A good story length is whatever is necessary to tell the story. If your story needs five missions to tell, it should be five missions. If it can be told in three, it should be three.
As for mission length, again, the map should be as big as it needs to be to fit your objectives. If you have a lot of objectives, required or optional, you can use a bigger map. If there are only a few, you should use a smaller map, rather than have a huge map full of spawns standing around doing nothing, that a player without stealth who doesn't know what needs to be done has to slog through to complete the mission.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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Wise words.|
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
A good story length is whatever is necessary to tell the story. If your story needs five missions to tell, it should be five missions. If it can be told in three, it should be three.
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Try to take a look at your story/goal for your story and make sure that everything you put in actually has it's purpose in there, either as a solid plot point or "just for laughs" or whatever. Justify it's existence or throw it out and be ruthless about it, painful though it can be. If everything in there feels "justifiable" to you, then that's how long the story needs to be.
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Wise words but not to be taken as law. Just because it can be told in three missions doesn't mean that it has to be. |
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
A good story length is whatever is necessary to tell the story. If your story needs five missions to tell, it should be five missions. If it can be told in three, it should be three.
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Use as many as you feel are necessary. There will always be people who for whatever reason complain if they have to zone more than a couple times. Then there are people like me who like changes of scenery and probably would enjoy 4 short missions more than 3 long ones that get boring halfway through.
My design goals tend to favor longer arcs. I like rich storytelling, and it's hard to craft a satisfying surprise, subplot, misdirection, or reversal in just a mission or two.
While yes, I can agree as a writer 'however long it needs to be," as a player there are some caveats. People don't all have a long time. As it uses the task force mechanic, your arc will monopolize the gameplay options of those playing it. If it's so long that multiple play sessions are needed for people who can just game evenings, it had better be good (and memorable) enough to stand up to that kind of monopolization. The player is using up their time, make sure their time is well spent.
As such, keep in mind not just the number of missions, but try each mission and see if they are long. My rule of thumb is never make an arc that takes longer than a short to medium strike force with the same team make up. Tougher enemies make longer missions, as do defeat all/lead out objectives.
For mission number? 4 is usually my maximum unless I make sure there are some relatively short ones in there somewhere. 4 defeat alls on large outdoor maps, however, is time consuming. I do try timing mine, and if a non-optimal team can't finish an arc in two hours, it's time to edit. An hour and a half for an arc is really long, when you think about it. Remember: the longer the arc, the more fun you'll have provide to distract the players with so they don't feel inclined to peek at their watches. The longer the arc, the higher the stakes.
What is ideal for mission/story length in time?
I have one story, that is completable in 10-20 minutes total for the 3 missions. I find the mission fun, and actually have played this mission several times at different levels, and found it played very different at level 5 (easy) than it did at 35 (difficult).
I have another that takes about 5 hours to do all the optionals (it can be rushed through in about 15 minutes if you just do required and know what to do). This mission will take a level 1 character to level 12 if they do all the options. Its full of mostly CoV villains so its great for Heroes for a change of pace. I found that usually finished half the optionals before moving on to next mission. So this one is easily too long.
The shorter one seems too short, but is capped because of size, many custom characters cap it. The longer one is less than half the size it could be but fills out all 5 missions and uses large maps with good spawns.
I find myself when looking for AE missions, avoiding the longer ones because I don't want to committed to long stories without a good reference (5 stars stories are not always good, some of the best tend to be 3-4 stars, because someone didn't like it). Yet I hate getting into a story that is good then see it end suddenly, with no followup.
What is a good story length, and what is a good mission times?