D&D 5E How fast do you play D&D?

[Mhyr]

We just finished LMoP. It took us 20 sessions including some minor side treks. We come together about twice a month for 4-6 hours. I have 8 players now and it is very seldom that the same guys finishing last session sit down together for the next one. We have the following levels after this one year of 5E:

level 3: 2 PC*
level 4: 4 PC
level 5: 2 PC

*(One living abroad and was only able to join the game for three sessions. The other one just started with one session int D&D)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I generally prefer weekly or twice-monthly play, for 3-5 hours a session. In all the major campaigns I've participated in, that was at least the goal, though schedule constraints occasionally meant we would skip a week, or double up a week (play two times in one week) to avoid "lost" sessions.

 

[Lanefan]

My 4e D&D campaign is designed to last the 5.5 years (early 2011 to late 2016) it takes to get from level 1 to level 30 at around 4 sessions to level and playing 3 hours fortnightly, currently at level 25 after 92 sessions and would expect something like 110-115 sessions total.

Not bad for a 4e campaign, from all I can tell. But to divide it by 2 to get an assessment as if it were played (mostly) weekly, to line up with what seems to be the norm for comparison purposes, would show about a 3-year campaign life instead of the close-to-6 you're getting by playing every second week.

I've run a bunch of ca 30 session, ca 2-year campaigns in the 2000s. My current Pathfinder campaign is most like that, next Sunday should be the last session, session 34, having run January 2014 to end September 2015, 1 3/4 years.

For comparison, our weekly games tend to usually end up getting in about 40-47 sessions per year (per party, if two are running side by side on different nights). Now, in all fairness I'll admit that we're not as hardcore as some once we get together, and some weeks some of the evening goes to discussions about food, beer, politics, or whatever; but we still get some game play in.

My Classic D&D Karameikos campaign is a weekly sandbox running since start of April 2015, PCs currently around 5th level mostly, not sure when it will end, basically should run indefinitely while I have players, the way BECM is I could run it to 36th level no problem.

5 levels in about half a year means 36 levels in about 3-and-a-half years. Then what?

My 5e D&D online Wilderlands sandbox started in March 2015, building on prior campaigns (1e, LL, 4e etc) back to ca 2009, currently weekly. 35 sessions and PCs ca level 7-8 currently. Judging by past experience this will run until there's a TPK; if no TPK I'm happy to run it indefinitely and it looks to have a lot of legs.

I guess your definition of "a lot of legs" is different than mine; at your current advancement rate you're looking at less than 2 years total to get to 20th, and you can spin it out for a while after than with Boons and so forth. In my eyes (as player) 2 years into a campaign just nicely gets it started; I've learned a bit about the world and what the main stories are, I've probably gone through a few characters before finding one or two with enough luck and-or starch to stick around, and I'm ready to see where it goes for the indefinite (as in, many years) future. (caveat: I'm talking about table games here, just noticed your example is an online game)

For the purposes of discussion below I'm going to intentionally ignore campaigns where the intent going in is to run only a single adventure path and nothing else.

There's other aspects, too, that can make a campaign longer or shorter. If you're running a single party with the same players running the same PCs all the time your campaign is going to have a built-in time limit to it as the PCs will outgrow the game system by earning too many levels. If you have characters cycling in and out via retirement or rest or death, and-or if you have multiple parties (may or may not be run by the same actual players) going in the world at the same time, and-or if you put some serious brakes on level advancement, you can make what would have been a two-year campaign easily last for 6-8 years or more; and not feel stale.

It's also down to the DM. If at campaign start you've only got 6 or 8 adventures in mind, guess what? Unless you have unusually creative players you're probably only good for an 8-10 adventure campaign, with the extras made up or inserted on the fly and-or coming in response to what the party does in the game. But if you've story-boarded out 30-40 adventures covering all sorts of different levels (in full knowledge you're not going to run them all, based on what the players decide to engage with) you've given yourself loads of flexibility and - more importantly - loads of ideas.

Lan-"and the best part is that 5e can support all this"-efan

 

[Talmek]

My group plays every other week for about 4-6 hours per session. Over the course of 5 sessions they are halfway between 3rd-4th level. To me this feels much more like the right pace than what I had done previously in campaigns, be it meeting only once a month (you'd better be willing to write one HELLUVA recap in that case) or every single week for the same amount of session time (I was too prone to burnout trying to prepare 7-10 encounters every single week).

 

[discosoc]

We play games faster than these forum pages load, that's for sure.

 

[Henry]

?...how long (in years, or months for the extremely short-lived) do you want and-or expect your current campaign to last overall?

I don't plan for mine to last past 9th level, roughly. Even at current rate, we'll still be playing it until january or so. I've not ever had a campaign last more than a year to 16 months. Every time i've ever tried, people change jobs, move out of state, have babies, etc. keeping the same core group for more than a year is very uncommon to me.

 

[Sunseeker]

My group plays weekly for 8-12 hours, depending on how much content we have to play through. We try to keep our turns brief <1min. We play fairly fast and a little loose, I'm very open to people telling me what they want to do and how they want to do and me telling them what DC that is over crunching through what only the RAW allows us to do.

 

[aramis erak]

Looks like everyone so far in this thread is levelling pretty fast by my way of looking at it...so, a corollary question: how long (in years, or months for the extremely short-lived) do you want and-or expect your current campaign to last overall?

Me, every time I start a new campaign I go in with the (probably naive, but what the hell) intent that it'll last for the rest of my life or as long as people want to keep playing it, whichever comes first; so far I've had 'em last 10 years, 12 years, and 7+ years. And pretty much the only way to achieve this is to either somehow slow down the levelling rate to a relative crawl (recommended) or end up experimenting with 75th-level characters (have fun with that!).

I'm not the least bit interested in doing all the world-building work to then only use it for a year or maybe two.

Lan-"it also helps to have more than one active party running side by side"-efan

I expect mine to end around the february... because the campaign goal is the druid learning to fly. I'm aiming to wrap the campaign around then.

 

[Ktulu]

Coming up on session 38 in my current game. We try to play weekly, but health and life got in the way this year. Anyway, the highest level character is 7, with most around 5 after some character deaths. The 7th level char has been at every session and never died.

 

[S'mon]

5 levels in about half a year means 36 levels in about 3-and-a-half years. Then what?

I guess your definition of "a lot of legs" is different than mine; at your current advancement rate you're looking at less than 2 years total to get to 20th, and you can spin it out for a while after than with Boons and so forth. In my eyes (as player) 2 years into a campaign just nicely gets it started; I've learned a bit about the world and what the main stories are, I've probably gone through a few characters before finding one or two with enough luck and-or starch to stick around, and I'm ready to see where it goes for the indefinite (as in, many years) future. (caveat: I'm talking about table games here, just noticed your example is an online game)

Then what - if I did actually get a group of 36th level PCs in BECM D&D, which seems unlikely,
and they wanted to keep playing, then I'd get hold of the Immortals set and do BECMI.
The alternative of course is new PCs - this is a pretty traditional campaign which allows
for multiple PCs, my son (8) insists that all his main PC's children are also his characters
- "I rolled them!".

But realistically, few tabletop players stick around that long here in London, my
Karameikos group are mostly young and their careers will likely take most of them away from London within three years. In my 25th level 5e D&D campaign only one original player & PC is still there from the
start at 1st level in 2011, three more of the current group joined through 2012 at ca 6th-8th,
and the fifth joined at the start of this year at level 22.

Re the 5e Wilderlands game that might reach 20th in a couple years, actually ideally I would like to play a lot of Epic stuff at 20th level so I could see it going a long time at 20th, but eventually
the players will want new PCs - this gets in to what a 'campaign' is separate from a 'world' since there are NPCs in the current game that some players have known in prior campaigns from 2-5
years ago, I think my first online Wilderlands campaign was 2009 and there is player
continuity from then.

Finally, in my big 1e AD&D campaign that went for many years, by the end the PCs were demigods and a lesser gods and we had years of deity-level play.

Overall, I don't think slow advancement is necessary for continuity unless you don't want the game to change, in which case I'd prefer a lateral-advancement system to D&D; BRP as in
Pendragon & Runequest maybe. But I really like in D&D seeing the campaign change
over the years, zero to hero to superhero to legend to demigod in some cases. I don't much like 3e/PF super-fast advancement though, my favourite 3e campaign was Lost City of Barakus
using half XP.

Edit: Overall I think WoTC were right to think that most campaigns last 1-1.5 years, but wrong to
design 3e around going 1st-20th in that time - they designed 4e to go 1st-30th in 1.5 years but
failed IME since combat is slower than they realised. I would say Gygax was right to design around 1st to name level (ca 9th-11th) in a year of weekly play, that is a satisfying campaign for most people. And he
was right to have slower progression after name level for the long term campaigns that wanted
to stick with the same PCs. 5e by contrast has a similar rate to 10th level (quicker 1-4, similar
5-10) but then rockets you up from 11th to 20th. The difference though is that 5e power curve
seems a lot more shallow; I was reading the 5e DMG yesterday and my 7th-8th level PCs are still
doing the sort of
adventures it describes for the level 1-4 novice tier, I suspect at 20th they'd mostly be doing
the sort of thing it describes for level 11-16 paragon tier, and that should work fine.