Thank you for being a friend, Zach

I’m getting ready to run a Cyberpunk RED campaign soon, and for the first time I’m using the revolutionary technique of “keep it to 3-5 sessions so that we actually finish it.” It seems obvious in retrospect, but until actually seeing that advice posted online I had genuinely never considered just doing short campaigns. It was only ever one shots or sprawling 100+ hour campaigns (which always fizzled out, natch). I know I’m not the only one too; aside from stories I’ve read online, I’m in a D&D5e campaign run by a friend of mine who’s never DMed before (!) and he’s drawn out a huge map and expects this to be a long, drawn out campaign. Where do you think this impulse comes from? I feel like Big Actual Plays are an obvious culprit, but I also think the fact that most of the official adventure modules WotC puts out for 5e are the large-scale 100+ hour campaigns leads people to think that they should be doing that right from the jump. If your only exposure to ttrpgs is 5e and you only looked at the official stuff, that’s the conclusion you would come to, right?

I think this impulse comes from a bunch of things, and like most problems perpetuated by Big Actual Plays, they existed before Big Actual Plays, but Big Actual Plays have more recently becomes some of their most extreme perpetrators.

I think the WotC campaign modules perpetuate this too obviously, but Big Actual Plays and that playstyle are like major parts of their marketing, so it goes hand-in-hand.

If I had to put a particular root to this it would be the idea of GM Auteurism, the idea that a (good) GM is not just a facilitator of the game and the player on the other side of the screen, but an entertainer and responsible for crafting a totally bespoke experience.

And when GMs want to be this or feel like they have to, I think they will almost always default to a big epic story, because entertainers are storytellers, and they don’t want their story to just be “some treasure hunters went into a handful of 20-room dungeons and got rich or died.” They think there has to be a quest, there has to be foreshadowing, there has to be character arcs, there has to be twenty unique fantasy cultures across the gigantic continent the party will granularly travel across (often that the game rules themselves have to be heavily modified to represent), there has to be a BEG with a speech and an epic showdown - and they think of themselves as responsible for making sure all these happen. In a trad TTRPG campaign just played straight without a prepped plot, some or all of these things might occur organically or might not, but in a culture that expects GMs to be entertainers primarily, the GM is terrified of the idea that they will not occur. That would be a failure of them as a GM. So there has to be 20 unique fantasy cultures and enough dungeons and whatever to provide space for them and all the character arcs and twists and plot points they have meticulously planned.

Im sleep deprived and rambling but hopefully this makes sense.

The reasons these kind of things fail 99% of the time is because the kind of TTRPGs these campaigns are typically attempted in just do not lend themselves well to prepped plots without a ton of very unfun railroading, take a long time to play, and because running this sort of thing as an entertainer is the equivalent amount of work as a full-time job for the GM. Big Actual Play GMs can create the illusion of this working because they are incentivized to put on a show for an audience because that's literally what they are doing, and because it is their full-time job.