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<blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 7874064" data-attributes="member: 6999616">My experience of D&amp;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 &quot;Halls of Teleportation&quot;, 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 &quot;campaigns&quot; 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&amp;D or AD&amp;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&amp;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?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Dallman, post: 7874064, member: 6999616"] 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 [I]adventures[/I], 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? [/QUOTE]

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