D&D 5E Length of peoples Campaigns?

[Gilladian]

I run my own campaign world. I've run the SAME world for the last 25 or 30 years. At least for DnD. And I've had some of the same players for the ENTIRE time. Or at least one - my husband. He has seen Greenvale, the main campaign starting point, advance about 100 years in that time. His original character was the first Prince of a new realm. That PC's grandson is now the Prince, and the kingdom has doubled in size. A war and an assassination plot that the next set of pcs foiled were a major point in Greenvale's history. Also, in the last campaign, the fate of a whole County and possibly a larger area was changed when the PCs in a third campaign killed an evil baron and stopped a major bad guy group from gaining power in the region. I've also had campaigns that did little or nothing to advance the "world history". I still haven't figured out how major an impact I want the tamed and "de-eviled" kobold tribe that one ranger and druid made into their "pets" in one region will have on the rest of the campaign world.

For me as a DM, how my world changes from campaign to campaign is a major reason I do the DMing. It's the FUN part (or one of them, anyway).

 

[pogre]

I've been playing since the 70s and we always campaigned in a "bubble'. I think it is a stylistic choice. My campaign lasts as long as the group and PCs do. For one campaign that was 10+ years, others a few months, and with most falling somewhere in between.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Thanks for all the replies. I wasn't sure I was just imagining things again (when you start to push half a century on this earth perceptions of what is current can get clouded by stuff your remember as "just a while ago" that turns out to be 30 years wroth of "ago"...).

I have done "bubble campaigns", but that's the exception for me. I much prefer a continuous 'timeline' of what goes on regardless of what PC's are doing it. I am typically, nowadays anyway, running about 3 campaigns at once. We switch from campaign to campaign every few months to keep things fresh. I'm running two 5e campaigns, one Powers & Perils campaign, and one Shatterzone campaign. Oh, and I guess one Gamma World 3rd Edition...but that one may have died, having only one remaining PC left alive. Currently we're playing one of the 5e ones. I have a feeling in a few more weeks to a month or two we may jump back into the P&P or maybe the GW3rd.

That said, when we do jump back to one of our 'ongoing' campaigns, we continue on from the time we left off. I guess that was what I was trying to get at. If my GW3 game ended on "March 3rd, 2252 A.D.", and we pick back up...it will be at least "March 3rd, 2252 A.D." and everything that has happened the last time we played is assumed to have happened. Even if everyone rolls up new characters and they start 1,000 miles away from where the last group of PC's were (incidentally, that was Oregon, SE of Eugene in a new town called Neugene).

I have been noticing myself and my group doing more and more "bubble campaigns" over the last 10 years or so (same group for last 20'ish...with at least one player having been with me for about 30 and my wife 25; so, yeah, 'long standing group'). I think it may have something to do with most of us having families and all that stuff. We play once a week still (sometimes twice), but sessions are between 4 and 6 hours...not the 12 to 16 it was 20+ years ago. Ahhh...the good old days of wasted youth!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Grainger]

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[delericho]

Yeah, it's not an either/or thing for me, either - we will indeed create characters and run through a campaign for a year or so, then create new characters and start over. But if the next campaign takes place in the same setting as the old (which is by no means certain), then the effects of that previous campaign will now be part of the history of that setting.

Indeed, that's deliberate: I took a conscious decision some time ago that whatever high-levels PCs do should change the world in some sense (for good or ill). That way, when if a player happens to play in several campaigns, he gets the dubious reward of seeing the mark he has previously made on the setting.

(That said, like Umbran said up-thread, it is by no means certain that I'll be using the same system from one campaign to the next, never mind the same setting!)

 

[wedgeski]

I've run all kinds of games: ultra-long adventure paths that have taken decades to play out; random low-level bubble campaigns that get picked up and then put down for years; homebrew campaigns designed to end when the clock strikes 20th level, but without a clear plan as to how to get there...all sorts.

One of my Dragonlance DLA campaigns will end next month, with a confrontation against Takhisis, no less than *twenty-nine years* after it began, with a group of my old school friends which meets only a few times a year. Quite unbelievable.

Anyone who has suggested that your choice of campaign depends more on your group and their circumstances than what they particularly want to play is spot-on, IMO.

There are a couple of things I haven't yet achieved, which are definitely on my D&D bucket list. I want to run an ultra-compact, ultra-themed specialist campaign where the start and end is determined by the progress of a single quest; dragon-riders exploring floating islands to find a macguffin, that kind of thing. Finish the quest, finish the campaign, move on to the next one. And secondly, I really want to run an extended sequence of short campaigns in the same homebrew, where the actions of the PC's have tangible consequences on the politics of the region over hundreds of years of game time. I've come close to this, but never found nirvana.

 

[Rabbitbait]

I've usually gamed in different worlds, so have not continued. However I have recycled NPCs and old PCs of mine from other games. The players enjoy recognising old PCs in different roles, almost like a favourite actor in a different movie.

However my last campaign was in Eberron and we played that for 6 years in real life (with one year off when our city was destroyed by an earthquake). All but one of the original players made it all the way through, but most players went through a few PCs. We enjoyed it so much that I have set the next game 30 years in the future when the repercussions of the PCs actions in the last campaign has died down a bit. The old PCs are still around (those that survived) but as NPCs now.

The new game starts this Thursday....

 

[MrZeddaPiras]

I believe these story arcs WotC is releasing are meant to be canonic to each other and to the Forgotten Realms setting. It's just unlikely to come into play if you run them as written: the bad guys are defeated and the status quo ante is reestabilshed, ready for the next epic to be played out.

 

[meomwt]

In the mid-1990's, I started DM'ing in Greyhawk. That first 2E campaign lasted a long, long time, and the group achieved several notable things.

When I ran 3E in Greyhawk for a different group, it was in a different part of the world. The first group's actions had occurred, but it was unlikely that the news would have travelled so far over to the new location.

Similarly, when running Red Hand of Doom (and the lower level stuff I ran as prequels), that was in a different part of Greyhawk, and news on previous events was scarce (though it was there).

Same gameworld, different bubbles. News travels slowly on horseback

 

[Grainger]

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