On the long form (again)...

 

James Maliszewski's blog is always worth a read.

So First Age starts posting about long-form, and soon they're all at it!

James Maliszewski has a good old moan on his blog about his Empire of the Petal Throne campaign write up. He'd been doing write-ups of his sessions, but recently killed them because they each rarely got more than 200 unique views (ha!) and very little interaction. He then has this mini-rant.

I had naively hoped, back when I started posting session reports, that they might at least encourage some discussion of the care and maintenance of long campaigns, because I think this is something of a lost art. The impression I increasingly get is that much of our hobby is devoted to idle consumerism – the never-satiated pursuit of the latest baubles – and not much play of any kind, never mind dedicated campaign play. I've sometimes darkly mused that the interest in so-called "actual play" videos and streams serves as a substitute for playing oneself.

I do understand what he means; my blog posts on the Strahd game seldom get more than 20 unique views, often less, and tend to provoke less conversation than other posts that I make. That said, I'm not doing them to drive traffic or provoke conversation really. They're there to capture what happened, in part for me. We're in our second year of the campaign and it would be so easy to lose track of what happened. If they serve as a reference for the players and entertain others, then they've done their job. Provoking a more detailed conversation is a bonus.

That said, more discussion of the long-form is worthwhile. Reflecting back, I've learned a lot reading blogs like the Alexandrian (see blog roll) and Sly Flourish, both of which consider campaigns in some depth. However, as a GM, I tend to internalise my thoughts on their advice more than starting a conversation back. Sometimes I just read the descriptions of the game sessions for ideas and to see how someone else does it. Often it makes me feel like I'm doing this too much by the seat of my pants, but is that a bad thing?

And do people watch 'actual play' videos and streams as a substitute? I don't know, because I'm more drawn to the written word than watching videos.

20 December 2021