What rpg system would you use for a 60+ session fantasy campaign?

[TheSword]

WFRP 4e is an extremely compelling campaign system for long term campaigns. My Enemy Within campaign has ran for 80 sessions. It’s as fresh as ever. 3 years in and coming close to a conclusion.

My WFRP 4e Gangs of Waterdeep campaign is 20 sessions in and going really well. No sign of slowing down.

I’ve embarked on a long term Ubersreik Adventures paid campaign and we’re already on session 11. Player attendance has been amazing. Usually 6/6 and occasionally 5/6. I fully expect it to run the duration.

Learn WFRP 4e and give it a whirl. You won’t be disappointed.

 

[payn]

Which, now I think on it, makes me wonder why the OP framed the question around a 60-session span (or any limited-number span) rather than simply asking what's the best system for a campaign whose duration is open-ended i.e. it'll keep going as long as everyone's willing to keep at it.

Opened ended includes 6 sessions as well as 60. I think the idea was that the session would go longer than average which is probably closer to 30 sessions or probably less.

 

[Voadam]

60 means it lasts a little more than a full year if you game weekly. If its D&D and you advance a level every 4 games that would be going from levels 1-16.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which, now I think on it, makes me wonder why the OP framed the question around a 60-session span (or any limited-number span) rather than simply asking what's the best system for a campaign whose duration is open-ended i.e. it'll keep going as long as everyone's willing to keep at it.

They aren't really the same question. "60 sessions" requires a game to probably be functional over extended play, but it still may not be usable in unlimited play (about the only game systems I think really work for the latter are ones with baked in diminishing returns).

 

[GrimCo]

Just to add.

Houses of the blooded. Game i would absolutley love to run or play for long campaign. Mix of GoT and telenovelas with multi generational story arcs.

 

[Autumnal]

My WFRP 4e Gangs of Waterdeep campaign is 20 sessions in and going really well. No sign of slowing down.

Color me curious how far you’ve tweaked the mechanics to suit the world, and/or the world to suit the mechanics. (I say this after having spent a toor-early morning thinking about the Realms with psionics rather than magic.)

 

[SableWyvern]

WFRP 4e is an extremely compelling campaign system for long term campaigns. My Enemy Within campaign has ran for 80 sessions. It’s as fresh as ever. 3 years in and coming close to a conclusion.

Any chance you have a comprehensive blog or anything else detailing all that has occurred, specifically from a behind-the-scenes, GM perspective? I'm especially interested in any thoughts on part five, which looks very weak to me, to the point I suspect I would need to basically replace it with my own conclusion.

The Enemy Within is on my list of things to get to and, in the meanwhile, I am happily devouring any wisdom and ideas I can find online.

 

[Kichwas]

It's a hypothetical question, with the following stipulations:

1. The campaign you'll be running will be at least 60 sessions long, more if you wish.
2. It's a fantasy campaign but the subgenre is whatever you want it to be. Heroic, grim-dark, military, whatever.

Probably Legend in the Mist.

The reason being that it has no leveling system. Character progression is about change rather than powering up, and the change is driven by the narrative.

Any other system might break down with that many sessions. Either the character development is too slow, or it caps out past the point where they system can keep balance long before you hit the 60th session.

If not Legend in the Mist I'd look for a similar horizontal progression RPG. Right now the only ones I can think of are Amber and Theatrix - two old diceless games, each of which has it's own flaws that would keep me away.

If I had to pick a system with vertical progression it might end up being Fantasy Hero - which I last ran in the 1980s (I ran Champions past that point, but it was always hard to get people to sit for Fantasy Hero). It has no classes and a point based character creation system After 60 sessions if I kept XP pretty low the PCs would gain about 180 points, and would have started at 75 or 150. They'd have gone from commoner scale to super heroes. But the game engine can handle that. However it becomes an increasingly slow game system as you go on. But with the right VTT automating things you might get some ground back.
- It's more mechanics based than I like now. But 60 sessions is a freakishly long time so who knows what kind of gaming I will like at the end of it all - I might be into GMing using the AI the Aliens brought over from the Andromeda galaxy by that time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If I had to pick a system with vertical progression it might end up being Fantasy Hero - which I last ran in the 1980s (I ran Champions past that point, but it was always hard to get people to sit for Fantasy Hero). It has no classes and a point based character creation system After 60 sessions if I kept XP pretty low the PCs would gain about 180 points, and would have started at 75 or 150. They'd have gone from commoner scale to super heroes. But the game engine can handle that. However it becomes an increasingly slow game system as you go on. But with the right VTT automating things you might get some ground back.
- It's more mechanics based than I like now. But 60 sessions is a freakishly long time so who knows what kind of gaming I will like at the end of it all - I might be into GMing using the AI the Aliens brought over from the Andromeda galaxy by that time.

There are issues I can see coming up with running FH that long without secondary capping mechanisms, but that's true long before that so its not an argument against it, per se. Its an odd case because FH isn't zero to hero (usually characters start out too capably for that) but the gap between those starting characters and what they end up with was likely to be huge unless you force broad rather than high growth.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

There's a few games I've played that can handle this sort of long term campaign.

My first thought is of course HERO. I'd recommend 4th ed. Fantasy Hero. It's got everything you need to play in one book. And of course HERO allows for broadly built characters as you earn XP, but doesn't prohibit building more powerful ones.

Ars Magica would work. And you could blue book half of it, giving more leeway for schedules and all that real life crap. ANd it just occurred to me that 60 sessions (assuming 1 session = 1 season) is about 15 years of in game time. Why, your magi are only just coming into their own.

I'm currently playing a FFG Star Wars game. It's been going about 60 sessions (although I've only been around for about 40 of them.) It still works despire our characters HUUUGE amount of XP. But it's a lot of work for the GMs to come up with NPCs that are powerful enough to count as rivals and nemeses. Our current adventure arc gets around this by requiring the PCs to actually be careful and not go about disrupting things/drawing attention to themselves, so it's not about our relative power.

I've run/played in a couple of Rolemaster campaigns that went for 60 sessions of more. But I find all the looking up tables too much of a chore nowadays.