io9 asks authors and game designers "What makes a campaign truly memorable".

[darjr]

http://io9.com/what-was-the-most-memorable-game-you-ever-played-1452421331

Monte Cooke, Bill Cavalier, Adam Koebel and others respond with some very cool and interesting words.

I think it has to be great friends with a lot of trust and a dash of gonzo good feelings.

I have so many memorable games, but I think my most memorable are the ones that include my children's first games. My daughter fought a giant as a Faerie dragon and when I played the part of the giant she hid under the table and played from there the whole night, and no, she didn't want to stop.

Or when my boys went through the monster manual and had to play monster PC's, that was so gonzo over the top in the Tomb of Horrors, what a blast. Or the time my son and daughter played halfling rouges in Freeport, sneaking and skulduggering their way to fortune and infamy.

 

[delericho]

That was a good read. Thanks for posting.

They are right - to have a good campaign you need a good GM, a good group of players... and then it might happen. No game system, and no published adventure, can give you a good experience, although they can certainly make it easier in the presence of other factors.

In just over 25 years of gaming, I have a total of four particularly memorable campaigns that I have run:

The first was my last high school campaign, was run under 2nd Edition, and really was little more than a "Lord of the Rings" knock-off. But it was also the first time we really got any depth to the characters and anything approaching storytelling. And, it was also the campaign that brought together the best set of players from that particular group - we'd had subsets until then, but that was the campaign that got everyone together.

The second was a five-year (real time) Vampire chronicle called "Rivers of Time", which spanned 2,300 years in-game. This one saw me applying all the lessons I thought I'd learned from "Babylon 5". And it does include some of my best-ever GMing - in particular, there was a plot point I seeded in the second session that finally paid off five years later in a session where the players barely rolled a die, but instead spent their time debating whether to change the future history of the world. (But that campaign also went on far too long. By the end, it wasn't even really enjoyable - we just carried on because we wanted to see it through.)

The third was the "Shackled City" adventure path, and was in many ways the last hurrah for my university group. Again, it was a group that had been together for years, and that had a lot of history. And the published adventures allowed me to focus on things other than adventure creation. The group did continue after that campaign, but never managed any regular play after that, and gradually fizzled out. Still, it was good to have that one, last, great campaign to look back on.

Finally, there's my most recent campaign, "The Eberron Code", which finished in May after almost exactly two years. This one was a fairly new group made up of experienced players, but we managed to hit just the right sweet spot in terms of personalities. The characters were all a bit more distinct than I've seen before, and they were that bit more invested in the story than I've seen before. Highlights included the session where the players recapped on "what we know", and laid out about 90% of my underlying mystery with about 90% accuracy; and another one of those sessions where they rolled almost no dice but instead debated in which way they were going to change the world.