Who else is still playing their original campaign?

Silver Moon said:

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.

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Cool.

We try to sail weekly, doesn't always happen, but each individual group is usually good for about 40-45 sessions a year.

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.

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We almost never have one-session adventures but occasionally one might get done in 3 or so. The longest adventure I've ever run was also 15 months (real time) - an adventure that was written for me by a player in one party in that campaign for use by the other - not counting things that were only run very sporadically when there was nothing else to do and-or only the right combination of people showed up.

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.

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Yeah, we all have loads of characters...more than we can ever hope to play unless the DM is willing to run a game every evening: unlikely. But I don't let the xp pile up quite as long as you...usually every 3 or 4 sessions I'll give 'em out; more often if someone is close to bumping and less often if it takes more sessions than that to get through a game-world day. (our rule is you don't get the xp until you've "slept on it" - in modern terms a long rest - so any xp earned today you in theory get tomorrow when you wake up)

Right now, for example, the adventure I'm running has been going since last June yet it's only been 14 game-world days since they left town - 7 days travel and 7 days adventuring.

Lanefan

I wish!

Of my original gaming group - school friends in the mid 1980s - 2 are long dead, the others now live in other cities. 1 of them visited for a nostalgic game a couple of years ago though which was great

No, but when I moved back to my home town a couple years ago, I became reacquainted with some old high-school friends I played with in the mid-80s. I started a new 5th-edition campaign (only ever played AD&D 1e before) with them and some new folks.

Another friend I had played with in the 80s, who is now in another state had a binder of some of my campaign material from the 80s, both DnD and Warhammer. Dot matrix print-outs and lots of hand-made maps on grid paper and hand-written note. I'm taking some of that old material and putting it in my new 5e campaign, so things have come full circle.

MNblockhead said:

Another friend I had played with in the 80s, who is now in another state had a binder of some of my campaign material from the 80s, both DnD and Warhammer. Dot matrix print-outs and lots of hand-made maps on grid paper and hand-written note. I'm taking some of that old material and putting it in my new 5e campaign, so things have come full circle.

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That is an excellent idea. I have a friend who dusted off his 80's campaign and used it to establish a new campaign set 75-character years later. Original human characters were the grandparents of current human and half-human party members and many original non-human characters are still around as NPC's.

Not even close to playing the original campaign. As a player the original campaign was a matter of just myself and the DM sussing things out between ourselves under Holmes basic (we did add more players of course). He invented a lot of his own rules and we got a lot of things amusingly wrong. The DM ran the same "campaign" simply because of momentum I think. However, he eventually joined as a player in a different group while still running our usual game. I then joined that other game as a player. Then the two groups AND campaigns merged, or at least the PC's from our original game wound up living and adventuring in the new campaign world. So, TECHNICALLY it might still be the same game, but it was certainly run somewhat differently. That game continued for a decade or so. Eventually I started "guest DMing" and then started my own game entirely, but ALL of our games fell victim to players quitting outright, moving, or simply finding other things to do - especially during summer. Summers were a KILLER of campaigns. When getting groups restarted there were one or two players who would want to pick up where we left off because they liked their PC's, but most players preferred to start new PC's and I simply started new campaigns entirely to accommodate them rather than try to shoehorn new PC's into old campaigns. I also wanted to experiment somewhat with coming up with NEW scratch settings or trying new published settings. Eventually all the old games just became part of any collective gaming history.

That's good and bad. Good because it allows me as DM to try those new things and the players get to try new PC's in new game situations rather than either of us being saddled by old baggage. Bad because starting over from the beginning TOO often also gets tedious. And not all new games even survive until killed by summer simply because not all new PC's are awesome and not all settings (scratch or published) are awesome. Some new games fizzle because... they just do.

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Legatus_Legionis said:

We have had a few PC's that have survived from day 1 (back in 1993) to this day.

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We do too, although around half of them are NPC's whose players left the group but the character stayed. We do still have three founding members each with their original character.

Looking back at the first campaign I ever ran, I'm glad we're not playing it! Lots of rookie mistakes and the less said the better.

That being said, I still play with two of my original group and that makes me very happy.

Can't say unbroken from 1982 until now. The longest running campaign I was in was AD&D (1st) when I joined. We went to AD&D 2nd pretty smoothly, though adopting Skills and Powers and the other Character's Option books changed a lot. It migrated to 3ed, where the DM went apeshit over things like dwarves could be wizard and how to fit that into the decade of history. There's a good chance we bypassed that 1307 games - for one section of years we'd play several times a week with different parties in the same world. But without a count I'm more than happy not to challenge Silver Moon's record.

After a long gap, one of the player ran the world advanced many decades with most of the core original people (including the DM) using 4e rules, with the most legendary characters from the original campaign as Exarchs and such.

While I've noodled with converting some of those characters to 5e, that core group doesn't have the ability to meet. Time, distance, what have you. Some of us tried online in a new setting, but that didn't last.

Flipping to longest I've run, I ran back-to-back campaigns in the same setting, 5 years and 7 years respectively. Mostly the same crew but all new characters. The campaign world advanced 80 years in order to refresh it, but also to allow time for some of the things they did from the first campaign to have large effects.

Grogg of the North said:

Looking back at the first campaign I ever ran, I'm glad we're not playing it! Lots of rookie mistakes and the less said the better.

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But I bet those rookie mistakes gave joyful memories that last to this day!

More often than many might realize, doing the wrong thing is more fun than playng "well".

Lanefan