I came across something which I percieved as peculiar and thought I should ask the gaming community at large about it.
A coworker and I often talk about RPGs in our downtime. I regale him with stories of my weekly Pathfinder and L5R games, he tells me tales of his AD&D group. I had been operating under the assumption that these were tales of a bygone age and he'd been a lapsed gamer for some time. You can imagine my slight shock, then, when he invited me to play with his group last week. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity to see a real-live group playing AD&D 1E.
Upon my arrival, I got to talk to some of the other players. That's when the real shock set in. They hadn't just been playing the same version of D&D with the same group since 1985, 3 out of the 6 players were still playing with the same *characters*. Not the original characters' descendents, not reimaginings or rehashes, the actual original characters. (The newest player had joined in 1999 and was still playing his original character as well.)
To say that I was incredulous is a bit of an understatement. I asked what level they were. The highest level character was level 15. I asked how many times he'd been resurrected. Twice. I asked if they only played every few months. Once a week since 1998, barring a few weeks when people had been sick or on a family vacation. Prior to 1998, they played twice per week.
I commend them for their tenacity and dedication to one setting and one character, but admited that I really didn't understand how it was possible to play a character for that long without them permanently dying or players moving away or everyone just getting bored. They just shrugged and said that's how it'd always been.
Every week since 1985, they lugged three bookbags worth of books per player over to the DM's house. Every week, they've played the same character. 2000+ sessions of the same character.
I guess my question is this: What's the longest you've ever played one character?
My longest played character was about 14 months, playing once per week. The fact that she lasted that long without me getting bored and making a new character was (I thought) an amazing feat.
-TRRW
Well, that seems like an unusually continuous game, but OTOH it doesn't surprise me that much.
I started playing 1e when it came out. Me and another friend of mine each created campaigns, which we then combined into one setting for a good long while before we eventually diverged to the point where they became totally separate games at some point.
I think we started out playing in 1980 in what was basically a continuous campaign that finally ended in around 1995. I recall having 3 main characters, which all started out right around 1980 and were still being played until the end. One was 14th level, the other 2 were around 11th or so. Sometimes we also did side games with a few other characters, but mostly we each played one of 2 or 3 primary PCs.
Leveling up to huge levels was never really the point of that game. Each character ended up with certain goals, story, allies, etc. It certainly wasn't boring, and we played pretty regularly for years at a time. There were some gaps here and there, but both he and I were always running some sort of D&D campaign until eventually Mike's main story line kind of wound down in the mid 90's, mostly because ultra high level AD&D just sort of stopped working and frankly a 14th level magic user can do pretty darn much whatever he pleases at a certain point.
Since then I've been running more episodic 2-3 year long campaigns, but a lot of the original PCs and NPCs are still around. They're just more 'off stage' or permanently 'messed up' somehow and not really adventurers anymore.
It was fun. We always liked the continuity. To a certain extent AD&D didn't really give you a lot of mechanical tools to differentiate characters, so there isn't a heck of a lot of incentive to rerun levels 1-6 or so again and again. Once in a while we'd introduce a new batch of characters, but not too often.
As for playing the exact same characters and no others for 20+ years? Eh, that is a bit more extreme than what we did, but I can see it happening.
