"Real time" or "time lapse" campaigns?

Although I love 3E, one of its paradigms is that advancement happens very, very quickly, and that grates on me a little. (Just for one example, the original adventure path modules could be completed within a game-year. That's mustered-out buck private to greatsword-wielding demi-god in a year.)

The obvious solution is to slow advancement. With a group that meets frequently, that solution can probably work. (It worked back when I was a kid, and we gamed three or four times a week.) But nowadays my friends and I are lucky to get one five-hour session in a week, and we rotate between two games, so slowing advancement means months of no mechanical progress for the character. That's frustrating for players ... some people won't admit it, but "levelling up" is a large part of the fun of D&D. I'm convinced it's a major reason D&D remains king-of-the-RPG-hill, honestly.

So, for the past several years, I've been toying with the idea of campaigns that last upwards of a decade or more ... perhaps even upwards of half-a-century. I've pondered how to pull them off. (Note that I'm not talking about campaign worlds that have lasted that long. I'm talking about a single campaign ... one group of PCs, more or less, from start to finish.)

One thing I'd really like to try is a yearly single session -- perhaps a long session -- at GenCon. It would be one complete adventure, and between each adventure a year or two would pass, game-time (and a year real-time, obviously). During that year, the PC would be assumed to be going about other business, adventuring or otherwise, and every PC would level up once each real-year, at the end of that year's session. Each PC would receive as much gold as needed to be correct for the level, and permitted to buy magic items fairly freely. The players would email me updated stats, so I could begin work on the next year's adventure. If a player wanted, he or she could write summaries of what a PC had been up to. We could even read them -- or summarize them -- at the next GenCon, before that year's adventure.

Characters would actually age. They'd advance toward their incredible destinies slowly. The adventures would be interconnected, though that might not be obvious for five years or so. Once it became obvious, though, tension would slowly mount toward a huge finale, literally a decade or more (real-time and game-time) from its humble beginnings.

Would people here be interested in playing in that kind of campaign? How interested? How willing to commit? How able to commit?

You could, of course, do something similar, but in a home campaign. I'd probably do it more in the form of stages ... perhaps every third level or so, I'd advance the time-line of the game-world by three or five or eight years. I'd probably have to take some time off between stages, to work up the next stage -- and its connection to the ongoing story -- and to give my players time to work out what their characters are doing in that down-time.

The more I think about this, the more enthusiastic I am about it. There are so many upsides, and the only downsides I can think of are very minor. (For instance, I know it will be work to get "down-time" production, even if only a few paragraphs, from my players. I know that with the beginning of each stage of the game, I'll need to "re-hook" the players and their PCs back into the ongoing story. And so on.) Are there downsides I'm missing? What do people think of the idea in general?

I guess I do this instinctively. My PCs are quite used to me saying "six months, (or a year) has passed since you last left home". I give them a half hour(or whatever time they need) to tell me what they were doing during that time. Then we get on with things. No re-hooking is necessary, since we play nearly every week. We've been playing this campaign about 2 years now, and the PCs are almost 10th level. In game time it's been about 5 years. Once they went north for the winter into the cold region of the world (why winter? it was coincidence) and got snowed in. They spent three months in a little town shoveling snow and waiting for the spring thaw.

Gilladian

I used to enforce a rule of having a certain amount of "sink in" time between level advancements, which could be minimized by training.

In the current campaign we have sea voyages, so it's less of an issue.

wilder_jw said:

Once it became obvious, though, tension would slowly mount toward a huge finale, literally a decade or more (real-time and game-time) from its humble beginnings.

Would people here be interested in playing in that kind of campaign? How interested? How willing to commit? How able to commit?

Click to expand...

I don't think it is realistic to expect folks to commit to playing a game ten years in advance. A lot can happen in a real-world decade.

I also think it will be incredibly difficult to build tension when you have a single game each year. Tension requires continuity, and with one session a year, you don't have continuity. I doubt most folk will even remember many of the details of the first few games when you're approaching the end.

wilder_jw: I think the idea is a great one. I would love to have a campaign that could last on the order of decades. I think the biggest obstacle is the practicality of it. Would I be able to commit to a session a year for ten, much less fifty years? There's no way of knowing thanks to the curveballs life tends to throw with a certain unpredictable inevitability. I think it would be significantly more difficult than an ongoing game that has epic plot arcs spanning years because the latter type of campaign can gradually evolve to changing circumstances. The abrupt changes that could take place in this format might be more difficult to deal with; I think the narrative would have to be very agile in order to account for that.

I think this idea would greatly benefit from more continuity than just yearly sessions. I would consider revealing world events in a monthly installment during the intervening year. These events should recall events of past sessions and propel the larger narrative forward.

This could be in a newsletter form, but more ideally it would be interactive, with players providing ongoing accounts of their PCs adventures. Not like PbP; the GM might take a hand in adjudication of side adventures or not, but never at the level of granularity the game utilizes. In this format, it would become something truly ongoing, even though the episodes are few and far between. Decades-long collaborative fiction in which roleplaying is just one recurring medium.

I would love to find a group of people who would do that.

One of our groups primary campaigns started out at 1st level just over 15 years ago. We never knew in advance how long it would last however. The main thing that has kept it going was that we would play for a few years, then leave it for a while (when we went to uni for example) and then come back to it later. Each section had its own story arc but there are story lines that run through the whole campaign too. Its very player driven and we basically come back to it when we feel there is more we can achieve.

The progression was much slower than the current d20 model. Our characters are currently about 15th level, but in AD&D terms this was pretty high

Basically, don't plan in advance for this type of campaign I'd say. The players may feel that the DM would bend the rules to keep the thing alive and this could take away the risk. A campaign should last however long it lasts

Rather than slowing advancement you could play it less often like you said, or take long breaks to build up some feeling of longevity - out campaign feels epic even though its probably only about 3 years of game time

Build in some good long term plots and hooks at about the 6th to 10th levels that your players will want to revisit much later. For example, in one of our current games my character had a brief encounter with a 13+CR giant at about 6th level. At about 12th I fully intend on going back. In fact a lot of the best adventures at higher levels are fully player driven IMO

I usualy have time lapses of a few weeks durring a campaing, often with a few months between adventures.
The "in game" time between this weeks adventure and the next is going to be about a year.

I sympathize with your problem but I can't buy into your solution.

I too feel that the rate of advancement in the RAW for D&D is too fast. Thankfully this was easy for me to correct for given the XP system that we use, but even the slower rate that I settled on seems a bit fast.

I have added in some substantial bits of downtime here and there such that my last campaign ended with the PC's at around 12th -13th level after about a year and a half of game time (looking at it written there in print, it doesn't seem like I slowed things down quite enough for comfort). Part of that rate was my fault in that events unfolded rapidly toward the end of the campaign.

As for the idea of an annual game in order to stretch out the game world time frame more, it sounds a bit impractical as others have already pointed out. Moreover it is hard for me to envision being really excited about a game that takes place so infrequently and therefore is so hard on continuity.

When I'm playing or running a really good game, it feels almost like a drug. I can't wait for the next session! I think about it between sessions (particularly when I'm the GM) and write things down about it and send out e-mails about it and read over my character looking for cool new things I can do with his abilities. I seriously doubt that I could maintain that level of excitement for a year. Plus, if I miss a session for some reason, then I'm waiting TWO YEARS before I get to play again!

Everything I've read from what you've posted, wilder_jw, has led me to believe that you're a good GM, maybe a great GM. But I still think I'd have a tough time staying excited about a game that I only got to play once a year.

Well, I'm in a campaign where we play once or twice a year, but that's because the GM lives 1500 miles away. Basically we all get together (via the "road trip" of which I must journey this x-mas) and play for a few days.

That works OK, but we pack a lot of gaming in on those visits.

For my sea campaign, the ship travel eats a lot of time. One-way trips take 20-40 days, which can eat up time like nothing.

They've been playing once a month for a year now, and they're just 6th level. They seem happy at that progression.

That means I'm leveling them once every 2 games (or once every 2 months).

I suggest that once every 2 real months should be the SLOWEST you level your PCs. This keeps their interest. Especially in a once a month schedule.

I also suggest that once every 2 games be the FASTEST you level your PCs, if you want the progression to be remotely close to reasonable. This one may not fit for all groups, but it's a good rule of thumb for most.

Janx

My first thought was "I already do something like this", in that every character, before advancing in thier current character class, takes a month of "down time" to train up; if they want to switch classes, this takes even longer. Equally, many of the characters have families, thus spend time with them when they are not saving the world...

The other thought I had was, of course, "Oh cool! Ars Magica!" I had one campaign of that that ran for about 4 real-time years, but something like 45 game-time years. We had two long "down times" (one lasted 6 years, the other a decade), but the general tone of the game is to take matters at a slower pace, due to necessity.

Comitting to one game for 10 real years might be difficult, but for 10 game years, I have no problems!