Campaign length question

[Desdichado]

I do not really run a campaign. I run a campaign world. Each session is self contained and the players can bring whatever characters they want with my approval. This allows for me to run a game in other cities if I want and also for differnt people to come in and leave the campaign as needs be. I create a bunch of story arcs that the players can run into, and tie those to story arcs that the players create for themselves.

I wonder if this isn't what some folks mean when they talk about their extremely long-term multi-edition campaigns. I'm sure some people really do have campaigns that have lasted that long. I suspect, though, that rather more have homebrew campaign settings that have lasted that long, but not actual campaigns that have.

And then folks like me just change things up once or twice a year, assuming I'm playing regularly!

 

[barsoomcore]

My current campaign has had about 60 sessions, over close to two years now. Characters are up around 8th to 10th level.

A campaign for me (because we all seem to have different definitions) is a set of arcing adventures that loosely tell a larger story while following a variety of shorter tales. I typically have several layers of story in a campaign:

The Big Arc -- what's REALLY going on, end of the world kind of stuff. Once this gets wrapped up the campaign is over.

The Season Arc -- I break my campaign up into "Seasons" of twenty to thirty sessions each. A given season typically has an overriding arc that culminates in a climactic finish of some kind.

The Adventure Arc -- A season is broken up into four or five "Adventures", each four or five sessions long and with a pretty tight storyline. Not every adventure ties directly into the Season Arc, but the majority of them do.

So the Big Arc is very sketchy, just a few ideas and such about background material. It slowly takes shape over the life of the campaign, as the players provide input and determine part of the shape of the story. When I start the campaign, I don't really know how many Seasons it will take to complete the Big Arc, so I don't bother to detail it too much. Let the players do some of the heavy lifting for me.

I generate Season Arcs one at a time, so next Season is always pretty much unknown until the current Season is winding down. By that point, I have a clearish idea of what my PCs are up to and what sort of story is likely to grab their attention. Plus, there's always new material, bad guys, cultures and such that emerge during a season and often grab my attention and interest. My last season got entirely taken over and hijacked by an especially pushy (but hot) NPC who I in fact just made up on the spur of the moment to justify an attempt to steal a party magic item I needed to get rid of. She inserted herself on center stage and wouldn't go away so I had to restructure the whole season around her.

Adventure Arcs pretty much generate themselves as the Season progresses and the PCs move from place to place. These are almost completely under PC control -- they decide where they're going to go and what they're going to do. I've gotten good at lifting material from various resources in order to put adventures together in a big hurry, so I can respond to PC shenangans without too much trouble. I like to take a little break between seasons so I can catch my breath, though.

Um, what was the question again?

 

[jmucchiello]

I wonder if this isn't what some folks mean when they talk about their extremely long-term multi-edition campaigns. I'm sure some people really do have campaigns that have lasted that long. I suspect, though, that rather more have homebrew campaign settings that have lasted that long, but not actual campaigns that have.

I'm a latecomer to a campaign that started in 1984. Two of the original characters are still in the adventuring party. And they're only 10th level or so. This is a 1st edition game and has never been converted. I like being in the game because I get to use my 20 year old gaming books. Unfortunately, we only meet like 3-5 times a year for 6-8 hour sessions nowadays.

Then again, I also game weekly with another group where one of the rotating campaigns began in 1997. We have 4 DMs running 4 independent campaigns, switching out every 4 sessions. This only causes confusion on the border weeks when someone will turn to the paladin and tell him to fireball something because in the last session he was playing a wizard.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm a latecomer to a campaign that started in 1984. Two of the original characters are still in the adventuring party. And they're only 10th level or so. This is a 1st edition game and has never been converted. I like being in the game because I get to use my 20 year old gaming books. Unfortunately, we only meet like 3-5 times a year for 6-8 hour sessions nowadays.

Yeah, but what is really long-running? Calendar years spent in the campaign or actual logged playtime? I'd argue that a campaign that only means once every two or three months isn't necessarily as long as one of my "short" ones where we meet once a week for 5-6 hours.

 

[mypetrock]

I've been playing in a campaign that we started when 3E first came out. We have been getting together once a week for 2-3 hours per session on a week night pretty regularly since. We have gone through Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, Speaker in Dreams, a conversion of Slave Pits of the Undercity (A1) and a related side adventure, Heart of Nightfang Spire, and now a conversion of Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (G1). Our group is going fairly strong as the two primary DMs switch off after an adventure or two and pick up on the plot hooks that the other one left. The group has been levelling pretty regularly and, now at 12th level, is starting to drool over Epic level play.

mypetrock

 

[Gothmog]

Yeah, but what is really long-running? Calendar years spent in the campaign or actual logged playtime? I'd argue that a campaign that only means once every two or three months isn't necessarily as long as one of my "short" ones where we meet once a week for 5-6 hours.

Well, I can't speak for anyone else here, but in the game I have been running for the last 10 years, 4 of the PCs are original, and for the first 6 years of the game, we gamed 3-4 times a month for a whole Saturday each time (12+hours). Its slowed down in the last few years (once a month or so), but those sessions last all weekend.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I am running a campaign that started as a lark to test out the new 3e system. It'll be two years old this coming february. I had suggested trying the campaign when the GM running the FUDGE game we were in the sixth or seventh session of complained about not having enough time to keep up with the party, so we tried it as a break. And we haven't looked back -- the original GM got bent out of shape and quit, another player moved away, and we've added a few more to fill in, but the ongoing campaign has been there for all 20 months or so, playing every other week.

Once the campaign was underway I started adding elements, which have turned into a big plot arc, at the end of which is a ancient dragon that the party will have to get to be high enough level to kill some day. Right now they're about 9th level, and they'll have to get to about 18-20 to really take on the dragon and hope to win, so if things stay on the same pace they'll be at this for a total of 3-4 years by the time it ends.

Of course, I don't know if the game will last that long -- I just broke out of some dungeon-crawl-inspired doldrums, and things have gotten very interesting and a lot more fun in my game.

I'm a player in another game. That campaign has been going on for about 6 months, and got a very rocky start. Three months ago I was ready to bail, but things have really started to develop. I don't know how long that game will last, either.

I hadn't played for years when I started gaming with the group that eventually became the players in my greyhawk campaign. Back when I was playing AD&D in high school we never really played a campaign -- just a string of adventures without much sense of cohesion. That was fun for us back then, but I really appreciate the better story lines I get now, in both of the campaigns I'm playing in.

 

[ForceUser]

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've learned a lot about good DMing since 3E arrived. My previous campaign was a story-driven, pigeon-holed nightmare. Despite that, it was tremendous fun. It was a very focused campaign, and because of the way I set it up the players - in character - denied themselves prestige classes, magic items, and downtime. God bless 'em, they were troopers. That particular campaign world evolved outward from the PCs 1st-level point of origin, and as such did not develop optimally for my tastes. Still, it had a lot of character and conflict and the players loved it. The overarching meta-plot was too narrow-minded, lending itself to a movie-like singular quest with no room for deviation. Still, it was a great campaign and I learned a lot from it.

I am applying that knowledge in my current OA campaign (shameless Story hour plug, by the way). Admittedly, I swiped medieval Vietnam part and parcel as a setting; OA is daunting enough without inventing an entire Asian-esque campaign world from the ground up. This works out great for me since there's a ton of web resources on ancient southeast Asia to draw inspiration from. Instead of one meta-plot, I have half a dozen, which as the campaign develops the players can choose to delve into or disregard at their leisure. Currently the group functions as a sort of imperial task force, but that was merely a plot device to bring the players together and could change as the campaign progressess. All in all I think it's actually easier running an open campaign because I don't have to keep inventing reasons why the PC group should do this or that - they can do whatever they bloody well please. All I have to know as DM is who lives where, who's doing what, and what's happening in which region. It's great, I can't wait for the PCs to develop bonds with my new world.