D&D 5E Do you favour short or long campaigns?

[Ath'kethin]

To address the subtext of the OP: I think the huge 1-15 campaign adventure path books are bunk. I agree 100% that they're too much, and too much to keep track of. In that sense, I think "long campaigns" are not a great concept.

Now, strings of adventures featuring the same (or most of the same) players/characters that last for years because everybody is interested and involved and having fun: sign me right up. I'm all about those, though as an adult with a full time job, a three-year old kid, and a spouse who is uninterested in fantasy in general let alone gaming, plus players and potential players who are all in more or less the same boat, it's a TALL order these days.

 

[ccs]

I like long campaigns that are comprised of individual adventures, only some of wich might actually be connected to each other. I don't even need an overall BBEG.
I really dislike being locked into one all-consuming plot session after session.

 

[LordEntrails]

I prefer long.

As others point out, you're arguments are against long adventure paths. I don't like those either.

 

[hastur_nz]

In my experience, most players love character continuity; if you give them the chance to stop and do something different, hardly any will want to take it. So as a DM, it's up to me to try and help make that fun. For example:
1. make sure your session recap doesn't just go over what happened last week, make sure it covers what's relevant for the session that's actually about to start; this means you might remind them of stuff that's way old but relevant to 'what's next', and leave out some more recent stuff that is not important going forward.
2. when you do your planning, make sure you do your own 'recap' to remind yourself of what's happened earlier, and how you can use that to make the next session interesting, not just what's written in your adventure / book. That's actually quite a challenge, but a good one IMO (I found Curse of Strahd especially challenging to run, but in a good way).

I've run adventure paths from 1st to 20th level in 3.5 and 5e, and to 30th in 4e. None were perfect, but all were epic events the players and I got a lot out of. Each had a mix of variety in adventure styles, and a 'meta plot' that didn't really appear clearly until the second half. Now, I'll probably never run one that big ever again, but something at least ten levels gives enough of the same kinds of continuity and development that people love, and it's less work for you as DM not having to try and keep high level play interesting.

The key to success in a long-running campaign is simply ensuring:
1. every session is as relevant and interesting as possible (if it's just filler, hand-wave it to the interesting part).
2. every adventure (in an AP), or chapter (in a book-style), is as interesting as possible, and is different from the previous ones.
3. you follow the two pieces of advice earlier i.e. solid, relevant re-caps to kick off each session with your players minds on the job; solid planning to keep you and the players interested and the adventures relevant not just grinding through the pre-written 'script'.

 

[dropbear8mybaby]

I prefer long.

As others point out, you're arguments are against long adventure paths. I don't like those either.

This seems to be a sticking point of the thread. I consider long adventure paths, i.e. Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, Tyranny of Dragons, et al, to be campaign books. There seems to be a lot of different opinions on what constitutes a campaign. From my perspective, having a single, themed set of adventures that spans months to years of gaming, is a campaign. I would not call, for instance, Tales from the Yawning Portal to be a campaign book, even if stringed together over multiple levels, because there is no set theme that spans and links all of them. I guess you could turn it into a campaign by injecting your own lore, but even then, I feel they're disconnected enough that I'd call it more a pseudo-campaign than a regular style of campaign.

 

[TerraDave]

So, to summarize, long boring adventures make for long boring campaigns.

For the 5E ones, even CoS, which I think is definitely the best, still have a fair amount of stuff that could be optional or dropped out right.

On the other hand, a series of shorter adventures, linked by thematic and some other common elements, can make for a great game.

 

[LordEntrails]

This seems to be a sticking point of the thread. I consider long adventure paths, i.e. Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, Tyranny of Dragons, et al, to be campaign books. There seems to be a lot of different opinions on what constitutes a campaign. From my perspective, having a single, themed set of adventures that spans months to years of gaming, is a campaign. I would not call, for instance, Tales from the Yawning Portal to be a campaign book, even if stringed together over multiple levels, because there is no set theme that spans and links all of them. I guess you could turn it into a campaign by injecting your own lore, but even then, I feel they're disconnected enough that I'd call it more a pseudo-campaign than a regular style of campaign.

I think a better / more common definition of "campaign" is one or more sessions in which the same PCs are used or a single story is told.

Whether its a good, bod or other campaign depends on all sorts of things. But I think the simpler, broader definition is more appropriate when used as a general term.

 

[MNblockhead]

I like both.

Long campaigns are, however, difficult to keep going. Life tends to get in the way. It can also be a LOT of work for the DM.

I've been running a campaign for about two years and it is getting difficult to sustain.

When it completes, I'll likely take a break and play some one one off games, starting with Paranoia and then some other systems I've been interested in trying. Then I'll run a published AP like Curse of Straud to reduce the workload. I find it hard to create my own adventures and world on top of work and family responsibilities.

Eventually, I'm sure I'll want to return to the world that I created. I put so much time into it and I and my players have been enjoying it. But next time I would do it differently. Each session will be a different level and I would skip some levels. Every session would be a one-shot adventure but with the same characters. Basically the characters would be a group of heroes, each off doing their own thing, but brought together every few years to tackle a major threat. That way the players can play the characters at different tiers of play, but I won't have to develop enough material to take them from 1 to 20. Even if I did one level a session, that's a tough for me right now. I'm thinking 10 sessions (each about 8 hours) spread across all three tiers of play. If not all players can make a session, no worries. Each sessions stands on its own. It also allows me to get lazy and run published adventures that I like because I won't have the same story continuity demands.

Basically, I think I'll go back to the modular style of play I started with in the 80s.

 

[Blue]

I can imagine your pain with adventure paths. I never run them. I run homebrew worlds (often with players helping to flesh out) and only my own adventures. The players helping flesh out the world really leads to a lot of buy-in, where they see things come up because of what they have described.

My current campaign is about 2.5 years in (13th Age, similar to 5e). The previous two campaigns I ran (3.0 and 3.5), based in the same world with 80 years separating them so what the players did in the first could really impact the second, lasted for 12 years total.

It's work not to let it get stale. I throw lots of plots and things to follow at the players and they take on what they want, so they have a lot of direction. That D&D 3.0 campaign got completely player-directed when they found vampires trying to recover an artifact from a dragon's horde that could cause a constant eclipse. Suddenly the whole campaign spun around how to keep this safe, and the allies who wouldn't be corrupted by the vampires over generations, and where could such a thing be destroyed. Never envisioned at campaign start, which was much more around orc horsemen tribes in the steppes and a living forest guarded by a druid's circle.

I also do campaign arcs to spotlight each of the characters, something that wouldn't be in an adventure path. For plot arc, I try to keep where they need to keep details clear for 4-6 months if not less, and send out recaps when old arcs resurface.

And anything that has not yet come up in the world is subject to rewrite to match player interests, including - nay, especially my big plots. Where we are right now plot-wise I never could have imagined at the campaign start because so much of it is based on how my PCs have interacted and changed the world. This is very different then following an adventure path and keeps it focused and relevant for them.

I guess the best way to describe it is I'm pseudo-sand-boxy. I come with ideas based on what the players and characters seem interested in and do, and they are free to pursue those or something else. But stuff they don't pursue doesn't just drop unless the players aren't interested - it grows and that helps keep the world dynamic. I had one campaign where I was asked to have a definitive beginning, middle and end before the start and even with rewriting that wasn't as much fun for me to write. I'd rather throw out huge amounts of foreshadowing that I have no idea what it means, and then tie it in three months later as things become clearer.

 

[Mortilupo]

I've decided that I'm done with long campaigns. I'm currently running two long term campaigns. One with a group that started at 1st and wants to get to 20th. The other I took over to run SKT and will, hopefully, go back to playing in once I'm done.

I'm really over long campaigns. All the campaign books are exhausting. Curse is relatively short, all things considered, but even it is too long IMO. The same with Horde, especially since it's really only part one of two.

The problem is, IMO, that there is simply too much filler and dragging out of plot elements. Most players forget what happened twenty sessions ago and rarely ever can recall enough to piece puzzles together across multiple sessions. It becomes a slog rather than a fun jaunt. I also get bored of the campaign as a DM and constantly feel like either pushing the players towards faster resolutions, or just skipping filler content to speed things up. Right now, in SKT, I feel as if the last ten sessions have been basically about nothing other than pure exposition, even though the characters have traversed half of the north just to get to this point. In my homebrew campaign, it's becoming increasingly difficult to give the players motivations for their characters since the only real motivation has been the same one since 1st-level, and everything else has been filler to get to that resolution, which is still seven levels away. It's becoming a really drawn out drag.

I equate it much to the same phenomena as British TV shows which have much shorter, more compact seasons, and American TV shows which stretch things across 20+ episodes. All the current campaign books feel like a 24 season American TV show when what would be much more fun, would be a six season one.

I think from now on I'll only do sub-5 level campaigns, with the aim of three levels being the sweet spot. I'm currently playing in the Sunless Citadel and I'm hoping that the DM decides to continue on with Forge of Fury. I really like the concept of having a break in-between campaigns so that it always feels fresh and new and exciting and has a decently quick resolution to all the elements. I almost envy him being the DM for this.

So what do you favour? Short or long campaigns?

The problem isn't long vs. short campaigns, the problem is that the "long" mod books really don't offer all that much in roleplay and push you through the adventure. A long campaign for me is a game that spans two years of weekend play and hundreds of mods.

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