I’ve been reading PbtA games a lot and trying to find things about how they handle game duration – specifically campaign duration. Most games I own don’t seem to talk much about how many sessions or where exactly a campaign should end. Monsterhearts does this by stabilishing Seasons, but then again I feel like it’s not really thoroughly explained.
I thought I’d seen something about duration in Apocalypse World, but a brief search into the first and second ed (draft) showed nothing. I do remember Adam Koebel saying something like the game lasting about 8 or 12 sessions (and that worked really well for me!), but also that it was probably not explained in the very books.
So, I kinda want to hear what you guys think about campaign duration and how long any given PtbA game lasts in your experience, and/or if I missed any explanations on this that actually are in the books.
I know a guy whos now on session 40+ of dungeon world. Man, the way you interact with the world changes when every character has done 40+ sessions (they took a short break after 24ish sessions i think)
My Urban Shadows Storm was resolved after 6 sessions.
I’ve been thinking about mechanics that would tie directly into the session number, with the goal of a specific number of sessions in a campaign (Fronts, Roll+Session, etc)
Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows have duration built in, I think. Other games have a “retire to safety” option which occurs between the 5th and 10th advances.
I personally like scheduled completions for my games. Open ended campaigns usually just run until people get tired of it.
I find 6-9 sessions to be the sweet spot for a good run, as long as all the players are driving towards their own goals. Reactive players that wait for the GM to spew story at them take longer.
I run my AW campaign in 6-session seasons. Between seasons some players change characters, some change only playbooks, some keep everything. Our Tribal changed to a completely new Maestro D. Angel became Hocus (but the character was the same). Battlebabe decided to keep it that way. And our Brainer from season 1 came back as a threat in season 2.
Our games have averaged about a dozen sessions. I end a campaign when I feel I’ve found out what I want to find out about the PCs.
It really depends on what you would like to accomplish. Night Witches has a set ending so that’s easy but otherwise I would look to the experience mechanic of each game for a clue as to how likely a game can comfortably run. The Sprawl starts with low stats and a slow XP gain so it can probably run quite some time before the players find everything to be a doddle. Monsterhearts tends to reward characters who have loads of experience by making the consequences of their actions that much more brutal so I have happily run a long game of that even with the rapid character advancement. Which I guess undermines my original point!
Y’know what? I think that, given we are discouraged from attempting to write the story in advance. You will just come to a point where most of you will agree that that is about where you want to leave off or switch to a new playbook. Now that I think about it Urban shadows has quite a nifty mechanic for turning old PC’s into new threats so the long campaign is quite likely to just be more about the world than the characters as people replace whomever they were playing.
Aaron Griffin yes, I also prefer the scheduled completion myself. I made the thread kinda both looking for advice and looking for a way to put it into other game’s rules. I feel the way Monsterhearts puts it is a path, but not quite there yet for me.
I might be wrong in saying this but it sounds a bit like you you want to go into the campaign with clear expectations of where it will take you.
If that’s true I’m sure you will have a fun time but you are eliminating 75% of the joy to be found in most PBTA games. Traditional games, for example D&D, have a story arc written early or before the piece which the GM plans. The GM then attempts to keep things on track broadly speaking, whilst the players do their best to mess things up. This can be great fun but it’s not really suited to most AW hacks.
AW hacks usually work best when the MC/GM?whatever is asking questions fast and furious of their players. “Who’s that guy and what’s his beef?” or “What the hell does that look like?” This means that the second you try to impose your view over the story and tell rather than ask where it is going you are losing most of your creative pool and a whole bunch of the story.
If I’m wrong about that and you just want a timeframe then I apologise for proselytising and suggest that like everything else go to your players and ask “How long is this going to run for?”
Also, it is of course your groups game and you may be more comfortable with a more traditional style of play. That’s all good and I wish you a fun game but my experience tells me that you will be missing out on a much more collaborative and interesting story.
Daniel Steadman having a story arc in mind does not conflict with “play to find out”. That’s literally what Fronts and countdowns are.
Daniel Steadman I’m not trying to get in the game with clear expectations of how it’ll end, but rather “when” it’ll end. I ran an Apocalypse World “season”, stating beforehand that It would probably take anything between 6 and 12 episodes. We did 11 episodes and It felt pretty good.
Asking the table “how long will this run for” is fine, but I like the design of the game to tell me with text how do I know when I get to the end, like Monsterhearts did. In short, it’s more like I’m trying to come up with a good way to determine the show’s “format” beforehand, not the show itself (if that makes any sense).
This is a really interesting discussion. Kudos to the variety of points of view!
My take is that the length depends greatly on three things: 1) the scope and stakes that are established in First Session, 2) the focus of the MC at hitting the established threats/storms/agendas, and 3) the amount that is added as the story progresses.
In its purest form I imagine that resolving what is established and play to find out fits into that 3-8 sessions of play timeline. But if the story is really singing and the players are engaged it can spiral into a bigger story.
For reference I have run 2 “complete” Urban Shadows campaigns. The first was very focused on what I had in mind and built from the character gen. It lasted 3 sessions and felt like we resolved what we set out to resolve. But we could have asked more questions and built it up more. The second campaign lasted 7 sessions and felt more like a pilot season of a show. We want to go back and find out where it goes, but the main arc was resolved and the characters grew and changed dynamically.
The last one had the most organic ending/climax that I have run in any pbta game and I think we really understand how that version works now.
In short I think the length depends on the MC’s focus towards handling what is established and how much “new stuff” gets revealed/discovered as the game play one.
I prefer open-ended gaming, myself, but there’s no reason you can’t set a hard limit for the number of sessions if that’s what you want to do.
With many PbtA games, there’s going to be a certain point where you can’t advance the character any further in level or abilities, but the fun of playing isn’t (IMO, at least) contingent upon that, so I just feel it’s best to keep the campaign going until everyone starts to get bored with it.
At that point, plan your next session to be an exciting climax to the game and then start something new.