D&D 5E What is a "Campaign" to you?

[Greg Benage]

A "campaign" is a series of game sessions with some element of continuity between them: DM, setting, players, characters, rules. But a campaign doesn't require all of these elements of continuity. A campaign could feature different DMs, different players, different characters, even a migration to a different ruleset or edition. Because some element of continuity is required, a campaign will produce some kind of timeline, but not necessarily anything recognizable as a story or coherent plot.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think a campaign is defined by scope and scale. If your scope is to recover the Shard of Madness, and your scale is a single dungeon delve, this is not a campaign. If your scope is to recover the Shard of Madness and your scale is to traverse the world and locate this item, and back again, that's a campaign.

At the very least, a campaign is a series of adventures that are tied together in some manner.

 

[Shiroiken]

If your buddy says, "I want to start a new Forgotten Realms/Eberron/Golarion/Homebrew campaign" what do you immediately assume he or she means?

"I am starting up a new game with new character that will create it's own story of some kind."

Classically, a campaign was the game a DM ran, where all characters past had an impact on the world (even if only a grave). A DM ran a single campaign, and would periodically restart the game with lower level PCs when it became unmanagable/unfun. However, the previous events still affected the world.

Later, as story took greater precedence, DMs started rebooting their campaigns as apocalyptic events made their previous campaigns unplayable for future games. Thus the term campaign came to mean any game that was beyond a "one-shot" session.

Is a campaign defined by the PCs? The setting? The story? The real world participants? Is it limited in scope or broad? Does a campaign imply something specific about playstyle or structure? Adn with all that, what IS NOT a campaign or not expected in "campaign play" to you?

None of that should affect the term campaign. The only thing that is NOT a campaign is a single session event (such as at a Convention).

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Then there were the ones that lasted several months or even more than a year. (I'd love to do a long term game that spans years of real time, but we've never managed one of those. We're always too eager to try the next new idea we've come up with.)

Since your campaigns are often short, what you might want to do to enable a long campaign (if the rest of your group is game) is follow a few principles:
1. Ask your players, "if you could only play one type of D&D character ever again, what would it be?" Have them make that type of character, the kind they never get tired of.
2. Take breaks to play shorter adventures/campaigns. This will give you an opportunity to try all those other things that catch your fancy, and take a break from the same thing.
3. Make sure you come back to the main campaign after a break. Don't go off on 3 other mini-campaigns at once. If you have a compelling long term campaign and each player is playing their favorite RPG avatar, then they will want to come back to it, so it isn't going to feel like a chore, it will feel like coming home to their favorite campaign.

(That's the theory at least. Can anyone who may have already done this verify if it works?)

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

If you run a D&D adventure and something worth remembering happens in-game, you've got yourself a campaign.

If you run multiple adventures for more or less the same group of players running more or less the same characters, and you observe your players talking enthusiastically about what happened during prior sessions, you've got yourself a good campaign.

If this can be done for several years to a decade plus, you've got yourself a great campaign and lifelong friends.

In the last fifteen years I have run all three types of campaigns.

Edit: Put simply, a campaign is a real life quest for fun.

 

[Lanefan]

A campaign is one DM saying "I'll run this game as long as there's people willing to play it and I don't get bored of it", and going from there.

Players come and go. Characters come and go. But if the DM (permanently) changes or the world/setting (permanently) changes it's a different campaign.

Since your campaigns are often short, what you might want to do to enable a long campaign (if the rest of your group is game) is follow a few principles:
1. Ask your players, "if you could only play one type of D&D character ever again, what would it be?" Have them make that type of character, the kind they never get tired of.

If the campaign goes on long enough they'll get tired of that character, or it'll die.

(That's the theory at least. Can anyone who may have already done this verify if it works?)

Also, run multiple parties within the same campaign, let them meet and interweave now and then, play one for a while then put it on hold and play another, let their stories add up to a bigger story, and have fun.

I've run long campaigns where none of the players (never mind characters) who started out were around at the end; but it was all identifiably the same continuous campaign in between.

Lan-"if you go into a campaign thinking it'll last forever, it just might"-efan

 

[Mercule]

A campaign is the period of time between one "reset" to another. What that means can vary from group to group, as is evidenced in this thread.

For me, it involves some level of continuity in characters. Deaths happen, and the whole party could be replaced without it becoming a new campaign. A TPK or mass retirement would most likely do it, but not necessarily. When we did RtToEE, we lost all but one PC. Because the setting/plot was a bigger focus than the characters, the campaign continued. A character-driven campaign would have ended, even if everyone brought in high-level replacements.

I ran a solo campaign for a PC, in high school. He reclaimed his father's throne and we decided to retire the character. A couple years later, I had another idea that played into the character's personality, so he un-retired and we threw in a couple other players. Some might consider that a break in a single campaign, but I don't. We'd put a ribbon on it and there was no intent of continuing until the idea struck. Similarly, I ran one campaign per school year (generally speaking) during college. Two of those years had the same party, but it was a totally new arch. It walks right up to the line, but I'd say it was a separate campaign; I wouldn't call anyone wrong who thought otherwise, though.

A couple concrete(ish) questions:

If you've read Amber, are Corwin and Merlin separate campaigns or not?
I'd say yes.

Is Avengers a separate campaign from Captain America? Hulk? Guardians?
I'd say so, but there's a good argument for Cap/Iron Man as side stories of the same campaign. The Hulk-only stuff is separate, as is the Guardians. The Guardians are clearly linked, though.

 

[the Jester]

When I refer to my "campaign," I mean two different but related things.

The first is the group of pcs and the adventures they are on. But this is my less-precise, casual-use "campaign."

What the term really means in my head is the setting- the milieu- and everything that takes place in it. Thus, my campaign is somewhere over 1,000 games long, even though it has consisted of multiple different groups of characters and, for that matter, players.

 

[Nebulous]

Sometimes, you are on the air 3 years too long...

That's when your campaign has jumped the were-shark

 

[Henry]

I find Iserith's description closest to my own.

Interesting, but odd note: when I was in high school in the '80s, we used the term, "dungeon" in the way people use the term "campaign" today. This is probably because the initial gamers in the group I played with back then started before the Greyhawk boxed set was published, and no one had heard of the term. So it would be, "We're playing in Joe's Dungeon this week, we'll get to finish exploring the haunted forest for the missing mayor's daughter."

In my original group I consider myself the main influence for actually calling them "campaigns" (after reading multiple issues of Dragon Magazine and realizing "dungeon" was terribly inaccurate.)