Jeff Wilder
First Post
Although I love 3E, one of its paradigms is that advancement happens very, very quickly, and that grates on me a little. (Just for one example, the original adventure path modules could be completed within a game-year. That's mustered-out buck private to greatsword-wielding demi-god in a year.)
The obvious solution is to slow advancement. With a group that meets frequently, that solution can probably work. (It worked back when I was a kid, and we gamed three or four times a week.) But nowadays my friends and I are lucky to get one five-hour session in a week, and we rotate between two games, so slowing advancement means months of no mechanical progress for the character. That's frustrating for players ... some people won't admit it, but "levelling up" is a large part of the fun of D&D. I'm convinced it's a major reason D&D remains king-of-the-RPG-hill, honestly.
So, for the past several years, I've been toying with the idea of campaigns that last upwards of a decade or more ... perhaps even upwards of half-a-century. I've pondered how to pull them off. (Note that I'm not talking about campaign worlds that have lasted that long. I'm talking about a single campaign ... one group of PCs, more or less, from start to finish.)
One thing I'd really like to try is a yearly single session -- perhaps a long session -- at GenCon. It would be one complete adventure, and between each adventure a year or two would pass, game-time (and a year real-time, obviously). During that year, the PC would be assumed to be going about other business, adventuring or otherwise, and every PC would level up once each real-year, at the end of that year's session. Each PC would receive as much gold as needed to be correct for the level, and permitted to buy magic items fairly freely. The players would email me updated stats, so I could begin work on the next year's adventure. If a player wanted, he or she could write summaries of what a PC had been up to. We could even read them -- or summarize them -- at the next GenCon, before that year's adventure.
Characters would actually age. They'd advance toward their incredible destinies slowly. The adventures would be interconnected, though that might not be obvious for five years or so. Once it became obvious, though, tension would slowly mount toward a huge finale, literally a decade or more (real-time and game-time) from its humble beginnings.
Would people here be interested in playing in that kind of campaign? How interested? How willing to commit? How able to commit?
You could, of course, do something similar, but in a home campaign. I'd probably do it more in the form of stages ... perhaps every third level or so, I'd advance the time-line of the game-world by three or five or eight years. I'd probably have to take some time off between stages, to work up the next stage -- and its connection to the ongoing story -- and to give my players time to work out what their characters are doing in that down-time.
The more I think about this, the more enthusiastic I am about it. There are so many upsides, and the only downsides I can think of are very minor. (For instance, I know it will be work to get "down-time" production, even if only a few paragraphs, from my players. I know that with the beginning of each stage of the game, I'll need to "re-hook" the players and their PCs back into the ongoing story. And so on.) Are there downsides I'm missing? What do people think of the idea in general?
The obvious solution is to slow advancement. With a group that meets frequently, that solution can probably work. (It worked back when I was a kid, and we gamed three or four times a week.) But nowadays my friends and I are lucky to get one five-hour session in a week, and we rotate between two games, so slowing advancement means months of no mechanical progress for the character. That's frustrating for players ... some people won't admit it, but "levelling up" is a large part of the fun of D&D. I'm convinced it's a major reason D&D remains king-of-the-RPG-hill, honestly.
So, for the past several years, I've been toying with the idea of campaigns that last upwards of a decade or more ... perhaps even upwards of half-a-century. I've pondered how to pull them off. (Note that I'm not talking about campaign worlds that have lasted that long. I'm talking about a single campaign ... one group of PCs, more or less, from start to finish.)
One thing I'd really like to try is a yearly single session -- perhaps a long session -- at GenCon. It would be one complete adventure, and between each adventure a year or two would pass, game-time (and a year real-time, obviously). During that year, the PC would be assumed to be going about other business, adventuring or otherwise, and every PC would level up once each real-year, at the end of that year's session. Each PC would receive as much gold as needed to be correct for the level, and permitted to buy magic items fairly freely. The players would email me updated stats, so I could begin work on the next year's adventure. If a player wanted, he or she could write summaries of what a PC had been up to. We could even read them -- or summarize them -- at the next GenCon, before that year's adventure.
Characters would actually age. They'd advance toward their incredible destinies slowly. The adventures would be interconnected, though that might not be obvious for five years or so. Once it became obvious, though, tension would slowly mount toward a huge finale, literally a decade or more (real-time and game-time) from its humble beginnings.
Would people here be interested in playing in that kind of campaign? How interested? How willing to commit? How able to commit?
You could, of course, do something similar, but in a home campaign. I'd probably do it more in the form of stages ... perhaps every third level or so, I'd advance the time-line of the game-world by three or five or eight years. I'd probably have to take some time off between stages, to work up the next stage -- and its connection to the ongoing story -- and to give my players time to work out what their characters are doing in that down-time.
The more I think about this, the more enthusiastic I am about it. There are so many upsides, and the only downsides I can think of are very minor. (For instance, I know it will be work to get "down-time" production, even if only a few paragraphs, from my players. I know that with the beginning of each stage of the game, I'll need to "re-hook" the players and their PCs back into the ongoing story. And so on.) Are there downsides I'm missing? What do people think of the idea in general?
Last edited: