I think the game challenge for 2017 should be to run 2 games for 17 or more sessions. 2×17+ sessions. If you only run long games, start considering switching once you cross the 17 session mark. If you usually run short games, try to go higher than 17 if possible.
Hard mode: make them complete campaigns/stories in exactly 17 sessions.
It feels like… Not unattainable but almost boring to me? Like “OK after 10 sessions we’ve gotten all we wanted to out of this world/system, right? RIGHT?”
Some of my players would love it, you’re right.
10 is my typical ceiling.
But! I’ve been thinking about the fact that I’m just not good at keeping games fresh for the long run. A lot of that, I think, comes down to my natural curiosity to explore systems and not fiction.
So I’d imagine the skill I need is learning to plant slower-growth seeds among the hothouse flowers that typically bloom and die fast.
Hmmm sure I’ll give a try.
Hmm. Maybe Burning Wheel or Pendragon would fit for that?
I definitely think some games support long term play better than others.
This conversation is adorable.
LOL! I ran 40 sessions (albeit 2-3 hours each, not 4 hours) on a single Burning Wheel campaign this year.
Richard Rogers dunno about that but it’s got me thinking about just what it is that clicks over in my head when I hit the 10-ish session mark.
We’re 15 or so (4 to 6 hour) sessions into our Khorosan Dark Ages game and probably right in the middle of the arc. This is de rigeur for us… Which is why I often struggle with con ttops.
So for Richard Rogers, Eloy Cintron, and Mo Jave the challenge becomes an inverse one: stop right after you hit 17 then.
We come from gaming roots where the expectation is to play a campaign, then we play indie games built for one shots or mini arcs for a few years, then someone mentions 17 sessions and then it’s like, “Whoah now, I don’t think that would be any fun?”
This was the fun. Now it’s just one way to have “the fun”.
Which, to me, is adorable.
Aaron Griffin that’s not hard, intentionally creating a shorter campaign is easy and doable, it just requires intent or scope restriction.
Careful Richard Rogers, saying that there’s more than one way to have fun is like unto heresy in more places than not!
I had to sit with “ttops” for a bit to decode that. My first instinct was “tabletop ops” which sounds tactical and totally badass.
Count me in!!
I’ll be starting a Burning Wheel game in January, so I’d love to hit this milestone.
Our jam is around five two hour sessions, so this feels like madness to me! There are people I play with who would love it.
Jason Morningstar two hour sessions are what works for us too, so I kinda feel like 17 might be cheating compared to 17 four hour sessions.
I’m ready to play! I miss longer-form games.
I mostly play six hour sessions. The only problem with 2@17 of them is getting that many sessions in, especially with one GM.
My typical game these days is around 20-30 sessions. A full pilot + 5 episode season of PTA takes about 7 sessions.
3+ years, playing weekly is about what my group prefers. So that’s around 150 sessions or so?
Can the 17 sessions be of multiple game systems (but in the same overall story arc). Like can you use microsope between your fantasy and sci-fi games to move the story forward? I mean, I know it sounds like cheating, but I just can’t see running that many games in one thing. In a year. Unless my wife and daughter sent me to camp, maybe.
Tomer Gurantz that’s sort of the challenge. Spend some time with a specific system
There is one game we have been playing for 12 years, off and on, playing probaby 30 sessions per “novella” and six full novellas to date, plus some weekend-long short stories. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out we’ve sunk 200 hours in play and another whack talking about it.
We think there’s one, maybe two left to go.
Mo Jave what’s the game?
David Benson it drifted, as did our tastes in games during this timeline. The earliest two novellas were 7th Sea, the next was TSoY, We had a hybrid that was drifted from a hack of Castle Falkenstein, half of one with FATE, and others a kind of homebrew freeform. Also, the fiction is a roman-fleuve, and so each novella needed a different kind of system to get at the arc we were hoping for.
That sounds awesome, Mo Jave
Mischa Krilov I am pretty partial to it! 🙂
TSoY has a special place in my heart. I’ve never played enough 7th Sea, and my Cyberpunk group was the wrong one for Falkenstein.
What’s a roman-fleuve?
I ran a fifteen session playtest of The Clay That Woke in 2011, and could have easily continued, but a player moved out of state and my son was born, so it ended. I haven’t actually run seventeen sessions of anything since AD&D in high school.
Mischa Krilov a French genre of novel writing… A series of novels or novellas following the life of a single character in a way that highlights the epoch they are in.
See the history section here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_sequence
Curious. That description makes me think of Amber or Nobilis, something grand in scope.