D&D 5E Length of peoples Campaigns?

[The Crimson Binome]

Then they all roll up new 1st level characters and start the Prince of the Apocalypse, with no mention or reference to what just happened with the whole Tiamat thing. That is, if the PC's, for whatever reason, go to Greenest (is that what it's called?), it will be perfectly fine. It was never attacked by a dragon and dragon worshipers, and Tiamat never showed up to be defeated. In short, that "campaign" was a "bubble story" with no consequences or lasting effects to continue an ongoing "actual" DM's campaign.

If you're following an official setting, then most events have dates attached. The Eberron campaign setting describes not just a world with a particular history, but it also takes place in a particular year. Likewise with Forgotten Realms in any given edition - The year is 20XX.

That means everything that happens in that setting is taking place during the same time frame. If you're running a second campaign within that same setting, then part of that setting involves a return to the year that setting represents. The other campaign hasn't happened yet.

Unless you chose to advance the timeline, of course, but that's all on you. Imagine if you're new in town, and you found a group that works for you, and they're even playing in your favorite setting, but then you show up to find out that their version of that setting is way different from what you expected. You'd probably still play with them, but it would take a bit to get adjusted. It wouldn't feel quite right, especially since you weren't there to watch all of those changes happen to the world.

Personally, I put the blame on the shift from homebrew settings into official settings (which DMs are less likely to want to disrupt, for fear of making their books obsolete). Some of it also probably comes from the shift from long campaigns (multi-year) to short campaigns (try to wrap up everything 1-20 in one year).

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I've never stopped running continuous thematically relevant campaigns. It's bad enough that I have sometimes started off a new campaign in one of my worlds and have to stop for a moment to realize that all the weird and esoteric bits are only going to be amusing to me because by current players weren't around in 1994 or 1983 or whatever. So thematically, ever single game I've run is part of a continuity....even if the players aren't always aware of it (most of them are, but all of my current players have only been with me for around 9 years or less; only a couple of the old guard show up for a surprise game once in a blue moon).

To be fair, I don't know of any other GMs that don't do it this way except for the organized play guys.....some are considerably less rigorous about it, and some will recycle modules (reset the clock, if you will) when they see fit, but they all do seem to keep coherence to some degree or another. I think it's hard not to....only a hard reset of the entire group might prompt someone to think about rebooting the whole setting as well.

 

[Viking Bastard]

For years my group would periodically switch between a long, ongoing campaign (or a series of interconnected campaigns set in the same world, originally using RC rules, before switching to 2e, then GURPS, and eventually 3e), and shorter, more self-contained games (using a variety of systems).

It remains to be seen how things will go with my current group, long term. I'd like to set up the same dynamic, but I'm not sure we can pull it off as a group--simply none of us are in a stable enough of a place.

 

[Henry]

Actually, all the campaigns I've been in (since at least 1981) have been "bubble" stories. Alan has a campaign he wants to run, we run it until people get bored with it (or it peters out, or half the players stop gaming due to real life) then Bob has an idea, we roll up level 1 PCs, and start campaign #2. I think the longest campaign I was ever part of was about two years long, with six months to one year being more common. Funny thing is, this has been the case across three cities and 3 separate groups. Maybe it's a regional thing, or a group thing.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Funny thing is, a change in game system has often not resulted in a change of campaign setting, IME. I had a single campaign world--not one campaign per se, but all part of a shared history--go through 2E, 3E, and 3.5. A campaign I finished recently started in PF and ended in 5E.

I just don't think there are any hardcoded rules or even patterns to this sort of thing.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Funny thing is, a change in game system has often not resulted in a change of campaign setting, IME. I had a single campaign world--not one campaign per se, but all part of a shared history--go through 2E, 3E, and 3.5. A campaign I finished recently started in PF and ended in 5E.

I just don't think there are any hardcoded rules or even patterns to this sort of thing.

This is exactly how the Forgotten Realms work, canonically speaking. The rules of the current edition always reflect the reality of the state of the Realms.

When AD&D 2E came around, and The Assassin was no longer a class, the Assassin's Guild was closed in Faerun.
When 4E came around, and Vancian spellcasting was temporarily suspended in the Realms, it was a result of Mystra's death.

What I really want to know is, what happened between 4E and 5E that caused the many magical weapons to lose their enchantments?

 

[Mouseferatu]

What I really want to know is, what happened between 4E and 5E that caused the many magical weapons to lose their enchantments?

Inflation. The weapons couldn't keep up.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

My longest campaign (started in 3rd Ed) ran from the summer of 2005 to spring 2010 (changed over to 4th Ed in summer 2008), it is now on hiatus, but when it resumes, it will be 5th Ed.

 

[DongMaster]

While I seldom let on campaign follow another (I usually reset the clock in other rpgs), isn't PotA set two years after ToD?

 

[pemerton]

I've run 8 campaigns in the past 30 years.

Four were/are set in Greyhawk - an AD&D dungeon crawl game, an AD&D all-thieves game, a Rolemaster game that lasted 9 years, and an ongoing Burning Wheel game. The first three games shared a cast of characters; whether I'll use any of those same characters in the BW game is yet to be determined (so far GH has mostly been a source of maps rather than people).

Two were Oriental Adventures/Kara-Tur games - an AD&D one when the book first came out, and an 11 year RM game. There was no overlap between these two games (other than a bit of basic geography); from memory, both were notionally set in GH insofar as there were two moons in the OA world also.

One was a very brief (3 or 4 sessions?) 3E game, when that system first came out. It was self-contained, and used a couple of old White Dwarf scenarios plus X2 Castle Amber.

And the eighth, still ongoing, is a 4e game set in the default 4e cosmology. This is self-contained, and there's a good chance there won't be much left of the world (or, at least, much that is recognisable) by the end of it.