For most of my RPG playing life I was in far longer running campaigns. AD&D was usually 30 weeks at two or three sessions a week, or for RQ several years running fortnightly or monthly.

Only one RQ character completed his full story arc, and he was the one who failed his power gain roll every fortnight for two years with a 40% chance of making it each time. This totally destroyed my faith in RQ’s random character development mechanism.

I was very miffed when the longest running AD&D campaign stalled with my MU 36K exp short of 18th level. If I ever GM again it will be in his universe, though I won’t tell the players why I know the senior NPC running the good guy’s organisation so well.

Knowing the background stories of my characters is important to me, no matter what the mechanics of an RPG are. Convention one-shots are not really “my” characters and therefore less satisfying to play.

That’s one reason I like convention-style one-shots; you have far less to lose if it all goes pear-shaped in the final scene. Or perhaps I just enjoy playing Call of Cthulhu, where PC survival is a bonus, and they GM is actually aiming for a Total Party Kill.

I was once in a “Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes” campain which ran for many episodes until the first true fight scene came up. At this point the mechanics let us down and the campaign crashed and burned mid-episode.

The Druid I referred to above was actually my third ever AD&D character, and at that point we were still exploring what RPGs were all about. There were some classic sessions as well as some poor ones. I will never forget the evening I was feeling frustrated with being regarded as the healing machine and loaded my spell list with the most obscure stuff I could think of: purify water, snakes to sticks and the like. I drove the DM scatty – I found good uses for them. When I cast the snakes to sticks he even asked to see my spell list, but then conceded that it did apply.

On reflection, he could have made both styles work if instead of announcing “no effect” in response to my Finger of Death he had made an amulet explode and made the bad guy gloat about how his magic defences demonstrated his superiority.

As it was, the mages were researching spells with clauses like “There is no saving throw and if you do get a saving throw then it is at -4″.

Having your signature spells constantly failing because the GM was rigging the saving throws in the monsters’ favour would make an incredibly frustrating game. Why on earth did you keep playing long enough to reach 13th level rather than walking out of the campaign and finding a DM who wasn’t a dick?

The sort of Story Games I was really talking about wasn’t D&D played in a story-centric style, but systems where the mechanics are strongly story-based; they’re more metagame rules about the player’s ability to direct the narrative rather than their character’s ability to have an effect on the game world.

TORG’s possibilities and FATE’s Aspects and Fate points are an example, but many explicitly Story Game based systems take it much further. Umlaut; The Game of Metal, which I’ve blogged about before (It’s a great game) is a good example.

I once worked a Druid to 13th level under AD&D 2nd edition rules. Many of the players, including myself, were playing in the war game style. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the accademic year (yes, we were students) that I discovered the GM was playing story rules. I had given up using the more potent spells because the never worked. The reason they never worked is because the GM wanted longer fights. What he got was booring ones as we evolved a combat style which didn’t grant the bad guys any saving throws.

Both styles of play work, but the whole group has to agree on the style!

But was the cake a lie?