Longest Campaign

[maggot]

My long campaign is my current campaign. Running every other week since 3E came out. Sept 2000 and still going. Characters are about 15th level now. Three original characters, four original players. Although some players have taken a year or more off.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

My longest running campaign ran from 1984-1991. Since 3E came out, my longest campaign ran almost two years. I have had a few very short-lived lately that just haven't worked out. Hopefully my current campaign, just 3 sessions old, will last a while.

DM

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

The longest campaign I've played in/run is the one in my Story Hour. This year it'll be a 7 year long game. Sadly, play has slowed down, but its still going.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

Their characters gain a new level about once a year, and they are currently lvl 11. Levelling speed has increased since 3rd edition, but since playing frequency has decreased, the speed is about the same.

Having gone straight from 1st edition to 3rd edition, I was used to slow levelling, but my players have been spoiled by 3rd edition's quicker levelling and are VERY disappointed that after the first three sessions of my current (new) campaign, they are only at just over 500 XP (with 8 PC's in the party). They have actually only had about 4 encounters thus far, some orcs, some gnolls and an evil priest that almost TPK'ed them (one PC sacrificed himself to save the rest of the party after the party's paladin was killed).

My players just don't seem to want to build a character from nowhere to a higher level. They want to start with fully developed adventuring careers and lots of cool powers, prestige classes, etc.

Oh well, rant over.

DM

 

[nopantsyet]

I'm such a noob...

My longest running is my current at 14 months. Prior to that I've tended to last a few months of weekly playing. Sometimes they were short, somtimes they just ran out, and sometimes they got killed.

Currently we play bi-weekly, and the PCs are 4th level. I think the 3.5 level progression is only too fast in a weekly+ game. In my game it feels about right. Of course, it does present issues should the campaign go on long enough, but I'm not thinking that far ahead. It will go on as long as it's worth continuing. But each campaign seems to last longer than the previous, and I learn valuable lessons in DMing that help improve the next. So once my campaign is good enough to last ten or more years, I expect it will last that long.

Plus I've got a very good group now in which most everyone is stable, so I think we should be able to keep the table full for a while.

 

[woodelf]

Just for interest sake, I wondered what some of the longest running campaigns were. Here I mean campaigns that have run more or less unbroken from beginning to end (or are still ongoing).

[snip]
Anyone else got similar tales of long campaigns that have seen their players age from their mid 20's to their mid 30's?

Longest game i've personally been involved in: i ran an AD&D game for 8 years in middle school, high school, and into college. Only ...3? players were there for the whole run, but probably another half-dozen were in the group for 6+ of those years, and another dozen were in the group for several years. At a rough estimate, 3 dozen players were regular members of the group at one point or another, and another dozen or two played for a session or 3. Most of the games i know about, however, tend to run 1.5-3 yrs before either ending outright, or concluding a campaign and morphing into what is effectively a new game (often with personnel changes).

Oh, characters started at 2nd level (long story), and at the end, the highest-level chars were 9th.

However, i'd say it's safe to say that Arneson's Blackmoor campaign is the longest-running RPG campaign, since it predates D&D by at least a year (IIRC, it even predates Chainmail), and is still running.

 

[Arani Korden]

Let's see - our game started around '88, and it's still going, so a long time. And some of the PCs came from an earlier campaign that I was not involved in, so an extra year or so for them . . . We haven't been playing a solid 17 year block of D&D, though - we play other games maybe half the time, but when we play D&D it's the same campaign and the same PCs.

And about levels - in my youth I wasn't smart enough to think of something like slowed level advancement. I wasn't expecting the game to go on for so long, anyway. When the power level got out of hand, I'd just find a cheesy plot justification to knock everyone down ten levels or so. In the campaign's current incarnation, we're using C&C, and I am watching the rate of advancement closely, so hopefully I won't have to do it again.

 

[kenobi65]

I've been involved in a loose-knit campaign for 23 years now...and the campaign had been going on for several years before I joined. At that point, I was 17, and most of the other players in the group were in their 20s or early 30s. Now, I'm almost 40, and the others who've been in it from the beginning are in their 50s.

By loose-knit, we've had several DMs share the duties over the years, most players have multiple characters, and we've had a lot of players enter and exit the group over the years. But, it's all in one (homebrew) campaign world. There's currently 4 players who've been in the campaign for 20+ years; all of us have at least one PC who we've been playing in the campaign for that long.

The campaign was originally AD&D; over the years, we've converted to 2E, 3E, and now 3.5.

Once upon a time, we played nearly every Saturday (and from about 1pm until 10pm or later most times). Now, we're spread out over two states, and only play together a half-dozen times a year...but, two of those gatherings are multi-day marathon sessions.

 

[VorpalBunny]

I ran a 2nd edition Forgotten Realms campaign from 1992 to 2000. When 3e came out we converted over and played using 3e until the campaign ended in January, 2004.

 

[Joël of the FoS]

We started our campaign in 1987, with 6 PCs. One player left and was replaced and that is it.

We started 3rd level and got to 14-15th level.

Me the co-DM worked with the other co-DM to make sure the PC were not going in level too quickly, in order to keep this campaign going for the longest possible time.

The campaign started in Greyhawk but then went to FR and Ravenloft for weekend in hell- type adventures.

We retrofitted the PCs last year to 7th level when we switched from 2e to 3.5e.

That is quite cool to have a PC that old.

Joël