“Weekly” Gaming

This isn’t the focus of your article, but it feels really good to see someone saying that their longest campaign lasted 23 sessions over roughly a year and a half. Way too many people seem to believe that the average gamer plays every week, without stopping, for years. — @vaskrag.bsky.social

It’s true! We can’t all be James. Those 23 sessions felt long and epic, and become more mythic in my head as time passes. The most successful campaign I have participated in was Pahvelorn. We managed to play weekly for the course of year and change. Even then we were imperfect, and that game hit 46 sessions before things petered out. When I ran Gradient Descent we started off strong, the first 7 sessions happened weekly, but the following 5 happened over the next 4 months! I have many stalled out campaigns under my belt. One day I’ll post about running Silent Titan, or Deep Carbon Observatory. Those games were fun, and we played for weeks … until we didn’t. There is nothing wrong trying and failing to get a game going. I appreciate when people speak plainly about their failures, along with their successes.

I always laugh when people talk about whether games support high level play, that this or that mechanic is broken past this or that level. Who are these people that play games that go long enough any of that matters? I can probably count on one hand how many characters I’ve played that have made it past level 3.

It can be challenging to keep a steady schedule, but I really do believe that the ability to do so is what leads to these campaigns that last for years and years. The game becomes a part of your life, you schedule around it the same way you might schedule around a soccer league. To quote myself:

Games stall out because people can’t get their schedules to match. Picking a schedule and sticking to it is really the only “mechanic” you need for long term play. This is The Fundamental Theorem of Gaming.

Maybe one day I’ll get there.