How many campaigns have you finished?

[Olaf the Stout]

This week my Shackled City AP campaign came to an end after over 3 years of fortnightly play. The final session count was around 80-odd sessions. Most were 4-5 hours long with several full day sessions thrown into the mix. The PC's began at first level and finished around 18th-19th level.

What was different about this campaign for me was it was the first campaign that I have ever run that reached the planned ending. Apart from that, I've played in just one other campaign that reached a planned ending. That campaign was 6-9 months of fortnightly sessions though, so it was a fairly short campaign.

Every other game I've played in has come to a premature ending due to the DM quitting, several players leaving or the group simply losing interest in the current game. This one managed to get past that, even surviving a 7 month break after the birth of my second child. I think the stable player line-up was a major help in that regard.

The final 2 sessions had 6 and 7 players at the table thanks to past players being in town at the time. It made it a challenge to run, but it was great to see everyone there for the ending and certainly made the finish feel suitably epic.

So how many campaigns have you finished? How long did they go for and what level did the PC's reach?

Olaf the Stout

 

[Jack7]

Well, if ya count all kinds of Role Playing Games then about five or six reached an ending I planned, more if you count "reached a suitable but unplanned ending." My RPG Campaigns used to be of the longer variety, one running about 5 years or so (it was AD&D). In that one my players (I was DM) topped out at about 16th level, with the replacement guys hitting about 12th, and a couple of the big guys being KIA or sacrificing themselves at the end.

If you count Wargames then I've finished a lot of campaigns, but they usually run a few months in length. Ran one in Stalingrad that ran about 9 months.

But I don't have a lot of time to play nowadays, I have family and businesses to run and projects and inventions and social stuff and charity and occasional case-work and what-not.

So nowadays a Campaign is a very different thing than it was before.

I set limits on Campaigns, which usually have very narrow parameters.

For instance in the past a Campaign (when I was a kid) might include Resurrecting the entire, long-dead Kingdom of Pesh, and that went on a long time.

Nowadays a Campaign might be, have the Basilegate infiltrate a town being besieged by the Bulgarians and see if the rumors are true that the Bulgars are employing some kind of Monster as an ally, and if so, kill it, so the regular Byzantine troops can lift the siege.

So whereas when I was young a Campaign was Strategic and maybe even cosmic in nature (that was the goal), nowadays I run Tactical Campaigns with limited objectives. Just don't have time for the "reshape the world stuff" anymore.

A Campaign is more like, "let's take Palermo," than, let's plan and execute the Invasion of Russia.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I would say I have finished (as a DM) five campaigns. I've run at least two more that I hoped to finish but didn't because they weren't working. I also ran a CoC game over multiple sessions that might push the definition of 'campaign'.

The first campaign I ran finished with a wide range of levels; one character hit level 17 IIRC, while the others were several levels behind (never made that mistake again).

The next two were played out to upper teens. Select characters were brought back from each for some fun epic level sessions.

The most recent two campaigns I ran both ended at around level 8.

In terms of sessions, my campaigns have ranged from 12 sessions to somewhere in the mid twenties. My most recent was meant to be 20 but I had to shorten it to 12 with some really dense, productive sessions and really creative storytelling.

In terms of real time, most of my campaigns are a little less than a year, sometimes with substantial breaks in there.

As a player, I've done less. I've played in a lot of one-offs, but I'd guess I've only completed two, maybe three short-ish campaigns.

***

My scope of what defines a 'campaign' is roughly equivalent to a season of dense, serialized television. It has a clear beginning and end, if not necessarily a definitive one (though mine have been pretty definitive). I'd like to aim bigger, but I also believe in running a variety of games with a variety of DMs, and my life (and my players' lives) just don't allow enough sessions to do any more than that. I find that setting realistic expectations is a very important part of DMing.

 

[RoryN]

In real life? None, nada, zip! In my mind? Every one I've ever run!

The problem has been a lack of commitment from some of the people I used to game with. When the guy playing the high-level cleric decides he's just going to go run off to Reno for the weekend without saying anything to anyone (even his parents didn't know where he was) it tends to disrupt the campaign a tiny bit. lol

To be honest, I haven't even finished any of my computer or video campaigns. No, wait, way back in the day, I finished "The Bard's Tale II". yay me!

 

[Shemeska]

Less than 10.

However that's both because I've only been gaming for twelve years now, and also because all of my group's campaigns each last for around 1-2 years, and the ones that I've ran around 2-3 years. D&D 3.x, Shadowrun, oWoD Werewolf, Alternity, Firefly. All run to completion and all damn fun.

However I will add that I'm doomed to never finish a superhero game, regardless of system used. I've been in three and dropped out of three. Me and the genre don't agree and I just lose interest and bail. I'm a terrible person.

 

[Dragonblade]

Many of our games stop prematurely, but a few have gone the distance.

I played in an awesome 3.5 based homebrew campaign that lasted two years and went from level 1 to 20 in the mid 2000's.

I ran the original Rise of the Runelords using 3.5 gestalt PCs from start to finish back in 2008 before 4e came out.

Played a fun and epic homebrew 4e Dark Sun game last year that went from level 1 to 20, then jumped to level 29 for our final battle against the sorcerer-kings. We ended the campaign by cleansing the world of defiling magic and became the first true gods Athas had ever known. Epic doesn't begin to describe it.

Am currently playing a 4e-ified house ruled Pathfinder and running through Serpent's Skull. We are in book 3 right now.

When that finishes I'm running a new 4e campaign and will likely convert Jade Regent or Kingmaker to run it in.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

Finished? Wow... Geez, I guess none.

As a player I've finished what was technically a two-parter. I still consider it just a one shot though. Too short to count as a campaign.

 

[enrious]

I played in H.S. and college, but in those days there wasn't really much of a sense of a campaign with a planned end - you played until a tpk, people got bored, or it got too high a level to have fun.

Starting with 3e (when I got back in), the following have been completed:

1) Scarred Lands - did the Serpent Amphora trilogy of modules. Really loved the setting, keep meaning to go back there one day (or import it into my homebrew)

2) World's Largest Dungeon (ok, technically they gave up on the last map, but after a year in the campaign, that was an acceptable end - it was one of the planned options)

3) Ptolus - campaign lasted a year and a half, was so much fun we're playing in another Ptolus campaign

4) Kingmaker - Although we only played through 5 of the books as by the start of the 5th book, I was suffering DM burnout (from my style of ad hoc DMing, even the sandboxy nature of Kingmaker was confining to me, like a pair of briefs 6 sizes too small), the players were pretty burned out by the kingdom building (which by then we'd ditched and switched to just narrative format), and the fact that I wasn't happy with the way the AP flowed (or didn't) into the 6th book.


Now let's look at the ones since 3e that didn't complete on schedule:

1) IRC game set in the Forgotten Realms involving a mercenary company. As I recall moving ended it or some players couldn't play anymore. (I still use a gnome pyromaniac from this campaign in my Ptolus games as a background arsonist NPC)

2) A FR game with neighbors, ended when all of us ended up moving at roughly the same time.

3) A Ravenloft game. Ended when it got a point when we players lost faith in the DMs ability to not make it a tpk every session. Kinda funny now, but with more familiarity and time spent playing, we consider him to be the best Ravenloft DM and trust him implicitly.

4) A rail-road game to beat all rail-roads (did you know that goblins can spot the heads of 3 PCs who are lying in tall grass at a distance of over a mile? They can if the DM needs the goblins to attack the PCs), this one ended when two of the players had a meltdown and the other players elected to excise them from the group. As one of the two was the DM, the campaign ended.

5) Mutants and Masterminds campaign #1 - lot of fun, but ended with players moving or having their work hours changed.

6) Mutants and Masterminds campaign #2 - still fun, but quickly the complexity of it started to bog things down and make it unfun.

7) Midnight - still regarded by all of the players as one of the most fun, it ended somewhat prematurely because of the death of a PC, which revealed that for all of the Players (and DM), that character was sort of the heart and soul of the campaign.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

None. But then I don't plan a campaign with a goal or end game - my campaigns go on for exactly as long as my players want.

 

[MortalPlague]

Good question.

I've run many campaigns, but few have gone the distance. These are the proud few.

1) The Noble Game - D&D 3.5, Level 12-14 - The PCs were framed for the murder of the king, and they had to flee the country, raise a foreign army, and retake the capital, while winning the hearts and minds of the people by working with the underground resistance. Two PCs died in the climactic siege, but the crown prince retook his rightful place.

2) The Continuing Saga of Brandon Von Redding and Jaskiran Koshmaze - 4th Edition, Level 9-18 - Not so much a complete campaign, but Jaskiran survived three full adventures, while Brandon, joining late, survived the latter two adventures. A bit of a meandering campaign; more accurately, three completed mini-campaigns. It's worth noting that I'll be running a new chapter in this saga very shortly, with plans to bring the group from 19th level up to mid-epic.

Honorable Mention) Tiefling Politics - 4th Edition, Level 12-13 - This started as a freeform game, where one of my players rolled up Nox Amandine, a tiefling sorceress. She was the youngest of thirteen children in a noble tiefling house, and she was busy assassinating her way up the family hierarchy. Her backstory formed the main thrust of the game's plot. The game concluded when she was betrayed by another, less sinister member of the party, and apprehended by the church. She escaped, eluded the other PCs, and rode off to plot her revenge. But since Nox was effectively out of the game, the campaign came to an end.


I have had the rare pleasure to play in a game or two that came to a natural conclusion. The current game looks like it will wrap nicely with a climactic showdown in a short while. Also, in the twilight of D&D 3.5, we ran an 'evil' game where our characters toppled civilization to make way for a new order. We had to 'skip a bit' and bump the level to do the final battle, but the campaign did come to an excellent conclusion.