Who else is still playing their original campaign?

Still playing after all these years! I am curious how many other old-timers there might be out there still with their original campaigns.

We began back in May of 1982 and a still going. We've pretty much stuck with 1st Edition rules (one exception - we use the 2nd Edition Bard class as we found the 1st Edition version unworkable).

Our Sunday night group is now on Module #172 having played 1,307 games thus far. Over the years our regular attendance has ranged as low as four to as high as fourteen, and most players have five to nine playing characters who they alternate.

No, sadly not, but more power to you for still hanging with both the same group and campaign. The only person I still game with from my original group is my twin, but I'm stuck with him.

The group I'm currently DMing for is the one that's lasted the longest, going on for almost a decade, but that's been through multiple campaigns and some shifting of membership.

Oh, and the 1e bard was something else. I managed to have a character finally manage to qualify for the class back in the day, but by that time I was tired of playing the character!

The campaign I first played in (in 1982) started in 1981. It "ended" around 1990-ish, meanwhile the same DM was starting a "new" campaign. That one lasted until about 1998. Then, in 2007 he started another "new" campaign...and a while later it was revealed that the two "new" ones were in fact just offshoots of the original. Today, having largely merged the new two and with elements of the older one rearing their ugly heads (including the character whose name I use here) it's apparent they're really just one great big long interwoven campaign with an 8-year hole in it (1999-2007) that is still going.

Same slowly-morphing system all the way: we call it "Victoria Rules", a much-modified-over-the-years version of 1e.

One player (the DM's wife) has been a constant throughout; hardly surprising seeing as they first met via playing in a D&D game. Myself and another player who started just before me have also been pretty much constant. Many, many others have come and gone.

As DM, my campaigns go long (10, 12 and 9+ years) but I start fresh with each one as regards world/setting, story,etc....they're connected a bit (e.g. they're in the same universe and one coujld, in theory, planeshift ftom one to the other) but I count them as separate campaigns.

EDIT: redacted - my dumb

Lanefan

Silver Moon said:

We began back in May of 1982 and a still going. ...

Our Sunday night group is now on Module #172 having played 1,307 games thus far.

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[MENTION=8530]Silver Moon[/MENTION] these are interesting numbers to compare with my/our own records here.

2017-1982 gives 35 years. 1307 sessions / 35 years gives a bit over 37 sessions a year; by this I assume you play weekly (with the usual interruptions sinking about 1 session in 4) with few if any off-cycle sessions or overlapping groups i.e. 2+ sesisons a week with different parties. 'Bout right?

1307 sessions / 172 adventures gives an average of just over 7.5 sessions per adventure. Our long-term average is about 10-11 sessions per adventure, which tells me either your sessions are longer than ours or (more likely) your play is more efficient.

My question is, what level is your party? We've found here that the per-adventure session count tends to increase with higher level, attributable to a number of possible factors: adventure (module) complexity and size, more options per character and opponent slowing down combat, more access to divination-type spells causing more time being spent planning and information-gathering, and so on. For comparison purposes, our campaigns have all started at raw 1st and each got to the 9th-10th range (no PC has ever got beyond 12th); with very slow advancement rules, lots of cycling of parties and characters (and sometimes players!) all countered by us often running more than one session per week e.g. in my current campaign for a long time I ran one group on Fridays and another on Sundays - these two groups had lots of overlap and interweaving of characters and players, and stemmed from a common root.

Lan-"congrats again on the amazingly long campaign"-efan

I've reconnected with the very first person besides my brother I games with at ten. Met up at GenCin

Not the same campaign by any means but I am still using a version of the campaign world I first started working on back in 1988 (BECMI rules at the time).

Lanefan said:

One player (the DM's wife) has been a constant throughout; hardly surprising seeing as they first met via playing in a D&D game.

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Sounds familiar. My wife was a founding member, although at that point in time we were just friends. Then we dated, then we broke up, years later we started dating again, broke up again, then became engaged. But during those years in between we still gamed together ever week.

Lanefan said:

[MENTION=8530]2017-1982 gives 35 years. 1307 sessions / 35 years gives a bit over 37 sessions a year; by this I assume you play weekly (with the usual interruptions sinking about 1 session in 4) with few if any off-cycle sessions or overlapping groups i.e. 2+ sessions a week with different parties. 'Bout right?

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Sounds about right. During our first decade we had very few missed weeks, and even a few mid-week catchups. During the last decade we've averaged closer to every-other-week and around only once a month during the summer.

Lanefan said:

1307 sessions / 172 adventures gives an average of just over 7.5 sessions per adventure. Our long-term average is about 10-11 sessions per adventure, which tells me either your sessions are longer than ours or (more likely) your play is more efficient.

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I don't know that I'd call anything we do efficient (other than me occasionally playing fast and loose with the rules) Huge variability in module lengths, running from lots of single-night one-shots to a half-dozen year-long ones (one of my wife's modules ran 15 months). A lot of the modules come from Dungeon Magazine, which tend to run 4 to 6 games.

Lanefan said:

My question is, what level is your party? (no PC has ever got beyond 12th); with very slow advancement rules, lots of cycling of parties and characters (and sometimes players!)

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That's us all right. Highest is 15th, most are in the 8th to 10th range, with several characters per player lower than that due to just an occasional play. We're also around 8 years behind on Experience Points being awarded (thankfully I keep detailed logs). I hope to get to that this summer.

Lanefan said:

The campaign I first played in (in 1982) started in 1981. It "ended" around 1990-ish, meanwhile the same DM was starting a "new" campaign. That one lasted until about 1998. Then, in 2007 he started another "new" campaign...and a while later it was revealed that the two "new" ones were in fact just offshoots of the original. Today, having largely merged the new two and with elements of the older one rearing their ugly heads (including the character whose name I use here) it's apparent they're really just one great big long interwoven campaign with an 8-year hole in it (1999-2007) that is still going.

Click to expand...

We have a piece of that too. A dozen of our modules are an entirely separate campaign* entirely that was originally meant to cross-over as part of a group anniversary module but hasn't yet. I plan to get back to that campaign soon, but have some things to play out first before we can get to a cross-over. Maybe I'll merge them for our 40th Anniversary.


*A Wild West setting on a world with D&D races, religions and low-magic. Originally the D&D/Boot Hill charts from the original DMG were used but we've now evolved to using Kulp & Nixon's "Owl Hoot Trail" Western/Fantasy mashup rules.

We were playing our original AD&D campaign from the mid-1980s- updated to 2Ed, 3Ed & 3.5Ed- right up until the dawn of 4Ed.

We didn't update to 4Ed- it was a poor fit for our PCs, but that wasn't what killed it. Diverging schedules was the culprit.