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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7124658" data-attributes="member: 40592">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'.</blockquote>

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