Ashrum the Black said:
Dark Dragon, if you don't mind my asking why wouldn't you do another campaign that long again? I realize that the amout of work a DM does is never really understood by his players. (hek my wife thinks its a lot and she only sees about half of what I do
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Well, I must add that I won't DM again a long campaign with that special group (I'm member in three groups, but the one I'm talking about has 7 members...). The problem was (and perhaps still is) to develop a story for 7 PCs with very different play styles, alignments and knowledge of the rules (there are absolute rookies and veterans playing over 12 years D&D in that group). Good, evil and neutrality was found in the group, as well as chaos and order. Some members tend to powerplay, others like more role playing. Because of the group's quite large size, it's not always easy to get attention to the story, and, of course, 7 players can do more unexpected things than 4... And believe me, they are VERY unpredictable, and the PCs tend to quarrel among each other as soon as an opportunity arises.
The work I've done for this campaign was quite quickly finished. Most plots I developed (or better: improved) off my mind during the sessions on the PCs behavior and ideas and needed just a few notes, only the two small dungeons and the opponents and NPCs needed a larger amount of writing. The main plot was set from the beginning. Of course, the group realised it later.
Ashrum the Black said:
But, I've always been most comfortable running a longer campiagn to handle a longer story line. Helps make everybody emotionally involed in the story instead of just playing to kill some orc, if you know what I mean.
That's right and that's my intention, too. I don't like dungeon crawl (that can be done on a computer). In the second group (the oldest with 4 players and a DM, founded 1991), longterm campaigns are fine to play. If this group survives RttToEE, I'll be behind the screen again..with a quite short campaign (lasting about a year, I think).