How often do you reset?

[Hussar]

I was reading a link provided by Merric B regarding some of the market research done on DnD. One of the things that fell out was that most people reset their campaigns before 20 sessions. linkie

This surprised me. I know that my campaigns have usually lasted longer than this. Do people restart very often? I wonder if this has led to the idea that people have "been there, done that" and are looking for new classes/races to play. The "dreaded" fantasy creep.

I gotta admit, since I don't reset all that often, I have so many character ideas I'd love to explore, just from the PHB. But, if people are jumping characters every three or four months, I could see why they might be tired.

So, how often do you reset campaigns or how often do the campaigns you play in get reset?

 

[Masquerade]

Well, up until my graduation less than two months ago, my group consisted entirely of high school students, and it's hard to get them to stick with anything for long. My current campaign, which just had session twelve or thirteen, is the longest running game of D&D any of us have ever participated in, and the other games we've played around with haven't run much longer.

I think that my games would have more sessions between resets if we were able to meet more often, because these resets usually happen due to long gaps between gaming sessions.

 

[wayne62682]

My group almost always tends to get bored of our current campaign within 6 months (and we play every two weeks so thats roughly 12 sessions), and then we start anew with something else. I think the longest we played a campaign was 8 months.

 

[rom90125]

My current campaign has been running for 4.5 years. It will probably run another 8-10 months before we 'reset' and start concurrent Iron Heroes and Arcana Evolved campaigns.

I suspect the longevity of our current campaign is a result of two factors: Our youngest player is approaching 30, and we only play once every three weeks (if not longer).

 

[Mark]

Started DMing in the mid-seventies and I have purposefully advanced my primary campaign world from five years to two hundred years between each campaign I have run, pausing sometimes long enough only to run a one-shot game. Sometimes I have done it by whim and sometimes by rolling the dice. I've moved quite a bit, or others have, so the longest campaign was probably a few years long but a couple/few times per week. I'm not a stickler for starting with first-level characters, so games/campaigns have seen a whole range of power levels. Of course, my campaign world was never as fully-realized in the early days as it is now but it has come through a couple of thousand years of so-called history to date. I've never reset, do not care much for been-there-done-that games (also not a fan of playing out a book or movie plot in rpgs), and it is really only me who would have to put up with it.

 

[Nifft]

Four years, hundreds of sessions, no resets.

-- N

 

[el-remmen]

The only time we have ever "reset" was when scheduling or group membership changed significantly as to make maintaining the game nearly impossible.

The only other time I can think of was when we reset our 1E game to start a 2E game in the summer of 1989 (when I first created Aquerra).

Otherwise, my campaigns have lasted as long as the circumstances of life allowed them to last: sometimes 4 months, sometimes a year, and a couple of times 3 and 5 years and a hundred sessions or more.

 

[Dog Moon]

Four years, hundreds of sessions, no resets.

-- N

Lucky.

The number of our campaigns that I've been in is just too staggering. :\

 

[Kurashu]

Now that I think about it, my group has never reset. Stuff just happens. Like when our DM lost our character sheets, only to find them in car three weeks later (ug, that was when we played Gamma World x_X worst DM ever). Or almost everybody dies due to a freakish gnome with more explosives and alcohol the day before our DM is heading off to college. Or one of the two main PCs goes off to college (again). The quest kind of dies off and we start a new several months later.

However, the Night Below lasted our longest despite the character sheets and the exploding gnome. That one was also the funniest.

Let's go make people out of a door.

 

[Nalfeshnee]

i hate it... i hate it... i hate it... but none of the campaigns that my roleplaying group has taken part in has lasted for more than 30 sessions, and only one has lasted more than 20...
having said that we all wish to play in a long running campaign but our main prblem (apart from an abyssmally low attention span) is that we all DM and that are always thinking about our homebrew campiagns and the next 'great' adventure.
We are also highly kinfluenced by the effectiveness of a session - as in a good session will prolong the campaign by a few sessions while a dud is practically the first nail in the coffin.
I'm currently running a planescape campaign, and its reched session 8 which is good for us (one of the players in my group has an average track record of 3/4 of a session!) though, as much as i hate to think of it, or admit it, i doubt it will last 15... someone will come up with another idea and steal my players away from me....
in case it matters my group is made up of early 20 year olds whove been roleplaying/wargaming together as a steady group for over 10 years.

if i had t count up all the characters me and my friends have played with (let alone made) over the ears, we'd have a horde large enough to take on the abyss, i'm pretty sure!