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Dream Factory

Public Enemy #1: The Fade

I have been running and playing roleplaying games (RPGs) for over thirty years now (I’m old!  Mid forties!  Argh!)  and I have seen my fair share of stories come to an end.  Sometimes it’s because the story is done – like a TV show, the players, after several season’s worth of story-telling may decide to conclude the story and move on to a new one.  However, much of the time it’s not a planned end – instead it’s cancelled or goes on indefinite hiatus, usually never to return.

Sadly, this happens all too often to these games – even when the story is amazing, the players are invested, and no one really wants to stop.  There are several factors.  Let’s look at what it takes to keep a good game running.

Story games aren’t at all like most common board games in quite a lot of ways.  You might be able to play a game of checkers in under an hour, or chess in under two.  Even more involved board games like Monopoly or Risk usually come in under three hours.

Most RPGs require an hour or so per scene, with four to seven scenes per episode!  And with most RPGs, while gaming is the meat of what you do in a game session, it’s not all.  In my experience, most gaming sessions go something like this:

  • People trickle in – and quite often the last stragglers can arrive a little late.
  • People kibbitz about chatting about their week, before we get down to business
  • The GMs checks in with the group to see if anyone has any issues or concerns to be taken care of before the game begins.
  • Then the GM hands out awards for any homework, along with an explanation for the level of the award given.  (John, your essay on the town of Volken was so thorough!)
  • Playing yet?  Nope.  The GM asks the group to give a short summary of what happened last episode, to bring all the details back into everyone’s mind and get the juices flowing.  If people get into this, it can take a half hour easily.
  • Now we play!
  • BUT, we have to stop playing all the time when:
    • Someone has to go to the bathroom and we need to pause the scene
    • Someone makes a joke or some other non-relevant observation, and the group takes a few minutes on that tangent – pausing the game in the meanwhile.  (Oh, john – did you get my email on Duke Nukem forever?  Fred:You play that game too?  It’s so cool!)
    • Ding!  Time for food.  Game goes on a long pause while people order pizza, nuke microwavable food, etc.  Then back to gaming.
  • The episode’s over for the day?  Great, you guys still can’t go home yet, we have to hand out the episode awards – which I am sure you all want, right?
  • We also have to ask about who wants homework for more awards next time?
  • Finally we have to make sure that everyone is one the same page about the next time, day, and location for the next episode – which may require some negotiation.
  • Now go home!

When it takes so much time to run all the scenes, and then you get all that in between stuff as well, it should come as no surprise that a solid gaming session can easily take five or six hours, no problem.  And that’s a long time.

Now a solid gaming group works best in my experience with four total people – three players and a GM.  (Although you can fit one or two more in if needed, or run with fewer if you have to.)  So that’s four people that have to find a minimum five hour block that they can all regularly (usually weekly) meet for.

Supposing we are able to do that – for example, I have a gaming group that meets every Sunday from around noon to five or six – then next question is with four people involved, how often will one of them have to be unavailable, because his father’s birthday is that day, or because it’s some religious holiday, or because his girlfriend wants him to go with her to her parents that weekend, or whatever!

Even if each gamer can commit to attend at least three out of four sessions, that means that each gamer is missing one out of four – and with four gamers, that gives you less than a one in three chance that someone won’t be missing each game.

So, from time to time, game sessions will be missed, skipped, etc.  And when that happens, especially if it happens several times in a row, the inertia moving the game forward begins to drain, and the game starts to fade…

When the group finally does get back together, they may find that the excitement, the drive to play that story may have vanished, replaced with a vague lethargy instead.  And before you know it, the cry to play a new story begins, and the old story, which was firing on all cylinders and had lots of play left in it, is abandoned because we let it lie fallow for too long.

It’s a very common tale.  It happens again and again.  What can be done about it?  Well, you have two options, and you can use one or the other, or even both.

Option one:  Demand that all the gamers take committing to this endeavor, to gaming seriously – seriously enough to show up most every time.  Ask that game time be treated as an appointment just like any other – like a wedding or a doctor’s appointment that you just don’t skip out on if your favorite band happens to come to town or if your partner wants you to mow the lawn.  Sure, there will still be emergencies – health issues, broken down cars, etc – but by making sure that when gamers make plans to game they actually live up to those commitments, not only will you be gaming more often and losing inertia far less, you will also be gaming with a more dependable class of people.

Not that anyone whose life is too chaotic to ever be reliable is a bad person per se – it’s just a person that you may not want to have in your gaming group until they solve that issue.

Option two:  Try not to hold so tightly to these games and stories.  If you lose inertia on a story and it seems too hard to pick back up, be happy about the fun you had with it, but move on to the next.  If you feel that you have to get back to that story, ask for your fellow gamers’ help to reinvest energy into it for a restart.  But keep in mind, there are always tons of new stories waiting to be told – I don’t think we will ever run out.

Now, option two works from time to time, but sometimes you are going to need to use option one, confront someone who’s unreliability is harming the game group, and ask them to make a change or leave the group until they can be more available or reliable – preferably both.  But that’s your call.

There’s no magic bullet.  Getting a reliable gaming group together and keeping everyone going so that you can have not only weeks, but months and maybe even years of developing a single story is hard – maybe the toughest challenge in gaming in general – but it’s so worth it!

Good luck!