OUT OF CURIOSITY: was anyone who picked either the first or last option on the poll NOT joking about their vote?
I didn't vote it, but I did run Council of Wyrms for awhile.
OUT OF CURIOSITY: was anyone who picked either the first or last option on the poll NOT joking about their vote?
There's a huge gap between "once or twice per campaign" and "every few game sessions". I'll have a dragon* show up every now and then - maybe not every few sessions but way more often than once or twice per campaign (or I bloody hope so anyway, seeing as I tend to run 10+ year campaigns).
In most campaigns I only use dragons rarely because an intelligently run dragon can punch far above it's CR. I know most people don't do that, but I run them as hit-and-run strikers flying out of range only to come back when their breath weapon recharges or they can do a fly by grab and drop.
My last 3 campaigns ran 5 years, 7 years, and 4.5 years. I *really* need an option between "1-2 a campaign" and "every few sessions".
Unfortunately, I am not very good at the tactical use of dragons versus the party so it is pretty common for the Final Battle to be pretty anticlimactic when the mid to high level party wipes the floor with the supposed most powerful monster in the world.
In my experience, it's not that huge of a gap at all, because I have never had the good fortune to run a 10+ year campaign (I expect like most of us) and (again, I expect like most of us) my campaigns tend to last between 12 and 24 game sessions max. Of course, at a certain point three or four years ago I made a conscious choice to keep my campaigns relatively short because with the constant fight against player attrition and my friends' schedules, the failure rate of campaigns meant to be much longer than that was approaching 100%. And at that point in my life I had started running maybe 45 TTRPG campaigns and finished 3. Now I've started maybe 55 TTRPG campaigns and finished around 10*. So the decision did work, it improved my rate of campaign completion from 6.6% to 18%, nearly a threefold improvement.
It's impossible to overstate my jealousy of you guys and your epic campaigns. I had a Call of Cthulhu campaign and a Shadowrun campaign back in high school (wow, big wave of nostalgia) that lasted several years, mainly due to not playing on a regular weekly, or bi-weekly schedule. Even once a month was not guaranteed. It sucked (as it sucks for me NOW that I don't have a gaming group but I digress). Likewise, I think the Shadowrun 4th Edition campaign, Carnival of Echoes, that I wrote as my "master's thesis/unsolicited pitch" to get into the CGL freelancer pool, lasted for about three or four years, but again, rarely did we manage anything like regular weekly meetings. Still that campaign was (now I'm guessing) less than 50 sessions long, as were the ones I ran in high school, but longer than anything I've run since. Because as I mentioned, at a certain point I decided to limit my campaigns to a short length so that I could actually finish a campaign rather than just abandoning it when something else captured my interest.
I've been hearing about people whose D&D campaigns lasted many, many years or even decades. Usually those people are long in the tooth grognards talking about their glory days, but clearly not always based on some of these poll results. Anyway my reaction has always been the same: pure envy. My mental health would be vastly improved if somehow I could be guaranteed that I'd be allowed to play or run D&D at least once a week for the rest of my life. I wish that I had tails to tell of epic PCs I'd played for eons or campaigns I ran that lasted eleven years, but I have never had that kind of stability in my gaming life.
ATTN: so, I can't edit the poll, no big surprise there. For those of you rocking the super-long-and-stable-campaign life (you bastardos have I mentioned I'm jealous?) please mentally replace the word "Campaign" in the second poll option with "Year". That should fix the issue, I believe.
In a 20 level campaign, there will usually be about 8 significant dragons, and a few that are part of a battle, but not the focus. Every few levels...
...I meant in my campaigns there are usually about 8 meaningful dragons in a 20 level campaign... I was recounting my general pattern, not dictating a plan to others...This is an interesting response because it has a kind of absoluteness to it that seems to innately confer authority (like Chef, from South Park, telling everyone when teenagers are old enough to have sex: it's 17. "But doesn't it depend on the-" No. 17.)
...I meant in my campaigns there are usually about 8 meaningful dragons in a 20 level campaign... I was recounting my general pattern, not dictating a plan to others...