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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8690071" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I'm playing in a generational game right now- The Great Pendragon Campaign.The whole concept is that the game starts several years prior to Arthur's birth, and your first generation of characters are knights in service to Earl Roderick, who in turn serves Uthur.  The campaign is intended to last through Uther's death, the interregnum of chaos until Arthur ascends the throne, and all through his reign until his death. Play is divided into game years.  Sometimes we play through a year in a session; busier years might take two or three sessions.Each year the GM tells us what events are happening.  Some more or less require our participation (though often you CAN bail out/make excuses), like our liege lord mustering his knights to war against the Saxons, or Christmas court.  Other periods less is going on and we can pursue our own interests.  Sometimes Merlin might recruit us for an errand or quest.  In Winter we make a series of rolls to see how prosperous our lands/households are, against the GM rolling on behalf of the winter.  Our horses can die, we can have kids if we're married or petition our lord for permission to marry if we're not, etc. Some kind of family event will happen.  And after our characters reach a certain age they'll have to make aging rolls and gradually become decrepit, assuming they don't die in battle younger.  And our heirs are the intended next generation of PCs.  Two of our three PC knights in our first generation HAVE recently (less than ten years into the game) died in battle against an evil Fae giant.  One of the new PCs is the recently-knighted squire of one of the deceased knights, and the other is the younger brother of my former character.Pendragon has mechanics for feasts and for battles as well as for the winter/estate-management phase.  A significant plot thread for my original PC Sir Gwydion was that he managed to marry a wealthy widow with several estates, but I never improved my Stewardship skill, so I was reliant on hers, and then on that of a skilled steward who I specifically went out to recruit after a few harsh winters/bad rolls on my part.  And then I had EVEN WORSE rolls with that guy despite his very high skill, which the GM explained as drunkenness and carelessness on the steward's part.  After the first couple of failures and a dead warhorse over a winter my character sat him down for a very "shape up or you're dead" conversation, and then when he failed AGAIN, he went on the lam with a bunch of stolen silver and one of my best horses!  Hunting him down was quite a fun side adventure, which was prompted by the winter phase mechanics, growing organically from play.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As far as how you would implement something like this in D&D, I do think you're going to want some sort of extended downtime mechanics like you're working on for winter and so forth, and feast/social activity ones would be good too.In terms of regular play, you can just establish with the players that the pace of adventure is simply different in this game than a regular D&D campaign.  The land is perhaps more peaceful, and monsters more rare, and the PCs have responsibilities of some kind which prevent them from just wandering off the map into the wilderness in search of treasure.Framing play around the year and the seasons, I think, is really good.  Like in Diplomacy- Spring, Summer, and Fall turns, with Winter being a time when adventure normally can't be had and PCs need to focus on survival and keeping the homestead whole.  If you plan for each season to be when one "thing" (event or adventure) happens, then you get a max of three adventures/major activities per year, and time can pass at a page less breakneck than seems common for D&D.</blockquote>

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