Campaign Duration

[Silver Moon]

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.

Except the original characters haven't retired, they are still actively played, so the first campaign never ceased. The team for tonight's module will include two founding characters, two who were started over twenty years ago, and two relatively new characters.

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.

We also also use slow progression (although in our case, it is due in part to DM's owing backlogged experience points from prior modules). As I stated before, 16 years of character time has passed. I am the primarly DM and modules are definately designed based upon challenges and plotlines that revolve around the backstories or interests of the specific playing characters.

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.

I agree with this too. Our weekly group still uses AD&D 1st Edition rules.

 

[HellHound]

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.

It's just not the kind of game I like to play. I prefer shorter campaign arcs in a shared world, not playing one set of characters for that long.

 

[FalcWP]

Well, my average is quite low, given the number of campaigns that have flamed out after one or two sessions (or never even got off the ground - had everything planned out, had characters, and for some reason never got started). But my latest one is reversing that trend, as we're up around the six month mark.

 

[TessarrianDM]

My 1e and 2e campaigns lasted until the next edition came out (8 years and 10 years respectively). Our current campaign includes two characters who converted from 2e to 3e, then to 3.5. It is still set in the same homebrewed world as our 2e campaign. I currently have no plans to start a new campaign (or change over) when 4e comes out.

 

[The Green Adam]

These days my average is a year, though I've gone much longer in the past and as little as 3-5 session lately . My longest was a 1e/Homebrew D&D campaign that lasted 4 years.

AD

 

[EricNoah]

At about 1.5 game sessions per month, roughly a year and a half, so about 25-30 sessions; and usually that's anywhere between 5 and 10 levels of play.

 

[Warren Okuma]

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

Same here.