Question for Veteran DMs

[paqman]

My Forgotten Realms campaign and My champions campaign.

FR : Started in 1987 ans still running today (15 years) with 45 game years.

The Idea is rather standard, the players started at 3rd level and did about half of all the modules that as been published by TSR. I could never say what was the exact success of the game. I guess that I always kept tab of what the players did and the world was always affected by these events, you can imagine that with all the save the world and rescue this or that done in the past, some of the characters have countless allies and ennemies. And they liked that.

It is fun to always have the past come back on the players and they appreciate that a lot. Now, their is only one of the original characters that is still in play. He was bitten by a vampire in the past, he succeeded in staying good for a while then turned to neutral and finaly switched to Evil, the only thing he succeeded in keeping is the Lawful part. So now we play an Evil game centered arround the actions and movements of this character and his cohort (the other players).

The Champions game : Started in 1990 and stoped in 1995 or 96.
In this period, I was DMing the FR and Champinons game. the only two game we were playing for the majority of the time. This Game was a simple Hero games, where the players were more vigilantes than good heroes. Again, the actions of the characters had high impacts and the NPCs were well played from my part. I was playing in the Marvel universe, so I had NPCs aplenty.

 

[arwink]

I usually work off a theory that if the campaign I'm currently running isn't the best I've ever done, then I'm doing something wrong. It's all a learning curve, you know?

The most memorable, however, was probably a 4 year red-box set DnD campaign I ran, one that I'd probably still be running if a bunch of character sheets hadn't been thrown out by accident and the two key players hadn't moved across the other side of the coutnry.

It was the game that was the most overall fun, filled with wierd stuff and run in the Known World setting which we bent every which way we could think of. Got to play a lot fo the classic and current (at the time) DnD modules that influence the way I game today (Castle Amber, the Isle of Dread, Where Chaos Reigns, Wrath of the immortals and the every time-travelling blackmore module we could get our hands on were particular favorites). The players had been to the deep past and future of their world by the end, knew a lot of cool NPC's and generally were as weird a bunch as you could imagine. The fact that it was a small group that I enjoyed spending a lot of time with helped a lot as well.

Technically I've learned a lot from then. And the campaign I'm running will probably eclipse this one in my memory by the time it's done, unless something goes terribly, terribly wrong.

 

[RangerWickett]

Hey Ryan, come to the game tomorrow. Everyone's gonna be there (except for Laura), and you'll be journeying into the Cloister of Echoed Souls. Doesn't that sound interesting? I might even end the session with a bang by having your character killed or abducted or something. If there's any session not to miss, it'll be tomorrow's.

If you can't come, do you have any suggestions or requests? Ted wants to play Inky now too, to prove that he doesn't just play oppressive barbarians. And does Inky have any dark, cruel secrets that he's hidden from everyone, which might come back to haunt him? I wouldn't think so, but hey, it's your character, and I don't want to have him exit stage left without being portrayed to his fullest.

Be prepared to face the dreaded monster, the Floating Octahedron (okay, not really).

 

[d12]

RW-

The wife is dragging me to a party tomorrow night. (arg) Ted may play Inky and more power to him - the secret is to try to never use a weapon. No dark secrets with him - what you see is what you get.

-the Other Ryan

 

[Reynard]

My most successful campaign has also been the longest running. It started 7 years ago in Savannah, GA, with a group of friends with whom I clubbed, drank, and just generally hang out. It was AD&D 2e, set in a valley-nation called Erebar. Aside from a nefarious port city where the evil king ruled, a small dwarven mining town, and the PC hometown of Axehold, there was nothing to the setting. Of course, I needed a hook, so i decided that Axehold was founded by a group of adventurers (a Fighter, a Druid, a Wizard, and a Dwarf Barkeep) and celebrated the founding every year at the First Day of the First Moon of Summer, by having a contest called Heroes fest. Four groups of young people would randomly recieve a small quest, and the first group to return successfully was awarded the prize.

I decided that the evil king had a son the same age as the PCs, and he led one group (which was charged with getting the ear of an ogre). Of course, his "team" consisted of men at arms and court wizard apprentices. Another team, all siblings and friends of the PCs, drew the lot to return with a stone from the foundation of Sorrow Keep. The thried group I do not rmemeber, but the PCs got the quest: bring back a brandleberry bush. Not the start of an epic campaign, i tell you.

From that humble beginning a true campaign took shape. I credit my players with making it so wonderful. Thedecisions they made about their characters (I said "No elves" and one play just *had* to play an elf, and a ninja no less; one player wanted desperately to play a druid, dd not roll the stats, so instead of whining he played a character that, too, despertely wanted to be a druid). I tossed bones at the group constantly, and most of them bit. Sometimes subplots fell flat, and others appeared out of nowhere. the campaign was not about going out on this quest, or delving into that dungeon. It was about building Erebar into something special, both as players and as their characters. They warred with gnolls and then joined forces with them. they suffered assaults against dopplegangers and discovered that the ancient world had been one of great advancement. They wateched as that evil prince became King, held the power of the storms in his hand, and consorted with demons. they travelled into their own "Days of Future Past" and retruened changed forever. They entered the Land of the Dead in order to save the world and one of them, a valiant dwarf, chose to stay to seal that way from evil forever.

That nija elf built more of the world than any other character. Who was he? How did he get here? We did not know so we said that he did not know. Soon, elven ninjas and wu jen were traversing the globe to return that young lordling to his place. but he had died, only to be reincarnated into the body of a human soldier, who had nearly fell defending Axehold. NPCs became PCs and vicer versa. And amongst it all, the characters learned the true history of erebar (which the players helped build) and returned the old Gods to their rightful place in the world, at the same time defeating the Doppleganger threat and stopping the Great Beast of the earth (a "super red wyrm") from abolishing all life.

Somehwere in the middle of all that, I moved from CT and they moved to Pittsburg. We did not stop playing. Two to four times a year, I would (and still do) make the 500 mile trip and we would play a marathon session (3 or 4 days, 12 hours a day) and move the story a step closer to its pic conclusion. And when we finally finished, we realized that Erebar was not done yet. Only two of the original players remained, but the group had grown with new ones. They all created new characters for 3e, some the children of important PCs and NPCs, some wholly new.

We are currently in the midst of the second Erebar epic, one that covers new ground at the sime time tying up loose ends (Gods don't just appear on the world and everything is okay, after all). I see this game being the one I play still when the rigors of Real Life have made it impossible to play otherwise. It will be a year or three yet before this stage of erebar ends, and I just assume that there will be an Erebar 3, once again looking into the future.

So what makes a good long running campaign? Players. plain and simple. Good players bring stories with them. Good players give you the raw materials with which to craft your own stories. Good players cry at PC funerals and rage at recurring villains. Good players don't whine when their PC dies, or cry because they did not get to play what they wanted to play. Good players make campaigns.

I am just there to put the puzzle together. they bring all the pieces.

 

[your_mother]

blendercise

The most long running campaign I've run is a Vampire Chronicle that's been going since the game was released. What makes it a success in that fashion is persistence, from my players insistence that I continue it to the stories still circulating among everyone that has been involved. What makes (and has made) it fun has included the Non Player Characters, the Player Characters, the symbolism and complex plotlines, the way that events in the game coincided with the real world, the amount of choice and resonance the players were afforded, etc. What makes it personally satisfying for me, as the Storyteller, is that people continue to talk about it years after the games took place. It is gratifying to hear the players laugh about things, at the games as they are taking place or years after, when the tales are told again to new players and friends.
Tools that made it a success are the collective imagination, consistency, and dedication from all of the players. Everyone wanted to be there, the suspence and depth drew them in and they wanted to know what would happen next. Also, I have read nearly every white wolf book published up until about 1999 or so, and have incorporated a great deal of the concepts presented, but in a distorted and stylized format.
The list of memorable PCs and NPCs is too long to list at this point (I am at work, rapateta). Some of the more memorable plots included: letting someone play the Prince, letting another play a Demon Worshipper and Child Sacrificer, letting the players kill and plot against one another, my strategically plotting and executing the assassinations of many key NPCs so that what the players and NPCs built would collapse and create more interesting and sometimes bleak plot conclusions. I don't usually do monsters unless a player has a specific button that can be pushed (a Hollow Man Fomori full of frogs, with a long sticky tongue that sticks to the shadows, hounding a character whose player was afraid of frogs, etc.).
But what makes it most successful is that I always use the same formula (the sword in the stone) and urge my players to use it like a one-trick pony (hi ho Silver), and as the plot evolves that formula falls before the might of other discoveries, abilities, and decisions until the characters stand on their own against the odds, etc. i.e. build your own destiny (with a little help from my friends).

 

[barsoomcore]

I agree with arwink that my best campaign ought to be the one I'm running right now -- but there are elements to making a good campaign that are out of your controls -- like having good players. That said, my current campaign is certainly the best I've ever run.

But the campaign that turned me into a Good DM as opposed to an Enthusiastic DM was the 1984 - 1992 campaign I co-DMed with my best friend. Homebrew world, standard save-the-world-from-the-undead-sorcerer-who's-being-returned-to-life-by-this-cult-of-druids-he's-corrupted sort of game. Two characters lived through that campaign from start to finish and after eight years they were, I think, seventh level, with maybe three magic items between the whole party. The last night all but one of them died as they killed the bad guy -- the only character to survive was the lame cleric, whose player had lost more characters than anyone else in the campaign. It was pretty thrilling. We had champagne and everything.

My current campaign, Barsoom, has only been going for two years so it's a little early to say, but it's definitely been a cool experience so far, taking the lessons learned from that previous game (I basically stopped gaming for the next eight years), along with lots of life lessons (and learning how to swordfight) and putting together a campaign that I hope will come to have real emotional resonance. Time will tell.