around Forever. I don’t understand how Harper’s Tale still lives. I really don’t.

The games I have run – or played in! – that I have found most creatively satisfying typically run two to three years. I have a story that I want to tell for and with the players, and it’s typically for a smaller player base. Larger games absolutely do not give you the same opportunity to write a story as close to the players.

It’s typically broadly based around seasons which tend to be between 3 and 6 months in length. I don’t think I’ve run a game where I’ve planned for more than four or five seasons, which means that the sweet spot for me tends to be somewhere between two and three years. At that point, I’m usually ready to move on to something else.

[tsar]

I’ve played Cristoph @ Arx for I believe five years now. It’s a hell of a lot longer than I’ve played a PC anywhere else and I think a lot of that boils down to the world being pretty broad, with a lot of random social RP available.

But aside from that, I’m anywhere at a few months to about 2 to 3 years. So much depends on setting, staff, number of other players, turnover of those players and staff.

I was saying something to @KarmaBum that touches on what @Tez mentioned. I’m structuring out this game, I have a story to tell. I want to go for about 1.5 years to 2 years. With… TIME SKIPS. And in that we were talking about being very upfront on the tin about what this game is and also that it’s okay for a story to just be done.

[deadscribe]

2 years is my preferred length for these kind of games. Only a year for anything at a physical table. When it comes to MU’s, I notice that I take about a 2 month break after a year or so, because I run out of things to do or just need to step back.

A lot of it comes down to how the game’s progress works and how much happens in a given stretch of time. Like @tsar said, its about number of players, turnover, and how staff handles the setting.

[Third Eye]

As long as the gamerunners want to run it, which is going to vary and should vary. I don’t think there are any other factors that matter at the end of the day. I rarely particularly want to play a character beyond 2 or 3 years, but as long as I’m in a position where I can retire that doesn’t impact anyone but me the player. I don’t think admin should ever continue with something they aren’t engaged with under some obligation to ‘keep the lights on’ for players, though they should always be upfront with people about what their timelines/expectations for how long they’ll put into a game will be.

When @Tat and @tsar and kez and I were in about year 2.5 of Spirit Lake we started to have conversations about what the end game should be, in part because a year+ of pandemic staffing had been very tiring but also because it felt like the story Tat had started had reached a place where it’d been told, and there wasn’t really any place to go without a time jump or major thematic shake-up that we didn’t have any great ideas for in the short or medium term. I think if we’d come into it with more of an expectation that timejumps would be part of it, we might’ve been able to come up with an interesting evolved iteration of things, but also that game ran for 3 years and that felt like time. The games that have had actual endings are ones that orient my view of them in a more positive way (I still look back really fondly on Battlestar Pacifica’s finale, which was my first experience with that kind of thing), though that’s also probably just me.

[KarmaBum]

@Tez said in How Long Should Games Last:

I don’t understand how Harper’s Tale still lives. I really don’t.

That’s actually one of the reasons I’m curious. I know people on HT that have been playing the same character for like 20 years, and it leaves me head-tilting.

@tsar said in How Long Should Games Last:

I’ve played Cristoph @ Arx for I believe five years now. It’s a hell of a lot longer than I’ve played a PC anywhere else and I think a lot of that boils down to the world being pretty broad, with a lot of random social RP available.

I think that may be part of why I want my PCs to have a six-month lifespan. Random social RP is my least favorite thing, so I think when the story is done… so is the character.

@Third-Eye said in How Long Should Games Last:

When @Tat and @tsar and kez and I were in about year 2.5 of Spirit Lake we started to have conversations about what the end game should be, in part because a year+ of pandemic staffing had been very tiring but also because it felt like the story Tat had started had reached a place where it’d been told, and there wasn’t really any place to go without a time jump or major thematic shake-up that we didn’t have any great ideas for in the short or medium term.

How did that closure go in terms of the players’ acceptance of it? Was there “noooooooooooooo cling?”

When @bear_necessities and I originally wanted to close GH, the other players wanted to keep it so badly that we let other people take it over, and in retrospect… we should have just closed the doors. Curious if there was a similar GASP at SL when the idea of ENDING A GAME whose story had been told was pitched.

[Tez]

@tsar said in How Long Should Games Last:

I was saying something to @KarmaBum that touches on what @Tez mentioned. I’m structuring out this game, I have a story to tell. I want to go for about 1.5 years to 2 years. With… TIME SKIPS. And in that we were talking about being very upfront on the tin about what this game is and also that it’s okay for a story to just be done.

@Third-Eye said in How Long Should Games Last:

…it felt like the story Tat had started had reached a place where it’d been told, and there wasn’t really any place to go without a time jump or major thematic shake-up that we didn’t have any great ideas for in the short or medium term. I think if we’d come into it with more of an expectation that timejumps would be part of it, we might’ve been able to come up with an interesting evolved iteration of things, but also that game ran for 3 years and that felt like time.

I FANTASIZE, REGULARLY, ABOUT A GAME WITH TIMESKIPS BAKED INTO THE DNA OF THE GAME.

I am particularly interested in doing it as a truly dynastic game, based on the creation of families and legacies and maybe reincarnation and oooh, I wanna do it all so much. (I’m not gonna lie, I feel a strong thread of playing too much Crusader Kings in my whim.)

I haven’t personally seen it done somewhere else, but I would be very interested to see what it might look like, and to play in it.

[Third Eye]

@Third-Eye said in How Long Should Games Last:

When @Tat and @tsar and kez and I were in about year 2.5 of Spirit Lake we started to have conversations about what the end game should be, in part because a year+ of pandemic staffing had been very tiring but also because it felt like the story Tat had started had reached a place where it’d been told, and there wasn’t really any place to go without a time jump or major thematic shake-up that we didn’t have any great ideas for in the short or medium term.

How did that closure go in terms of the players’ acceptance of it? Was there “noooooooooooooo cling?”

People were pretty cool/accepting, at least publicly, which is all you can ask for. Interest dropped off from some people even though we had 7+ months to play, it definitely felt like there was a mental ‘this is over’ feeling even if it wasn’t that day, but that’s understandable even if it’s not how I’m wired.

[tsar]

@KarmaBum said in How Long Should Games Last:

I think that may be part of why I want my PCs to have a six-month lifespan. Random social RP is my least favorite thing, so I think when the story is done… so is the character.

And that’s one of my most favorite things! I enjoy playing roulette with RP partners. For the good and the bad, lmao.

[KarmaBum]

@tsar I know. It’s why we never RP anymore.

Also because we don’t play the same games or have the same RP times and you won’t ts me so

[tsar]

@KarmaBum lmao someday we’ll TS and also I’ll murder you at the same time in a non-social way.

@Tez I’ve been batting around the idea of three arcs (or seasons?!) with the first big enough to need a generational reboot and the second giving enough wiggle people could maintain the arc 2 PC but probably sheet refresh.

[Tat]

@Third-Eye I don’t think we were the only ones who felt like we were close to a natural ‘end’. We set out to tell a story about the return of magic, and 2.5 years in, we’d definitely hit the ‘okay, magic has returned-- now what?’ stage.

And some of that was fun to play, but there are also just big structural changes that are hard to really play through in a fun, cooperative way. So I think for a lot of players, especially those who’d been around for quite some time (we had a pretty good number who’d been there 2+ years), it felt right.

The people who were most disappointed, at least where I could see, were folks who’d joined fairly recently. A lot of folks mourned the end (I mean, I definitely did, and it was my decision!), but there was also a lot of great brainstorming and wrapping up of stories and hitting marks people wanted to hit but might not have if we were still going without an end date.

I still play around with the idea of a time skip sequel game, because I really like the setting and what we built, but I think that if one happens, we need some distance first.

[tsar]

@Tat said in How Long Should Games Last:

A lot of folks mourned the end (I mean, I definitely did, and it was my decision

I was just openly crying several times at the end. I thought I was done and then Kez hit me at the end of the last Khepri/Erik scene. shake fist

[Tat]

@tsar said in How Long Should Games Last:

@Tat said in How Long Should Games Last:

A lot of folks mourned the end (I mean, I definitely did, and it was my decision

I was just openly crying several times at the end. I thought I was done and then Kez hit me at the end of the last Khepri/Erik scene. shake fist

I still haven’t read it.

Can’t.

[Snackness]

I’m realizing that I can’t sustain a character without social connections, like, I need stuff to talk about but more crucially, I need characters to TALK ABOUT IT with. Also I hate random social RP (the ‘roulette’) so I’m basically fucking myself over constantly.

I LIKE playing for 2-3 years, but lately I’ve had trouble making it past the 3 month mark.

[sao]

@Snackness I feel this real hard.

[Tat]

@Snackness Yeah, I totally agree with this. For me, a character is often done when their close IC connections dry up. I can refresh them a time or two, but after that it starts to feel real forced and artificial and without those core friendships/relationships, it’s hard to keep on.

I like social RP roulette, and it’s still a thing that’s hard sometimes, just in terms of consistency.

[tieflinguist]

@Snackness said in How Long Should Games Last:

I’m realizing that I can’t sustain a character without social connections, like, I need stuff to talk about but more crucially, I need characters to TALK ABOUT IT with.

I think this has been the most crucial piece of how I’ve stuck with Ember for three years. I have a very stable long-term “inner circle” player group with Ember, and a huge part of what makes me excited about seeing where Ember’s story goes is seeing the stories of my friends in that group and what we bring to one another’s stuff. Our excitement for one another is symbiotic.

I think that it’s why I’ve played Katarina for over two years now and at times still feel like I’m figuring out what I’m trying to do. Katarina has a much more free-flowing, looser, far less intimate cast of fellow players around her and while I am very excited about Katarina’s budding Paul Katreides messiah complex, I don’t necessarily have anyone right now with whom there’s been an organic growth of that same kind of “our excitement for each other’s stories fuels each other” on the same level that Ember’s little player group does. There have been people in the past, but Katarina’s just had bad luck as far as those people sticking around the game long-term. If I was to be asked, “can you take Katarina into the end zone and wrap up her story in three months,” right now I wouldn’t feel like it would necessarily break some rhythm I was keeping with another player or a group of players, if I was to bring Katarina in for a landing.

(edited because some sentences were bugging me. Also @Tat is correct about it getting harder each time after you lose those connections and try to reset/refresh.)

[Snackness]

@Tat said in How Long Should Games Last:

@Snackness Yeah, I totally agree with this. For me, a character is often done when their close IC connections dry up.

it me.

And if I can’t establish connections in the first place, I’m just dead in the water.

[bear_necessities]

I don’t know if I have a sweet spot. Sometimes I’m done with a character in 3 months, other times it’s 6 months, but I don’t think it in me to sustain a character longer than a year anymore. At least not without variety, because playing the same person day in and day out bores me very quickly. That’s probably why the idea of an anthology game appeals to me, because I get to ‘mix it up’ every few months.

I do think games tend to either end too soon or linger too long, and the latter is due to people wanting to hold onto their characters even if the story is already told. I do wish games would have more of a definitive “end” though, whether that’s meteors falling or waking up and realizing you’re just a character on a MUSH or writing your characters off into the sunset with pretty vigs, whatever makes sense for the game.