D&D campaign structures, in the modern day?

[hawkeyefan]

I suppose it depends, as most things, on the preference of the group. I’ve always preferred to play in our setting as opposed to my setting.

Even in campaigns where there’s no rotation and it’s just going to be me in the DM chair, I still want as much input on the setting from the players as possible.

 

[aramis erak]

My daughter and I shared my L5R GMing alternating for a while, then she took over and ran it with merely mechanical help. Even put my PC into a great retirement arc.

It's all about communication and shared view.

 

[Gilladian]

My norm is one campaign, one DM, one set of players and PCs. However, at game shops where regular gaming went on, I have experienced something close to what the OP describes. In the mid/late-70's, when I was a young teen and 1e was just coming out, we played at various Hobby Shops in Copperas Cove, TX. There was a HIGH turnover of people, due to being right beside a military base. We all had multiple characters, there was a steady stream of new DMs and players, and everyone just showed up, pulled out a character of appropriate class and level for the given DM's adventure, and we played. There were no "campaigns" and PCs had all sorts of weird powers, over-powered magic, and monty-haulism and cheating were rampant. BUT it was LOADS of fun.

YEARS later, I played in a game shop during the late 3-e era. There were two regular DMS (me and the shop owner), and we wanted to expand the circle of people willing to DM. So we created a shared world setup with a loose plot that allowed us to go world hopping and recruited players with the requirement that they each would rotate through being the DM. It was fun, but I'm not sure in the long run it convinced anyone to take up full-time DMing.

All in all, given my druthers, I would prefer a stable campaign, but if that was the only way to get to PLAY, which I am sadly short of doing, I would join such a group again.

 

[billd91]

My experience of D&D-family games seems to be unusual. I started in a university group in 1979-83, where all the DM's worlds were of their own design, and all connected. Characters could be played in any of the worlds, and could be moved between them via the "Halls of Teleportation", an NPC organisation that had facilities in large and medium-sized cities and transported adventurers for free, although they charged merchants shipping goods in bulk. This meant that characters weren't in fixed groups, and long-running "campaigns" were rare.

Players would have many characters each, at a wide variety of levels. Parties were formed for adventures, which might take a single session to play, and rarely more than three (although sessions could last all day at weekends). Plot arcs could exist, but participation in them was basically voluntary for characters, who'd go on the relevant adventures if they wanted to. This had the side-effect that many adventures were organised by the PCs interested in a particular plot.

We played a lot like this in the mid-80s in middle school and high school. We were all pretty new at it and so everyone tried a hand at DMing now and then. And we'd each have our own campaign worlds going - some in Greyhawk, some in home-brews. We'd play the characters we wanted to play for the adventure without much regard for game world of origin or level. At one point, we did posit that one of the higher level characters, who had established a stronghold, hosted a magical gate that allowed us to move from one world to another, but we never really did care much - we just brought in whatever character we felt like playing at the time.

 

[TarionzCousin]

There are characters still in play who have been going for 40+ years of real time, and are still meaningfully playable, albeit quite powerful.

Does anyone remember what level Edena of Neith's paladin got to? Six hundred?

 

[John Dallman]

Does anyone remember what level Edena of Neith's paladin got to? Six hundred?

Nowhere near that in these campaigns: I don't think there is anyone over level 40.