D&D General How often do you complete a campaign as a player?

[TwoSix]

We play every-other week per campaign so usually that's about a year and a half for us, barring holiday breaks, but that's a quirk of how we schedule things; you're generally right.

I do wonder if weekly play is “the norm”. Only one of my 4 groups is weekly.

One of my groups was weekly for a few years but switched to every other week because weekly was too much, which seems to me be much more common as people get into their 40s or higher.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I do wonder if weekly play is “the norm”. Only one of my 4 groups is weekly.

One of my groups was weekly for a few years but switched to every other week because weekly was too much, which seems to me be much more common as people get into their 40s or higher.

A variable:

Weeknight games are easier to keep weekly, as most people's weekday schedules don't change much. If you're free on Wednesday nights, you're free every Wednesday unless it happens to be Christmas or something. But weeknight games need to be shorter; even playing online you can't generally play for more than three hours reliably.

Online play removes travel time, so it can run a bit longer than an in-store game, and it's less subject to people's travel plans.

Weekend games can be a lot longer, but it's much, much harder to have one every week and even every other week can be tough. Too many things come up, especially for adults. If people have kids, monthly is much more realistic (and you'll be skipping December). (I've never tried to run a weekend game online - we just stopped for Covid until it was safe to resume. I imagine it does not work well.)

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I don't think of campaigns as ever really having an end. I mean some do come to an end, but I don't look at them as a thing to complete if that makes sense

Oh I get this. It’s the way of a sandbox and player directed adventure.

We used to cross cross my friends home made world map and the dm
Rarely knew what to plan more than a week in advance.

We would just say let’s play the evil group or
Let’s play the good guys and we just
Played and played. Wish we could get a taste of that again

 

[Lanefan]

Glad to be wrong!

I guess it depends on if you're using PHB or UA multiclass combinations. UA really opened up a lot of crazy new ones.

I've curated the possible combinations. You can only ever have two classes, max.; no triple-classing. Some classes - Bard (redesigned to start at 1st level), Paladin, and Monk - can't multiclass at all. Cavaliers can only multi with War Cleric (see below). Rangers can multi but they are very restricted if they do; and most other classes lose something if multi-ed.

We never adopted Acrobat or Barbarian from UA. We have two homebrew classes: War Cleric and Necromancer. War Clerics function like Clerics except - perhaps obviously - their battle-oriented spells and fighting ability are improved and their non-battle spells (particularly curing) are considerably worse. Necromancers function like Illusionists, as a sub-class of Mage.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah because if you lose memories, then level drain is just weird.

Not at all. In fact, if you think of level drain as a specific type of externally-forced selective amnesia it all fits together quite well.

Also obliviax (memory moss) doesn't take xp away when it steals memories, though obviously, easy to house rule if that's your take on it (does make it a lot nastier though).

I've never seen or used this monster.

The one nasty idea I did use once was that a Dracolich's "breath weapon" should be that when it inhales, it sucks levels from those in front of it...

 

[Lanefan]

I do wonder if weekly play is “the norm”. Only one of my 4 groups is weekly.

IME weekly is the norm for formal groups. The only scheduled-as-bi-weekly game I've ever been in is a less-formal group that's currently running.

The other "norm", long ago, was "play whenever we could fit it in"; which might mean several nights in a row or might also mean once every several months when someone else's game sank for the night.

One of my groups was weekly for a few years but switched to every other week because weekly was too much, which seems to me be much more common as people get into their 40s or higher.

Just think, though: once you all retire it could be like college again!

 

[payn]

I agree that 40 sessions is likely a reasonable expectation for the half life of a campaign.

So, in my PF1 AP era where I knocked out many of the campaigns it took about 2 years playing bi-weekly for 3-6 hours. Accounting for holidays and stuff it comes out to about 45-50 sessions. Each module takes about 2-4 months depending where holidays fall and summer stuff. As a general rule I didn't like playing PF1 past level 15 or so, which was my ending point. Which means a level every 3 sessions roughly (Not the first few levels however).

What is interesting is that in the PF2 era they seem to have moved to a level 1-10 and 10-20 set up. I would bet exactly becasue going a full 20 moves the needle past that 45-50 session mark. Probably drops it down to 30-40 session mark. So, I like your target number a lot.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do wonder if weekly play is “the norm”. Only one of my 4 groups is weekly.

Until recently, I did play weekly; they were just different campaigns, sometimes by different GMs.

One of my groups was weekly for a few years but switched to every other week because weekly was too much, which seems to me be much more common as people get into their 40s or higher.

Hard for me to judge. I played at least weekly for 40 years. I admittedly was married for only half of that, have no children and my only real other hobbies were reading and computer gaming, so...

 

[TwoSix]

Until recently, I did play weekly; they were just different campaigns, sometimes by different campaigns.

I average about 4 in-person game nights a month and 3 online game nights a month; considering I'm married with 4 kids, any more than that is an extreme challenge.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I average about 4 in-person game nights a month and 3 online game nights a month; considering I'm married with 4 kids, any more than that is an extreme challenge.

More than I manage since my wife and I dropped Sunday night games early on, but I also think our Saturday games are longer than most so I can't say if the average weekly playtime would be shorter than yours. The fact I don't have, and have never regularly played with anyone with children matters, of course.