Loooong Campaigns...How Do You Do It?

well the game Im running now lasted 2 years took a 3 yr break and has lasted another year.
Its the longest I have run. The difficulty I have had in keeping other games going were threefold
1 - DM burnout - solution take a break, let someone else dm and return to game.
2- We finished big plotarch - now what? this is harder as others have mentioned if the players are not attached to thier characters, the stories and the changing relationships then bordom sets in and they start looking to try different roles/powers etc.

3. Too rapid advancement - I solved this by not making every game heavy on combat, lots of sessions where what fights they did have were easy, but out thinking or manuevering enemies took lots more time and energy. You can also decide on a rate of advancement - such as 1 level per 3 sessions, and awarding 1/3 of need xp per game. I think cutting xp is necessay in a game with more combat, otherwise power takes over plot.
At the moment the PCs have reached 18th level

In the current game they became aware of the BBEGs (council) as the game started. Lots and lots of side quests later they had unified a dwarven empire, established a city, failed to take over a thieves guild, lost and gained 2 artifacts and defeated the first plot arch. without permantly killing any of the BBEGs. (3rd -12th lvl)

Round 2 they have killed 2 of the 5 BBEGs, lost and regained one of the artifacts, shattered a magocracy (but failed to take it over); remained neutral in a demon War and a struggle of Earth Elemental Princes; two PCs got married; One established an international spy ring; One became archdruid; One created an order of knighthood, another accepted a final death (from a Destruction spell). I will be wrapping up the game in the next 2 sessions. Its from a combination of all three of the above points. Someone else will take over for a few months - and We may return to the world with a 200 yr gap.

I ran a Spelljammer campaign that ran for about 6 years and then another two on-and off (back when I had the time to play once a week)

And we used to play 8-10 hour sessions (not all time spent playing though)

Characters started at 6th level and they were about 13th level when we ended...wow xp was slow in 2E

We had fun though.

To be fair, it was only two players as the core, with the occasional guest, so that made it a lot easier to schedule.

Currently I play in one campaign and DM another (we switch back and forth every now and then). Both have been running since 2002, though we only play about once a month. We're due to switch back to the other game soon, and last time we played that was well over a year ago.

el-remmen said:

I don't think anyone goes into a campaign planning it to last 14 years. I mean, you may hope it will last as long as X (in my case 5 years), but you can't know until it happens or doesn't happen.

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Well said. I went in (June of 1992) hoping it would run for two or three years. I was lucky to pick good players at the start, and I started out using pre-written adventures from Dungeon almost exclusively, and they worked extremely well.

Then something weird happened. The aftermath of the adventures suggested new adventures - ones that weren't in Dungeon magazine. An escaped doppelganger would logically make trouble for the party, and an evil cult became a reoccurring thorn in the side. The game took on a life of its own. When Planescape came out, it was a perfect fit and the group did some planar adventuring as well.

The game was, however, still almost wholly episodic; there was no real over-arching plot line. I had never seen one before, and had no idea how to pull it off. By then I was playing in Sagiro's campaign (in its 12th year!) and learned from a master. I dropped in a Great Big Plot (tm) that would require the heroes to travel all over the continent. See, the PCs mostly stayed in a relatively small geographic area, since world building was pretty intimidating to me. I had my feet underneath me and wanted to branch out. So I started making travel mandatory if they wanted to stop their foes. This was great fun for me; it was the first time I really expanded my world, and I got to drop in all kinds of cool stuff.

The big plot was supposed to take six months to complete. It actually took two years. I had developed a habit for dropping in side quests; these really helped pacing and variety, but did slow down the big finale.

At this point, we were seven years into the game and folks were about 12th level (in 2e). I had originally considered ending the game after the big plot finale, but there turned out to be a lot of other fun stuff I wanted to try, so we continued - and the gaming kept getting better. In addition, we had the opportunity to playtest 3e at that point, and when a 2e game would have turned moribund (14th lvl or so), 3e made all kinds of things seem new again. I also had more than a dozen continuing plot threads at this point, so we all wanted to continue the game. No one wanted to start new heroes, because they wanted to know what would happen next.

That's probably my best advice for having a long-running campaign. Make the world reflect the changes caused by the heroes. If they see the game world changing because of what they do, they're going to have a lot of buy-in to the game, and they'll want to make things change. the other advice is for pacing: use one or more long-term plots, but intersperse those liberally with shorter, unrelated adventures.

Incidentally, we play every other week for 3-4 hours, always on the same day. Not as often as I'd like, but the weekday schedule and consistency means that we have very little trouble scheduling, and almost never need to cancel unless lots of people are sick. It's also clear that I like slow advancement, about one level every ten sessions. Interestingly, I've never had people complain that they were getting bored - possibly because I try to challenge their various capabilities at every level, so that they have a chance to use and understand all their new abilities.

sckeener said:

I am not sure about others but I tend to think of campaigns that run that long as worlds and not campaigns.

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IME, I tend to agree with this.

The "campaign" I started playing in, in 1982, is still going...though it's more of a case of "the same characters in the same world still exist, and we still play them sometimes."

This "campaign" is probably, technically, more like "a whole bunch of little campaigns that have occurred in the same game world, sometimes with some of the same characters."

In the 26 or so years that the "campaign" has been going (I joined after they'd been playing for several years), we've had literally dozens of different players over the years, though there are 4 of us who have been together for about 25 years. We take turns DMing, and many of the adventures are one-shots or short adventure arcs -- there hasn't been "overarching plot arcs" that have taken more than a year or so. And, most players have multiple characters.

That said, some of us have characters that we've been playing for a very long time...20 years or more.

Also, we don't play as often as some of you. At the peak, in the early 80s, we played pretty much once a week. As we're spread out now, we only play a half-dozen times a year or so (with a lot of gaming jammed into 2 long weekends over the course of the year).

Zweihänder said:

That's odd... Maybe I'm to free with XP? By the end of my campaign (which lasted about 10 months), the party was about level 18... Of course, we met every week for about 6-8 hours, so that might have sped things along.

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Free with the XP? Probably not. 3rd Edition is just insanely generous with XP compared to previous editions. (This isn't accidental: Their research showed that most campaigns only lasted for about a year of weekly sessions, so they specifically designed the XP progression so that such a campaign could reasonable go from 1st to 20th level.)

If you're running a 14-year old campaign it certainly started as a pre-3.0 game, so right there you've got a slower level advancement. Plus, on top of that, such campaigns usually feature character deaths and transitions between characters. Sometimes such campaign lengths refer just to a persistent campaign world. In other cases, the party itself has persistence although you've probably seen a complete turnover in party membership a couple of times. And some groups, of course, have simply achieved insanely high levels despite the increasingly exponentially slowing level progression in previous editions.

14 years...good job, Piratecat! At 11 years and burning out fast, I don't think I'm gonna catch you with Riveria...

To run a long game week in and week out, you need:

Slow advancement rate. Repeat: SLOW advancement rate. Repeat: ... (to save screen space, imagine here that I repeat this several dozen more times) If any one character bumps 3 times in a calendar year (without some *exceptional* reason e.g. gain a level via wish) you're advance rate is too fast. Some players can't handle this, and insist on their PC's bumping every time they sneeze...solution here is find new players.

Be willing to have players come and go, and to have PC's come and go more often than the players. Do *not* build a long story arc around one PC, as that's a surefire way to have that PC be the next one killed, retired, or otherwise leave play. It's possible, in fact, to have a campaign finish with entirely different players than it began with; it's more likely that while some of the players will be the same, the character lineup will have completely changed over, maybe more than once.

Corollary to that is to maintain contact with people willing to play in your game, as possible replacements for when someone leaves.

If possible (and I know it often isn't) have more than one party on the go in the same world; even if they're the same players, it's good for variety. If they're not all the same players, even better, as players and PC's can interchange between parties over time.

Have your rules and system pretty much in place before puck-drop, and at *all* costs resist the temptation to change them in mid-campaign, regardless what new systems, supplements, errata, etc. come out in the meantime. Exception: something that has yet to come up in the campaign is freely changeable e.g. if the PC's are all still 3rd-5th level and you want to change the level-up points for 8th and higher, no problem.

And, last but not least, have some stories to tell, and then some more...you'll be surprised how fast you go through them.

Lanefan

What's the world record? Any D&D entries in Guinness?

I enjoy slow advancement as a player. diaglo's OD&D campaign is starting on it's third year I believe and my fighting man, who's been around from the git-go, is 4th level. Loooooong way to go for 5th. May the game never end!

I have ran multiple campaigns the longest one played being a little over 18 months with everyone gathering every Sunday morning at about 9:00 AM and playing until about 9:00 PM, that was back in high school of course and I had few responsiblities or commitments. It was a lot of fun, but after the characters hit the upper teens in levels (this was 2nd edition mind you) the campaign became too cumbersome as far as power levels went and we started something new. From time to time we would break out the old characters for one shot games, but that was about it, basically if they wanted to go dragon hunting or something of that nature.

Right now I am currently running an Oriental Adventures campaign (3.5 edition) that we have been running right at 12 months now. We have only been gathering once a month for about 8 - 9 hours per session, but more recently have switched to two times per month for about 4-4.5 hours per session, so its still the same amount of time just split up. Its been a lot of fun and with the large gaps between sessions I have a lot of time to plan things and make the plot a bit mroe intricate than before, its a lot of fun and I enjoy having a lengthy time line to play with. I still do other games in between so it doesn't really get "old".

I could say that I've been running the same campaign for just over twenty years. It would be true, in a way.

It would be truer to say that I ran an AD&D campaign from 1984 to about 1986, then a different AD&D campaign, which later turned out to be set in the same campaign world but a few centuries earlier. Then I started another world for a RQ campaign but we went back to AD&D every now and again, and then another world again for a Rolemaster campaign and we went back to AD&D every now and again.

Now we're back in an AD&D phase and playing in what's nominally the same world, but we go back to RQ or RM every now and again. The maps are about the same, the places have the same names, but the characters have changed many times over.

So I don't know... is it really the same campaign?

The secret is how invested the players are in their characters and how invested they are in the campaign.

Having run dozens of campaigns over some 30+ years, that (for me at any rate) is the constant.

If players are not invested in their characters for whatever reason (could be as simple as they want to try the newest prestige class or core class that just came out in some new release) ..... that usually means the campaign will be short in duration as the players want to try something new.

Likewise, if the players are not invested in the campaign, the campaign will be short lived. Invested in this case is being interested and captivated in the campaign world and how they interact in it. This can be a real trick for the DM to accomplish and constantly getting feedback from the players how the campaign is progressing for them is a big help in this.

It also helps to be able to 'read' your players. I have gotten quite proficient at reading the 'mood' of the players so I can usually tell when one or more players are getting bored during the game. That is when it is time to change the pacing or do something, anything so that players don't zone out or remain bored. Because once the player(s) become bored, investment in the campaign starts to go south and once the happens, the campaign will not have the legs to go the distance you desire.