How to Keep Players Returning for a Thousand Hours

As noted elsewhere, I've run a lot of long campaigns. (I don't currently have an ongoing game that has lasted less than three years. My longest campaigns lasted eleven and eight years, respectively; one of my current ongoing games has continued for six-and-a-half years.)

Bearing that in mind, one of the most common complaints I see on the internet is about Game Masters attempting to wrangle players and force them to enjoy the GM's nonsense. To answer those complaints, here's a short list of advice, in many ways a coda and distillation of the advice I gave at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

1. Don't cancel. If the players have to cancel, that's one thing. But in my experience, if the GM habitually cancels, everyone assumes the game isn't a priority and their attention wanes. Stay home if you're sick or there's an emergency, but otherwise, do your best to make the game a priority and your players will do the same.
• If you have to cancel, give as much notice if you can. Otherwise, even if you're feeling unprepared, this might be a great opportunity for a breather session.
• If you can establish a regular schedule, that's even better. Don't break it unless you absolutely must.
2. Listen to the players and make their choices matter. Table-top role-playing games have two big selling features: players can try anything they want (as long as they're willing to live with the consequences), and it's the only activity in this cyberpunk hellscape where a participant is guaranteed an actual living human's individual attention (as a reward rather than a punishment). So give it to them: let them try whatever they want and live with the consequences as long as you telegraph the consequences in advance.
• You don't have to tell them exactly what will happen, but "if you fail this jump you'll fall" and "you don't know what will happen if you mix those potions together" are good starts.
• Also, let consequences echo throughout the campaign. Players love it when a dangling plot thread from a year ago makes its triumphant return.
• You can do this even if the characters aren't "important." The cashier at the corner store notices that you haven't been around in a couple of weeks; that establishes the character's place in the world and suggests that someone cares about what they're doing.
3. Establish real stakes. A series of 300 scripted fights might be fun as a tabletop combat sport, but it makes for a boring longform campaign. Dig into why the characters are doing what they do, and play antagonists as intelligent characters in their own right. Everybody wants something, and has stuff they're willing to do to get it. What does that mean for the NPCs? What does that mean for the PCs? Even if the players are no-backstory dungeoneering chumps engaging in 1974-style fantasy adventuring to get gold to gain XP to build a domain, that's a plot detail that should probably come up before Level 9, right?
• On a smaller scale, not every encounter with hostile forces should lead to combat, and those that do should feature creative use of equipment, terrain, traps, tactics, and even more ephemeral things like positioning and time limits. A fight even against weaker opponents is more interesting if they have hostages, while C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan increases the difficulty by giving the players a time limit while delving the dungeon.
• Even if events become world-shaking, always bring the game back to the player characters' scale. They're not saving the world, They're saving the people in it. They probably even know and like some of them!

That's basically it. You should show your players all the courtesy you want a friend to show you, and they'll keep coming back to find out what happens next.

Don't Punish the Players

A couple of months ago, The Alexandrian made a post about OneD&D in which he took issue with "bounded accuracy," the idea in 5e and some older D&D and OSR variants that the character's statistics for attacking, skills, and the like are going to remain within a narrow range throughout a character's development. (Contrast with a game like 3e, where a character's statistics can theoretically scale infinitely such that lower-level threats do not meaningfully concern higher-level characters.)

Among his other points, Justin Alexander argues that bounded accuracy is a myth, that certain abilities in the game break it by making characters too good at certain activities. I'll let him explain:

"The more fundamental problem is mechanical: There are a handful of class abilities which trivially — but hilariously! — break bounded accuracy.

"The rogue, of course, makes an easy example here. Expertise doubles proficiency bonuses, changing a range of +2 to +6 into a range of +4 to +12. Combined with ability score modifiers, this almost immediately turns most reasonable DCs within the system’s bounded accuracy into an automatic success for the rogue, and it gets worse from there.

"Reliable Talent then comes in for mop-up, making the rogue’s minimum die roll 10. The rogue is now auto-succeeding on every proficient check, and in their chosen Expertise any DC that could challenge them is probably impossible for every other PC.

"Of course, those are exactly the DCs these hilariously broken abilities pressure the DM to assign. Partly because they want to challenge the PCs. Partly because it just makes sense that these PCs should be able to achieve things the PCs without the hilariously broken abilities can’t do."

This, in turn, reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend years ago, in which he was talking about running D&D and worrying about the fighter's armor class and hit points. He posited that one has to ensure the monsters are tough enough to routinely hit said character's high armor class so that they deduct hit points, otherwise the players are not properly engaging with the rules system.

But I don't think those approaches are the right way of looking at things. It's perfectly acceptable — and likely even good — for player characters to be good at certain things. If the rogue can pick almost any lock with a single action, or if the fighter routinely doesn't have to worry about being significantly challenged in melees, that's fine. As a Game Master, if you seek to "challenge" your players (whatever that means to you), making the numbers scale infinitely is the laziest way to do it.

You can only begin to challenge the players when you establish real stakes for success and failure. My oft-mentioned high-level D&D game could defeat any fair challenge I throw at them (and quite a few unfair ones!), but they could still be challenged with stakes: retrieve an item, save the prisoners, delve the dungeon on a time limit. Your rogue can pick any lock and disarm any trap, but can she disarm the traps and pick the locks before the room fills with water? The fighter can stand tall against any challenger, but what about a distant wizard lobbing fireballs and mind control sorcery? Your diplomat can talk his way out of any situation, but can he stall the unfriendly cultists long enough for your allies to arrive before the cult starts executing hostages?

What if one of the hostages is a beloved and trusted hireling?

I have had plenty of Game Masters in the past who seem to like to punish players for their choices: they invalidate your character abilities, steal your resources, threaten every ally you have, and turn every victory into ash in your mouth. And while that sort of game can be fun with appropriate buy-in — Black Sun Deathcrawl, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and Ten Candles all come to mind as fun games when you learn to embrace the catharsis inherent in nihilism — that often turns a fun, engaging game into a grimy slog. (Incidentally, that's usually about the time when I lose interest. Always winning is just as much a bland and uninteresting railroad as always losing.)

Don't punish your players for smart choices they made, and don't make a hard game harder for everyone. If a character is good at something, you know you're only going to target that thing with luck or by making the game unfair. Instead, challenge something else. Employ distractions, challenge multiple abilities simultaneously, play foes as intelligent and reactive forces who adapt to changing circumstances.

Establish real stakes, then build on what you've established. Character stats don't make mistakes, but players certainly do when the clock starts ticking.

You might be able to support yourself and maybe even your allies, but can you accomplish your goals?

Can you save everyone?