Campaign Duration

[Silver Moon]

I had to go for the 25+ months option, as there was no 25+ years option. Our campaign began in May 1982 and is still running strong. Tomorrow night we start our 142nd module. We've played a total of 1,028 game nights. We still have several of the original characters actively played, with 16 years of character time having passed since we began. Each player has 5 to 9 playing characters who they alternate playing depending upon the module level.

 

[Aaron L]

It varies between our 14 year long campaign, and year or so ones that we do as a side thing.

 

[Aaron L]

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

Characters die and are replaced, characters retire and are succeeded by their children or other heirs, lower level affiliate parties are spawned off the main one to continue certain adventures for side sessions (with players playing other characters), characters build and rule nations and have their subjects adventure to further their goals, etc.


Nothing beats a game lasting over a hundred years in game-time.

 

[Reynard]

Characters die and are replaced, characters retire and are succeeded by their children or other heirs, lower level affiliate parties are spawned off the main one to continue certain adventures for side sessions (with players playing other characters), characters build and rule nations and have their subjects adventure to further their goals, etc.


Nothing beats a game lasting over a hundred years in game-time.

The best part is that there are people reading this who actually don't believe you, because they can't imagine, having come to D&D via 3E, a game lasting that long. It's funny.

Sad funny.

 

[theredrobedwizard]

Characters die and are replaced, characters retire and are succeeded by their children or other heirs, lower level affiliate parties are spawned off the main one to continue certain adventures for side sessions (with players playing other characters), characters build and rule nations and have their subjects adventure to further their goals, etc.


Nothing beats a game lasting over a hundred years in game-time.

See, though, to me that isn't one campaign. That's many campaigns that have an interwoven backstory and plot. Once you retire a series of characters, it ceases to be that campaign anymore. It's new, albeit with lots of callbacks to the previous campaign.

It's not that I don't believe a single campaign can go for that long, it just doesn't seem fun to me.

tl;dr - It's not one campaign, it's multiple campaigns sharing a world.

-TRRW

 

[Bagpuss]

Really hard to say as we don't run one campaign all the way through to the end before we swap to another then later swap back, we (with different DM's) are running 3 D&D campaigns at the moment. Age of Worms, Savage Tide and Red Hand of Doom

 

[DragonLancer]

See, though, to me that isn't one campaign. That's many campaigns that have an interwoven backstory and plot. Once you retire a series of characters, it ceases to be that campaign anymore. It's new, albeit with lots of callbacks to the previous campaign.

It's not that I don't believe a single campaign can go for that long, it just doesn't seem fun to me.

tl;dr - It's not one campaign, it's multiple campaigns sharing a world.

You beat me to it. Thats a campaign setting not a single campaign.

 

[Piratecat]

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

In this case, the same actual campaign -- same DM, same ongoing plot line, same heroes. I use slow advancement where the PCs raise a level about every 10-12 (4 hour) sessions, and we play biweekly, so they go up about 2 levels a year. The heroes are now epic, about lvl 22-23, and the game is starting to draw to a close.

The biggest problem has been players moving to the west coast on me! That's what's caused almost all of our player turnover. Even with that, several of our players have been there the whole time, and former players get to make guest appearances when they're visiting out east. It makes for fun consistency.

Slow advancement isn't for everyone, but we love it. The game is very story based, with lots of character development. I'd say that about 10-12 game years have gone by over the course of the campaign.

Obviously, the trick to doing this is to make sure that players don't get bored. That requires paying attention to how people want to develop their heroes, and handcrafting certain challenges and plot line to intimately involve the PCs.

 

[Reynard]

See, though, to me that isn't one campaign. That's many campaigns that have an interwoven backstory and plot. Once you retire a series of characters, it ceases to be that campaign anymore. It's new, albeit with lots of callbacks to the previous campaign.

It's not that I don't believe a single campaign can go for that long, it just doesn't seem fun to me.

tl;dr - It's not one campaign, it's multiple campaigns sharing a world.

-TRRW

I think you are imagining a hard cut off where there might not be one. That is, when he says characters die or retire doesn't mean a whole bunch of them do so at any iven time. Remember, it also isn't uncommon in long term campaigns for new characters to come in at low level regardless of where the old PCs were. Esp. if you are playing a game like AD&D where the difference in level between a 1st level and 8th level character is less obvious than 3.x A new character takes on an old character as a mentor, who gives the new character some gear to help keep him alve while they adventure together with the new character "watching and learning" a lot, and occassionally doing post battle clean up.

3E doesn't really support long term play, out of the box anyway. Levels come too fast, differences between characters only a couple levels apart are too great and 3E character never make the transition from adventurers to leaders (in a mehcnaically supported way, anyway -- that is to say that character advancement continues to be about adventuring/combat abilities all the way through 1 to 20).

 

[Li Shenron]

About 1 year and a half has probably been our typical length, not counting early failures.