247 sessions, 15 years!

[Roland55]

Is it too late to contact the Guiness people?

Can anyone boast anything comparable? I've gamed for over 40 years, and I can't even come close!

EDIT: Yes ... I am quite old, thus the "prehistoric" in my sig-line. Some mornings, I wonder who that old fellow in the mirror is.

 

[Lanefan]

Can anyone boast anything comparable? I've gamed for over 40 years, and I can't even come close!

Can't match the 15 years for a single campaign, but we've beaten the 247 sessions several times over the years. The most striking thing, though, is the almost complete lack of player and character turnover in Sagiro's game. Astounding.

To compare, a friend's 3e campaign just hit 400 sessions last month with its 10-year anniversary coming up in February. It's a single-party linear continuous campaign but has none of its original players or characters left; they've slowly changed over time.

The game I'll play in tonight - another single-party linear campaign - has been going about 3.5 years. Tonight's is session 184; so we should easily hit 250 by the 5-year point at that rate.

Non-linear multi-party campaigns can get to staggering session counts when two (or more, sometimes) games get run each week.

Lanefan

 

[Piratecat]

Silver Moon's game is the local record, I think; they're still running the same campaign (although some PCs have changed) after like 25 years or something ridiculous (and impressive!) like that. My last campaign was 16 years, about 400 hundred sessions. But Sagiro's is astounding and is better than I ever could have hoped. Never boring, and maybe one game a year drags (usually the one where we over-plan.) The game feels like a roaring locomotive heading up to the finish, but we're all tempted to foot-drag because none of us want it to end.

When this campaign ends, I'm hoping he starts a new 4e game. I'll be in it in a flash.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Congrats Pkitty. My group is currently sitting around the 55 session mark after 2 1/2 years of playing this current campaign. We're probably just over the halfway mark at this point.

The zero player turnover in about 9 years is what impresses me the most though. Unfortunately I haven't been able to avoid player turnover in my group. I've got 2 players in my current group that I've gamed with for between 4 and 5 years. The rest have been with me for 6 months or less.

I've had 3 player changes recently. 1 player left the group because 3.5E D&D didn't fit his style (too rules-heavy for him) and 2 other went overseas to play in a band on a cruise ship of all things! I'm hoping that the 2 on the cruise ship (who also happen to be brothers) return in a year or so but they are in their early 20's so who knows where they could end up in a year from now. Amusingly enough their Dad now plays in my group!

Olaf the Stout

 

[Piratecat]

We've definitely been lucky on turnover. Here's a sobering thought: we're all in our early 40s or late 30s. We'd only be able to get in two more campaigns like this before we hit 70!

Dammit, now I feel old.

 

[Iron Sky]

We've only been gaming, period, for about 15 years. There's 2 of us from the original group, one that joined a couple years after we started (Sanzuo), one about 10 years ago, and the other (our newest roommate) for about 2 years.

I was wrong in my xp comment, our longest game was actually the first one ever back in 2e days - we played between 1 and 5 times a week (heading over to my friend's house after school most days) with 5-10 players for a few hours a day and marathon 12-hour sessions sometimes on weekends. We'd detour into other gaming systems (Alternity, d6 Starwars, Warhammer 40k Miniatures, and of course LAN parties), but it was pretty regular for about 3 years.

At the time, I didn't even know what fudging was, so I'd say about 2-3 characters died a month yet, despite that, there were 3 PCs that were never killed in the duration of the campaign. The player who only played wizards went through about 15 of them and one individual wizard of his died 10 times in a row before killing himself in such a way that he couldn't be brought back thanks to an artifact robe he found.

Since then, the longest game I've played in or ran has been about 2 years(playing 3-4 times a month).

 

[Terry DM]

Jealous beyond words...

Bravo!

Ditto ... I could only dream of something so awesome.

 

[Roland55]

We've definitely been lucky on turnover. Here's a sobering thought: we're all in our early 40s or late 30s. We'd only be able to get in two more campaigns like this before we hit 70!

Dammit, now I feel old.

Ahem.

Don't feel old just yet. You're still a whippersnapper!!

 

[Lanefan]

The player who only played wizards went through about 15 of them and one individual wizard of his died 10 times in a row before killing himself in such a way that he couldn't be brought back thanks to an artifact robe he found.

So, 11 deaths for a single character. That's a record our 30 years of character destruction can't even approach...best we can do is we've had several characters die 7 times; nobody's made 8, though one of the 7-death wonders is still out there retired in an active game.

All the others stayed dead or unplayable after 7...the writing was on the wall. And then the wall fell on them.

Lanefan

 

[Iron Sky]

So, 11 deaths for a single character. That's a record our 30 years of character destruction can't even approach...best we can do is we've had several characters die 7 times; nobody's made 8, though one of the 7-death wonders is still out there retired in an active game.

All the others stayed dead or unplayable after 7...the writing was on the wall. And then the wall fell on them.

Lanefan

I felt bad about him having to remake wizards so often, so they discovered a robe of resurrection - if you died, it instantly resurrected you though you lost Con as usual. Of course, the first session he goes off on his own and fights a Brine Dragon (breath weapon dealing permanent Cha damage) and it kills him, he instantly resurrects, it looks at him in annoyance, kills him, repeat 10 times.

He'd put 15 in Con and when he was permanently down to 5 Con and 1 Charisma, the Brine Dragon decided he wasn't worth the trouble, but at this point, the wizard wanted to die so he took the robe off, hurled it into the sea and shot the Brine Dragon with a magic missile.

10 minutes later, he'd rolled up a new mage (he got to be really fast at it) and joined the group.