It's cool to see this here, thanks for posting op. I was just deepening a solo campaign in Palladium Books' Recon [0] today and getting a space trucker team together in FrontierSpace [1].
Epics and long-form narratives are really important in TTRPG culture. While originally pretty overwhelming, I learned a lot by running long-form campaigns myself. I find that the session-level complexity is usually best when kept very low, compared to what people think. The scope of events is also kept low in terms of things like "what happened today".
Personally I find that there's something about dialing the dopamine down (contrary to what people would expect) that helps the game feel easier for everybody to play in the long term.
My kids allow me to GM a couple of ongoing long-term campaigns for them, one that went from dungeon crawl to space adventure within 2 sessions and continued into space opera territory, and another long-form high fantasy campaign that's been going for 4 years now. The former uses Supers! RED [2] and the latter is based on GURPS [3]. Both are kind of gear-and-pet-fests for them so it's part of our job together to manage all that. :-)
(Including links in case others are interested in the publishing culture or games themselves)
What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story.
Even in more traditional games, I feel like I also see that tendency in certain parts of the Old School Renaissance scene, which makes me wonder if it's got something to do with the plethora of different systems that are out now. If I'm only going to have time for one game a week, I might not want to end up stuck to one setting and one system, but rather try deadly space horror in Mothership, surreal British fantasy in Troika!, steampunk metropolis Victoriana in Electric Bastionland, etc.
I'm intrigued to see if this sort of style, where one jumps from game to game relatively easily, but doesn't invest so much in a single character or world, will be as long lasting. I think the danger is that eventually you run out of new things (although that honestly seems hard at the rate that new games are being punished), but a lot of these games are fairly replayable, and my impression is that people keep on coming back to their favourites.
Funny, I noticed that too, it's a bit strange to me TBH, also with e.g. Itch becoming this neo-idea-topia just chock full of PDFs. (The charity bundles are an absolute travesty of making really cool stuff look like shovel-ware in some ways, too.)
It makes less sense to me as someone with a lot of TTRPG baggage, like back when I was a kid there was going to be a campaign to justify the character one wanted to become. But I do love to see the energy that goes into the newer games.
Socially I guess I can also see why it may help to switch things up for a lot of reasons. Maybe treating TTRPG night more like a mutable board game night allows some groups to keep on going. Or maybe we're really on the verge of some new industry discoveries that could explode into gaming we couldn't imagine before, without this new world of different gaming perspectives.
Back in the days, my students gaming group organised "one-shot" weekends. One session, 4hrs or so, story finished. Repeat 4 times, weekend done.
It was great fun and a great way to get exposure to new (to us) systems. I can't imagine the wacky hijinks of Toon in another way now. Or starting a session of Munchausen at 2 in the morning - with a whisky, because, you know, Munchausen. There was also serious stuff: Star Wars d6, of course the Empire knew about the trench run and had taken precautions! So while Han & Luke were freeing Leia, we were out to sabotage those countermeasures. I even got Kenobi's light saber out of it.
Highly recommended to those who can afford a while weekend like that.
The big-name ones are Wanderhome, Troika, and Blades in the Dark all of which are fantastic full featured systems that outside of the bundle go for a decent bit.
Pigsmoke and Damn the Man Save the Music are smaller but also very good.
>> Or maybe we're really on the verge of some new industry discoveries that could explode into gaming we couldn't imagine before, without this new world of different gaming perspectives.
You mean like what happenned to wargames back in the day, when D&D came out? Nobody makes or plays those anymore, far as I can tell (and from what I gather, the majority were solo-played anyway, which sounds a little sad).
This might be a little morbid, but I often wonder what Gygax and Arneson, and the other people involved in early D&D, thought about the genre they had started up, as they went to their graves. "I left something worthwhile behind", or "Why are all those people messing up my game"?
>> What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story.
That's right, but I wonder whether this is more of an effort to find and occupy a niche in a market where D&D still sucks all the air out of the room. D&D and some other big-name games like Pathfinder, or Vampire I think. I'm not even sure anymore.
Epics and long-form narratives are really important in TTRPG culture. While originally pretty overwhelming, I learned a lot by running long-form campaigns myself. I find that the session-level complexity is usually best when kept very low, compared to what people think. The scope of events is also kept low in terms of things like "what happened today".
Personally I find that there's something about dialing the dopamine down (contrary to what people would expect) that helps the game feel easier for everybody to play in the long term.
My kids allow me to GM a couple of ongoing long-term campaigns for them, one that went from dungeon crawl to space adventure within 2 sessions and continued into space opera territory, and another long-form high fantasy campaign that's been going for 4 years now. The former uses Supers! RED [2] and the latter is based on GURPS [3]. Both are kind of gear-and-pet-fests for them so it's part of our job together to manage all that. :-)
(Including links in case others are interested in the publishing culture or games themselves)
0. https://www.palladiumbooks.com/modern/recon
1. https://www.dwdstudios.com/frontierspace
2. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130108/SUPERS-Revised-E...
3. http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/