GM Commentary

BelleSorciere wrote:Keeping a game going two years is awesome. 

Thanks BelleSorciere. On one hand it could be argued that it's not like most other LoG&S games because there are only two players and most games will have more players, but what I find with small groups is that the plot moves a lot faster than with five plus players. Whereas a large group might take many sessions to progress a plot, we will often get through very quickly. With only two of us we have played a lot of sessions and covered a lot of realms and material. If we were trying to do the same thing with four or five players, the game probably would have fizzled out by now because it's much harder to organise larger groups for a sustained length of time - and the game wouldn't have moved as fast. The only reason why the "main Amber game" lasted so long was that it was 15+ players every Saturday (all Saturday) and we were a much younger crowd - those days are long gone, but I remember how slowly the game moved. When someone got to the plot, the PCs piled in and the bad-guy typically got smashed, or it got very ugly (PCs v PCs) - but apart from that, the pace was glacial - you could be waiting an hour plus to get time with a GM to progress your part of the plot, meanwhile you were off with other PCs doing something funky in Shadow. Running a game like this with only two players is very fast moving (which is why I spend so many evenings doing writeup).

I still think that David and I should run some one-offs (perhaps 1-3 sessions long) with a larger group as it would add some flavour. It's not stale yet - we're still having fun - but I can see that it could get that way without bringing in other players. David was concerned that bringing in new people would change the Grant/Ethan 'good friends' vibe - and he's probably right - even having Isabelle trailing along has given it a "three's a crowd" feel. I don't know - I think we'll have to add something in Year 3 to keep it fun/exciting.