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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 464722" data-attributes="member: 5328">Not D&D, but back in second semester 1987 I ran a very strictly time-limited miniseries campaign, which was under a positive deadline that it had to finish in the weekend after the last week of lectures (so that the players could start studying for their exams). There were seven weekends to play, so I constructed a seven-part 'collect the set to save the world' campaign, with one of the pieces of the set located on each of the seven continents, and an in-game deadline of one year and one day.I screwed the pressure pretty high on that one, with the world gradually going to Hell as the year counted down, and the characters presented with gradually worse and worse things they had to do collect the set. They triggered a stockmarket collapse and world recession. They provoked a limited nuclear exchange. Nuclear Winter had started. And the players were determined that it was all going to work out okay, if they had to hold me down in my GMing chair until it did. Sessions began to run later and later. Players started wanting to start early and earlier. The fifth session ran from 7 pm until after dawn. The sixth session they wanted to start at 3 pm. By 5 am things were getting pretty freaky. Reason? The GM was tripping on fatigue poisons and caffeine.Out of the seven PCs that started that campaign, only two stuck through to the end. One was dead (having walked up to a major villain and romantic rival with a homemade bomb and let it off). Four the other four were just not morally prepared to do anything more, even if it would save the world. Of the two characters still plugging away at the end, one had taken to sacrificing human hearts to the rising Sun (on the theory that this couldn't hurt), and one said that if only one breeding pair of humans survived what she had to do, then that was victory, by damn!Those two players haven't been the same since.I endorse this policy. Back in High School, when I had nothing better to do, I tried to see down long I could function without sleep. About the 85-hour mark I started hallucinating.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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