Thursday, August 24, 2017

#RPGaDay 2017 Day 24: Campaigns: Set-Length or Open-Ended Play?

Woo-hoo!  Now we're scraping the barrel for a good portion of the gaming community with Day 24 of this #RPGaDay 2017.  Good thing there are alternate questions available for those people.

Day 24:  "Share a PWYW Publisher Who Should Be Charging More"

PWYW is "Pay What You Want," an option available for online content on RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.    You can pay a million dollars, you can pay nothing, you can pay anything in between, the choice is all yours. 

The only PWYW product that I ever thought of paying money to is The Village on the Hill.  A clean concept that is certainly worth paying a buck or two. 

In order to justify people coming onto the blog and reading this, I'll be one of "those people" and pick an alternate question. 

"Campaigns:  Set-Length or Open-Ended Play?"

I'm not losing my grumpy tone on this one *yelling at a cloud*

Perhaps it's the Old School sensibilities I learned from the area gamers I hung out with, but dagnabbit, you played as long as you could with the characters you had and you liked it!  One-shots or trying out a new system was one thing, but you progressed with your characters until they died out or everyone agreed to stop playing and start something new. 

I'm in awe of and give pity to, those people who proudly proclaim, "I have a campaign for *XXXXX* that lasts six sessions!" 

Have they ever met another gamer, much less 3-6 more?  If you can get through half of your GM Agenda in the first session, you deserve the key to the city (of polyhedral dice).

And I've run into enough GMs who try to be practical, "Once they overthrow the El Presidente running the Banana Republic the campaign will be over, should be a couple of months, nothing crazy."

Sure, those are the people I talk to two years later and the PCs are fighting African Communists in the Mountains of Tibet, probably not looking into El Presidente's Secret Tibetan Bank Accounts either.

My advice:  Give 'em what they want until they tell you otherwise.  Games are a precious commodity.  Don't shutter the mine while there's still a vein of quality ore left.  

Now, if the canary in the cage is dead, get the hell out of there and don't look back...

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