Campaign Duration

[HellHound]

I've run campaigns that lasted years... my B/X campaign ran for about 8 years, and my CyberPunk Night City Cru campaign went on from 1993 to 1998.

That said, I've learned that I much prefer shorter campaigns - something where I can plot out an actual conclusion to the campaign from the beginning and actually expect the players will stick it through to get from the beginning to the end.

Night City Cru was a classic "no goal" or "sandbox" campaign. It was just slices of life of a bunch of Night City residents through 2020-2024. But my current cyberpunk campaign is about timeline progress - we are aiming at running this campaign until the world looks nothing like classic CyberPunk anymore.

 

[DragonLancer]

My weekly 4-5 hour session campaigns last between a year and 18 months. It's about right for what I like.

 

[sniffles]

Our group has several campaigns that have been running for years.

Sometimes I think I'd like to try shorter campaigns, though, just to speed up the action and get a chance to do a bigger variety of characters and campaign styles.

 

[Reynard]

I chose 25+ months as what i woul like it to be. It kind of depends on your definition of campaign, though. When I say I wanta campaign that lasts years, I mean I want to play with the same group (though player fluctuation is normal and a good thing) in the same world for a long time. it doesn't have to be the same "story" and it doesn't have to be the same characters -- PCs die, retire, etc.. and players change what they'd like to play, get bored, etc...

For campaigns in the sense of a single "storyline" I think 6 months is about the limit. otherwise, i start to lose interest and want to do something different. I am curently running Temple of Elemental Evil and that should run about as long as a singular adventure/quest should, and then we can move on to discreet modules or the players can decide to start carving out kingdoms, or whatever.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Currently working on 4 years...yeah that's more than 25.

 

[Jhaelen]

Looking back it's about 5 years on average. However, even when we played once a week we never had a game that advanced to high levels. The typical survival rate made sure noone ever reached a level beyond 12th.

I'd prefer it if campaigns were a bit shorter, more like 2-3 years. But it's pretty much impossible because we can no longer meet often enough to achieve anything significantly heroic after such a 'short' time.

 

[Piratecat]

My campaign's at 15 years. Sagiro's campaign, which I play in, is at about 13.

 

[Pinotage]

Since I only play PbP, most of the campaigns I'm in (Shackled City, Age of Worms) are likely to last at least 6 years, if not more. We average an adventure every 6 months or so, so 2 per year, which means 6 years on average. That's a good campaign length, but naturally not everybody's cup of tea when it comes to PbP.

Pinotage

 

[Flynn]

I've run three campaigns that lasted longer than two years: a 7 year campaign in 2nd Edition, a 3 and a half year campaign under 3E, and a 2.5 year campaign using the Fantasy HERO rules. Most of my campaigns, though, run around 18-24 months in duration.

With Regards,
Flynn

 

[DragonLancer]

My campaign's at 15 years. Sagiro's campaign, which I play in, is at about 13.

How do you get a campaign to last 15 years? Do you mean using the same campaign setting or the actual campaign?