Campaign length question

When you run or play in a campaign, how long does it usually last? Do you begin a campaign with a clear idea of a story arc, or do you let things progress at their own pace, letting the PCs investigate and get involved in what they find interesting. For those of you that use home-brewed worlds, when you make the world, do you have a meta-plot in mind, designing it from the top-down (making the world to fit a story idea). Or do you construct your world from the bottom-up (designing lands, cultures, etc- and worrying later about the story ideas). Finally, what are your resons for doing so?

I'm just curious about this, and how other DMs plan their campaigns. I have noticed that most gamers I have talked to and people on these boards play campaigns of around 10-20 adventures, and I wondered if this is pretty standard?

I will run until it runs out of steam. Sometime it will only be a short campaign (4 - 8 sessions), we have one campaign that is restarting that has had... I don't even know a couple of hundred sessions.

My current campaign has been going since 2000 (since 3e came out). Prior to that, my other campaign lasted 15 years of real time (from about 1985 to 2000).

The longest campaign I've ever ran ran just over a year real time, gaming pretty much every week for 4-8 hours.

On the other hand, I'm IN a campaign that has been going on for years... I'm not even sure how many... It's a shadowrun game, and I know we were playing back in Shadowrun 2E and converted our characters as needed. Though, we only get to play that one once a month at best, I fear.

And, yes, with one exception, we are all on our original characters... though a few of us are more machine now than man, we've been though so many fights... My essence is so low that Cybermancy is starting to sound awfuly tempting... And I started off the game with almost full, minus the needed implants for a decker. Even the mage has a couple of replacement parts.

My current campaign has been going since early 2001 or thereabouts. At first I only ran modules. As the party got higher level and had more ideas of their own, they started to step away from those. Modules are still a big part of my campaign though, I just don't haave the time to create entire worlds and adventures from scratch.

How Long Can You Go..

Well up until I was 25 my longest campaign I was ever in was a year in length. Too many people with school, girlfriends, and issues to keep it going longer than that.

Also I've noticed that many of the groups that I've either been in seem to loose interest in the campaign after about a year. Around the time they hit 8th to 10th level.

Right now I'm running a group thats been together for about two and a half years. We;ve had people come and go but the core people arr the same. We started out in a 2ed Forgotten Realms campaign that lasted about 1 year (the story arc had finished and we wanted to go onto 3ed). After that I ran a 3ed Greyhawk campaign to get the 3ed rules and mechanics down (and to wait for Forgotten Realsm to come out), now we've been on a 3ed Forgotten Realms campaign for the last year with only two months off for a quick Star Wars game in honor of AotC.

Right now everyone is around 8th level anmd I plan on running the campaign until we can utilize the Epic Level Handbook. So hopefully another 2 or 3 years.

As to creating my open campaign worls, I did that when I was young and before I discovered the Forgotten Realms. I designed it from the ground up. Building countries and people without a specific story arc in mind. Try there were some things that I put in that I thought would make my campaign interesting.

Ah all those happy years.

Knightcrawler

I'm on game 493 or so of the current campaign world, one of the pcs from game 1 is still around. He's mostly in retirement, though. I don't do metaplots; I try to create a setting with internal consistency and let the pcs generate the plot.

Different groups have done different stuff but lots have interacted with the same political situations, npcs, etc.

I played in a game that ran from Aug 97 til May 02, though most games I've played in last less then a year.

I've created my own world from scratch, and have been playing games in it for many years (over 6 now), with many varying groups of players. The sheer diversity of the people I've had playing has made it all worthwhile - I've had some fantastic times, and hope to always do so. It's not the only way I play D&D, but it's always nice to return to. In that sense, I guess it's timeless, but I never really run games in it for more than a handful of sessions in a row. The last thing I want is for it to get stale.

I'm building a website for it at the moment, but it involves quite a heavy workload! I'm hoping to have most of it ready for Gen Con UK (29th August) so maybe I'll force people to have a few games of it there

I'm at 10 years, about 260 sessions. I have maybe another year or two to go.