Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Warlock" data-source="post: 4500350" data-attributes="member: 21215">Let's see...I started my campaign in 1995, at the of 22, and it finished this year in February, having taken 13 years, and leaving me 35 years old.Two of the players were original members of the group who stayed with it from beginning to end. The remaining players joined between 5 and 9 years ago (most closer to the 9 than the 5). Two of my players got married and had two children, which eventually caused one to withdraw from the run to maintain that focus.I've have couples who broke up, leaving one behind in my run, and married couples juggle priorities so one or the other could remain in the run. But in the end, most were immersed in the major and minor plots running around. Despite the various life changes among various players, all retained an interest in my run, whether that was character development, plot and mysteries or pure action, and the mix of all of them.Continuity of characters that they could sit down and just knew was of course part of the draw, as well as the fact that their interactions with NPCs made them care about the world and want to keep playing.We played every weekend on Sunday from 5 to 11, with a few years with more sporadic 2 or 3 times a month bursts, and a month and a half Hiatus every year from halfway through December to the end of January where I looked at the player's actions and decisions over prior runs and sketched out the next years worth of likely scenarios. So, I have no freaking idea how many hours we put into it, but it was a lot, and it was years of comraderie and fun and socializing and imaginary ass-kicking.The characters went from level 1 to level 20, first in 2nd ed D&D (with some 1E sourcebooks) til about 12ish level, and then finished out the remaining levels in 3/3.5/3.MyHouseRules over the final 8 years.I, and my players, never felt like we were missing out on "mechanics," as that was never anything to desire. The value lay in the story and how they interacted with it and changed it, and what could be brought in with creativity. If there were rules to support it, I used them. Otherwise, I made them up. We always viewed the various core rulebooks as a framework to hang a campaign off of to give a generally consistent set of common rules to play out actions. So, we used anything and everything we wanted that came up, and never felt jypped if we couldn't use the old Blade bard kit or cast a specific spell or prestige class power.Those were secondary. Story and character were the meat, with doing cool heroic things about even, and "getting book value" was at the bottom, at least from the perspective of getting an opportunity to use everything.I can barely imagine running a campaign for LESS than a couple of years. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification