After a year of slow viewing (limited by a busy schedule at first, by a desire to savor each episode later), I finally finished John’s 17-episode run with Sean, Adam, and Stras on Youtube last night. What an inspiring ride!
My question: did John or any of the players ever disclose why that game came to an end, since it doesn’t reach any “true” end point in the fiction? Was it simply a matter of scheduling and real world constraints?
I just started watching and even early on they mention their busy schedule and infrequent streams. Adam is now GMing like…3 games? John is working on a new edition of Agon, Stras just finished working on Band of Blades and Sean is busy poking Adam to finish his hack. That’s a full time job right there.
Yep. There was never an official ending, we just got to the point where we couldn’t schedule a game for the life of us and so like many things moved on. We’ve talked a few times about getting the crew back together, but I imagine it would be in a very different Doskvol than the one we left.
Thanks, Sean! That’s what I reckoned. It’s good to know that even those of you who make this your livelihoods (as well as avocations) run into the same difficulties with scheduling as the rest of us. Somehow it makes me feel better about my own abandoned games over the years…
Also, I’m not much of a believer in an RPG series having an “ending” (unless the game is specifically designed that way). We play to find out what happens – each session. There’s no end point or story arc in this mode of play.
Other RPG streams are more like shows, with arcs and finales. And that’s fine. But that’s not what we were doing.
If we had played another dozen episodes, there still wouldn’t be an ending.
For sure, John! Ever since I was introduced to “Story Now” gaming several years ago (as opposed to, for lack of a better term, the “traditional” RPGing in the D&D vein that I grew up with), I have rethought many of the previous concepts I held about the goals, structures, and methods of RPGing and what works best for me.
I guess what I meant with regard to “ending” is a point where the PCs have reached their various goals, that there are no player-driven desiderata that have yet to be met. There are times when the PCs achieve, essentially, what they set out to accomplish early in the game with no new goals accrued during play unmet, and that can be a kind of game-induced ending versus real-world factors like scheduling difficulties dictating a game being “over.”
But your point about the many longterm arcs, with no “ending” in sight for Arcy, Oscar, and Cantor is an important element of what separates Blades from many “traditional” games! (And why I love it so!)