Quote:
Originally Posted by Stormcrow
AlexanderHowl said he gives 5-point bonuses at the end of a campaign. sir_pudding challenges this, on the assumption that the end of a campaign is the end of ever playing with those characters or that setting again, so what's the point of giving anyone points? AlexanderHowl says he defines campaign in the single-objective way. If you're going to be discussing regulation of character advancement and bonus points at the end of a campaign, you need to agree on which "campaign" you're talking about.
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(1) It seems to me that you may be defining "campaign" in kind of a wargamy was, as "there's an ongoing struggle to attain a particular objective, and when that objective is attained or abandoned, the campaign is over." I have a more literary/dramatic definition, as "there are a theme, a conflict relevant to that theme, and a premise that makes that conflict possible, and when the premise's implications are fully explored, the conflict can be resolved and the campaign ends." I'm not saying that there's no relation between the two, but they aren't quite identical. For example, the Iliad is set during the Trojan War, and the Trojan War could be called a campaign in the military sense; but the conflict of the Iliad is over the anger of Achilles, directed first toward Agamemnon and then toward Hector.
(2) I'll stipulate that you could have a setting where you portrayed a series of different conflicts reflecting different themes, and that you could carry the same characters forward This happens, for example, with the Vorkosigan novels, where various of Aral, Cordelia, Miles, and Mark Vorkosigan and Ivan Vorpatril are present in all the stories; or in the Discworld novels, where several different groups of characters come back repeatedly; it could be done in a game. But what I'm saying, and perhaps what Sir Pudding is saying, is that I don't choose to reuse setttings, with rare exceptions, and that even for those exceptions, I have never had a character reused and likely would never allow it. And given that, awarding points to player characters at the end of the final session doesn't allow further character growth, though I might conceivably do it as a ritual closure of that session. This has nothing to do with my defining a "campaign" as something that has to end with the characters being taken out of play; it reflects the fact that I personally do end campaigns that way. For someone who might, in effect, publish a sequel, things could be different.