It's been a while since I've had the time to really play week in week out for 8 hours every Saturday, to build up to that truly glorious, well earned epic moment.
That moment is what I build towards... they come once every 5 to 10 years with tons of work in between and people never forget them!
We play 3-4 times per year, for 36+ hours over a 3-4 day period. My players expend $5,000+ dollars a year, burn 5 to 6 vacation days per year, and fly across the country to sit at my table. Wives and families probably hate me a little bit... yet I have a waiting list for each chair at my table. Part of this is that experience was fun at level 5 when they started their characters, and now at level 50 nearly 360 hours of gaming later.
The story continues... if a character dies they choose from a pool of established NPC's and make that their new main character. Each person has lost 1 character this run, but the story goes on. An NPC was lost last session and the players were near despondent because she was so well beloved. A truly outstanding campaign should be the same experience or even better than a great novel or a movie you see in the theater.
There are no sacred cows in my campaign, no artificial restrictions or rules where the GM tells them "you can't because!" Our Warrior Monk wields an epic sword, our ranger has a legendary bow, our rogue has 2 matchlock pistols and a blunderbuss, our thief has twin blaster pistols she stole from a derelict ship.
They think about the game all day long, I get over a hundred emails per week, I had to get a text package on my cell phone just because of the game.
None of this happens because I don't have control or understanding of the game system. I have been told hundreds of times by players from conventions to book shop one offs, that once they have played in my campaign they can never go back to another. I only judge myself or my campaign based on those moments. It's the players that dictate to me if I am doing a good job or not.
I am a storyteller first, a judge second, and a mathematician third...
By god when a character dies in my campaign the players are as near to tears as if they had just watched the boy put down the dog in Old Yeller! I think a character death should mean something and if it happens so often people are used to it, then they will stop caring so much and the carnage becomes just another statistic. At that point we might as well be playing Battletech or Warhammer...
A stun is just a mechanic to serve the arc, and long stuns have decided the fate of entire Kingdoms and peoples! In that context the game mechanics can mean little or everything...
