D&D campaign structures, in the modern day?

[John Dallman]

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.

This structure emerged naturally in university groups where there were many DMs, and persists into the present day among people I know who started playing back then, who are mostly still running the same worlds, and using heavilly houseruled OD&D or AD&D1e rules. There are characters still in play who have been going for 40+ years of real time, and are still meaningfully playable, albeit quite powerful.

I'm not familiar with how people play more modern versions of D&D (3e onwards). I have the impression that open worlds are rare and parties have fixed compositions. An individual campaign may last for a few months or years of play, but then it ends. How wrong am I?

 

[Doug McCrae]

That's the mode of play described in 1974 OD&D. AD&D 1e is less explicit about it but I think it's still there.

I began tt rpg-ing in 1982 and the closest I've come to experiencing it was playing the videogame World of Warcraft, where parties do form for adventures.

 

[Lanefan]

That all sopunds familiar to me, as in still playing it in some ways, other than we don't have quite as much character portability between worlds as you seem to have. That said, characters jumping from one world to another is not at all unheard of round here; and there's a vaguely consistent connecting timeline to it all.

We generally consider all play in a given DM's world to be a "campaign", even if some embedded stories end up completely unrelated to each other and-or some character or groups of characters never meet.

Our adventures tend to take longer to play than your ever did - 10-15 sessions per adventure seems about the norm these days, due in part to the generally high-ish level of the characters and in part - sadly - to our sessions getting shorter as we get older.

But yes, anecdotally from what I've seen I have to largely agree with your observations of 3e-4e-5e play: generally smaller campaigns, much more stable parties (in part due to it taking way longer to roll up a character!), less player and-or character turnover, amd more of an expectation that everyone will show up for every session (i.e. largely gone are the days when whichever players turned up for a given session formed a party from their various available PCs and away they went)

 

[Umbran]

I'm not familiar with how people play more modern versions of D&D (3e onwards). I have the impression that open worlds are rare and parties have fixed compositions. An individual campaign may last for a few months or years of play, but then it ends. How wrong am I?

I'm aware of the style you mention, but though I started in the 80s, no group I've worked with plays the way you did. My experience has been parties with mostly fixed compositions, with a campaign lasing for long periods of time.

I think it is probably related to how/what the group was playing before they came to D&D. If you take a bunch of wargamers who gather in the FLGS to play wargames, and hand them D&D, what you describe is a pretty natural development.

If you hand a small group of teenagers who are used to reading fantasy novel trilogies the rulebooks, they will put together a game among themselves, with rather fewer people and probably only one person willing to run the game.

 

[Lanefan]

If you hand a small group of teenagers who are used to reading fantasy novel trilogies the rulebooks, they will put together a game among themselves, with rather fewer people and probably only one person willing to run the game.

To start with, sure, but where it goes from there would be, I think, largely determined by how many other people want to get involved once this small group starts telling their friends about their game.

If nobody else is interested then yes, it stays as a small insular group. But if a bunch of others all want in as well then soon you're very much looking at a hiving-off or parallel-game situation.

 

[Imaculata]

Most of my experience has been with sandbox games. Vast open worlds where the players decide where to travel next. It seems to appeal the most to our group. But each DM has ownership of their own campaign and setting. There is no overlap between the two. Each campaign has their own characters. I have no idea if this is the norm currently.

 

[Umbran]

If nobody else is interested then yes, it stays as a small insular group. But if a bunch of others all want in as well then soon you're very much looking at a hiving-off or parallel-game situation.

They'll hive off into parallel separate games. Teens aren't known for their organizational skills, and are known for cliquishness. So, they will calve off into separate groups that don't interact much. They are unlikely to form, say, a guild or larger organization, in which all the games operate and players swap between them every few sessions as described above. That would only happen under the influence of some other organizing force - like a game store or a school faculty member advising a gaming club.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Started in 77-78. The first game resulted in a TPK, but I was hooked. Over the years, I’ve lived and gamed in 5 cities in 3 states, and have played in about 100 systems. D&D has been the main game.

I have to say, though, I’ve only been in one group where there were shifting party compositions. While it was in the longest running D&D campaign of my life*, that group ALSO had multiple campaigns with set party makeups.


* it started in AD&D, and all the stuff was converted through 2Ed, 3Ed and 3.5Ed as the editions were released.

 

[Lanefan]

They'll hive off into parallel separate games. Teens aren't known for their organizational skills, and are known for cliquishness. So, they will calve off into separate groups that don't interact much.

Maybe.

It would depend then on two things: how much personnel overlap there is between the various games, and how much interaction there is between all these people outside of the game(s). If, for example, it's all one big gang of friends anyway who just can't all fit around the same table at the same time (or whose schedules don't allow for such) there might not be nearly as much separation.

Another unifying factor is if the original game developed any significant house rules (or, in rare cases, its own system) and the hived-off games shared such, i.e. a partly or fully in-house ruleset; while a dis-unifying factor would be if they're all using different systems e.g. one's running 5e, another's using PF, and a third is trying out 13th Age.

They are unlikely to form, say, a guild or larger organization, in which all the games operate and players swap between them every few sessions as described above. That would only happen under the influence of some other organizing force - like a game store or a school faculty member advising a gaming club.

Unlikely, but it's not impossible that this could arise on its own.

 

[Umbran]

Maybe.

It would depend then on two things: how much personnel overlap there is between the various games, and how much interaction there is between all these people outside of the game(s).

I think it would depend more on where they play. If they are all playing in a school cafeteria, or a game store, swapping groups might be reasonable. If one group is in Sam's basement, and another in Sally's dining room across town, the chance they will cross-pollinate is much lower.