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What's a reasonable amount of time to spend on an RPG campaign?
Personally, I find RPGs to be at their best when they are reasonably short - somewhere between 5 and 20 hours. Games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound seem to come to mind. For more open-ended experiences like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim I find that I generally lose interest after somewhere between 30-50 hours regardless of how addictive the gameplay is.
I haven't played tabletop RPGs so I don't have anything to say about them, but please feel free to chime in with them as well.
Heh, exact opposite for me. The vast majority of my all-time favorite RPGs all take 40-100+ hours to complete (BG1 + 2, Icewind Dale, Arcanum, NWN 1 + 2, SW:TOR, Fallout 1+2+3+NV+4, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, DA:Origins+Inquisition, Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity + Deadfire, Shadowrun: Returns+Boston+Dragonfall+Hong Kong, Divinity: Original Sin + OS2, Mass Effect 1+2+3, Witcher 1+2+3, etc). And even the two I played most recently, Baldur's Gate 3 and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, which I thoroughly enjoyed, both took me 100+ hours to complete as well.
Wanting or expecting every RPG to be 40-100+ hours isn't what I would consider "reasonable", but I still greatly prefer them over shorter RPG experiences.
Interesting question. I don't have a super prescribed length, personally, as long as it continues to be compelling and engaging. For a trite example, I was kind of over The Outer Worlds by the time I finished it (~30h), while I would easily have kept playing Baldurs' Gate 3 if the campaign had somehow kept going (~80h). So the length of both was about right for me, even though the length was very different and the games were different.
5 hours would be far too short for an RPG for me. I certainly don't mind 5 hour games, but I put that length more in the indie/cool concept space than the RPG space.
TTRPGs are such a different beast that I don't think you can directly compare them. A short campaign is still probably dozens of hours, while a long one could be literally thousand(s).
I know wanting 5 hour RPGs is weird, but I think that the reason why I end up noping out of a lot of RPGs - particularly those without particularly engaging combat mechanics - is that they are often padded with what tends to feel like busywork. I'm told that Omori is a masterwork. And it might be, but the length combined with a lost save (Steam didn't sync it for whatever reason) prevented me from ever really 'getting' it.
To each their own! I totally get your point re: busywork -- that's why I was so over the outer worlds.
I completely agree with you on shorter games which is why I look for titles like Hylics.
I think there's open world games like Fallout, Grand Theft Auto and Horizon (Zero Dawn/Forbidden West), which you could postpone the story for side quests as much as you wanted and you'll get bored at some point.
Then there's Pokemon (I haven't play any games past Emerald) and Death Stranding, where it's an open world but they put unlocks (esp. new map area) on the main quest, so you'd just need to get to the levels you wanted (infrastructure built, in case of Death Stranding) and move on with the main quest.
Finally there are railroaded RPG like Shadowrun games (from Harebrained), Trails (I'm playing!), and I haven't played Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate but I'd assume they're in this category, where it's not a true open world game (you can't move to other areas freely or they may be void of content)
Personally, I play most of these games because they are narrative driven, and the story make you wonder what will happen next. The moment their narrative no longer interest me I immediately lose interest. This happen in Horizon Forbidden West (the middle part of the game feels like a filler), and Trails Beyond the Horizon's opening (The story starts picks up in Chapter 2)
As for the time, I suppose my play game in all these games are all about 60-100 hours so I suppose that is what the game studios target for. Like, there are too much times where I finish the game at exactly 60 hours...