D&D 5E What is a "Campaign" to you?

A series of interlinked scenarios, with at least some persistent effects across them.

This can be:
  • the effects of a given scenario affect the play of later scenarios
  • The characters from #1 play in #2, even tho' #2 plays the same no matter how (barring character death) #1 played out
  • The setting elements are shared and modified, but the adventures aren't and the characters may or may not be the same.

Then again, I was playing map-and-counter wargames well before playing D&D... so character continuity isn't nearly as important to me as it might be to some who lack that background.

A trek campaign I once ran had different players available weekly. And everyone had multiple PC's. But they were all on one ship, there was shared effect upon the ship, and while the adventures were self-contained, the effects upon the ship weren't... so there was persistent effect, even tho' character advancement was negligible.

Likewise, a party playing totally isolated adventures, but with the same characters growing across the span is still a campaign... a disjointed one, but a campaign none the less.
 

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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?)

Thanks for the advice. I don't think it would work for us though. We're constantly coming up with new ideas for characters we'd like to play or campaigns we'd want to run. Even with our relatively fast paced schedule, there are plenty of ideas we'd like to try but haven't gotten around to. Besides, we tend to have long weekly sessions (we used to play 2-3 times a week), so a typical, (non-epic) successful, full length campaign runs between 200 and 300 hours of play time.

If we were to try a really long campaign, we'd probably have to bring in a DM who's done it before. Every time one of us has run the same campaign for a year or more, the ideas have piled up and the DM was eager to move on to a new campaign.
 

I think its as simple as campaign means mostly what it means in the dictionary.

Dictionary said:
a series of military operations intended to achieve a particular objective, confined to a particular area, or involving a specified type of fighting.
"a desert campaign"
synonyms: military operation(s), maneuver(s)

The "series" and "objective" could be like an adventure path for a stable group of players, or a sandbox ie. "particular area".
 
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The campaign is the glue, or overarching story, that ties each play session into something more meaningful. It is like chipping away at rock, until whatever the artist/DM intends starts to take form.
 


Thanks for the advice. I don't think it would work for us though. We're constantly coming up with new ideas for characters we'd like to play or campaigns we'd want to run. Even with our relatively fast paced schedule, there are plenty of ideas we'd like to try but haven't gotten around to. Besides, we tend to have long weekly sessions (we used to play 2-3 times a week), so a typical, (non-epic) successful, full length campaign runs between 200 and 300 hours of play time.

If we were to try a really long campaign, we'd probably have to bring in a DM who's done it before. Every time one of us has run the same campaign for a year or more, the ideas have piled up and the DM was eager to move on to a new campaign.

Sounds like it's working out best for you that way.

My friend tends to DM like that. He comes up with a lot of ideas for characters and campaigns he wants to try. He'd actually like to have many of them go long-term, but you can't really do several ongoing long-term campaigns at once very well. So instead we do a mini-campaign (basically just an adventure) with a set of characters in a setting, and then we move on, with him assuring us that we might come back to those characters again later.

I think most of what he does could really be done as adventures within the same campaign, if the setting was broad enough. In D&D for example, if you include planar travel and/or spelljamming, you can pretty much plop your characters down into the middle of an entirely new world with whatever details you want and have them play through whatever adventures you want them to. When you're ready to move on, stick them into the next world or scenario you thought of.

So that's another element -- how broad is the scope of a campaign's setting? For me, bigger is better (which is why I like having the setting be "the multiverse").

For characters, that won't work so much unless you have a cast of short-term characters that you like to bring in and then forget about. Which actually could be kind of cool if you had them somehow relate to the main characters. For instance, perhaps your main characters passed through a city on some world or land where there is a lot of political corruption, and intelligent undead are secretly behind it. They only touch on the issue briefly, or just entirely bypass it, not even realizing what's going on, and just stop in the city overnight and continue their journey. Then, you bring in an entirely new set of characters and play an adventure or two with those characters that is all about that city and the undead corruption. When you are done with that you go back to the main characters.

And of course, in my case, I think that often times it is only the change of setting or theme that is the real draw rather than playing a new character, and the current characters will really work just fine if players aren't in the mindset that "new setting must equal new characters."
 

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."
Same here, and the term "dungeon" could also refer to an individual session, as in "Is there a dungeon tonight?"; and also refer to a particular adventure. I think it was more an overarching term, often used where today we'd just say game, as in: "Is there a dungeon (game session) tonight?" "Yeah, but it's Henry's dungeon (game, or campaign); Richard's is on Tuesday this week." "Cool! Did we finish the last dungeon (adventure)?"

Lan-"it's kind of like how the word 'level' has about 80 different meanings at once in the game"-efan
 

Sounds like it's working out best for you that way.

My friend tends to DM like that. He comes up with a lot of ideas for characters and campaigns he wants to try. He'd actually like to have many of them go long-term, but you can't really do several ongoing long-term campaigns at once very well. So instead we do a mini-campaign (basically just an adventure) with a set of characters in a setting, and then we move on, with him assuring us that we might come back to those characters again later.

I think most of what he does could really be done as adventures within the same campaign, if the setting was broad enough. In D&D for example, if you include planar travel and/or spelljamming, you can pretty much plop your characters down into the middle of an entirely new world with whatever details you want and have them play through whatever adventures you want them to. When you're ready to move on, stick them into the next world or scenario you thought of.

So that's another element -- how broad is the scope of a campaign's setting? For me, bigger is better (which is why I like having the setting be "the multiverse").

For characters, that won't work so much unless you have a cast of short-term characters that you like to bring in and then forget about. Which actually could be kind of cool if you had them somehow relate to the main characters. For instance, perhaps your main characters passed through a city on some world or land where there is a lot of political corruption, and intelligent undead are secretly behind it. They only touch on the issue briefly, or just entirely bypass it, not even realizing what's going on, and just stop in the city overnight and continue their journey. Then, you bring in an entirely new set of characters and play an adventure or two with those characters that is all about that city and the undead corruption. When you are done with that you go back to the main characters.

And of course, in my case, I think that often times it is only the change of setting or theme that is the real draw rather than playing a new character, and the current characters will really work just fine if players aren't in the mindset that "new setting must equal new characters."

Unless I'm focusing on a very narrow theme, my settings tend to be kitchen sinks.

My last campaign involved three alternate versions of the same world, and an infinite number of shadow worlds, that were spiraling around a black hole due to causality being shattered. A goddess was hunting a god but couldn't catch him, so she decided to be clever and went to the end of time and began traveling through time in reverse, under the assumption that their paths would have to cross since they were traveling towards each other. She got greedy and built herself an empire in a future that didn't yet exist, and when the two deities finally clashed, a Schroedinger effect occurred, shattering the one world into many possible worlds, some in which one of the deities won and some in which they both fell. So the PCs ended up being a rag-tag band including the maudlin pilot of a mini-sized Metal Gear Rex, a monster that I can best describe as being similar to Pyramid Head (from Silent Hill), a self-loathing red and white dragon blood mage, an evil sea elf ninja, and an easy-going red neck samurai cyborg with limbs built from random junk (powered by a beat-up lawnmower engine). Sounds like a game of Gamma World gone insane, but it was actually my own homebrew system (using the backbone of 4e, as well as some inspiration from Gamma World).


My current 5e campaign is toned down a bit by my usual standards, but I don't doubt that many DMs would consider it crazy by theirs. A few hundred years ago, the Mists arose and people that were exposed to it mostly sickened and died, or went insane and transformed into monsters. Some rare individuals, however, found that the Mist strengthened them and they became known as Mist Walkers. Humans and demihumans now only exist in isolated pockets, and these communities depend on Mist Walkers to be their eyes, ears and hands in the Mists.

The Mists are the essence of magic. In this setting, there are two dimensions. A coherent dimension (where the campaign takes place) based on many worlds theory, where every possible action or event spawns its own universe. Then there's the incoherent dimension where magic comes from, in which all possible actions and events occur simultaneously (which is why magic is, in theory, capable of anything). In the coherent universe thought, acting as a form of perception, can shape magic causing the infinite possibilities to collapse into a single reality. Prior to the Mists arrival, magic was in decline. A civilization based on the legends of Atlantis, hoping to restore its former majesty, bore a hole into the magic dimension. As these things typically go, they were unable to control what they unleashed and were destroyed as a result. So now the essence of an incoherent dimension is leaking into a coherent one, and you get the Mists.

I re-purposed an idea I liked in Zak S's A Red and Pleasant Land, calling it Recursion instead of Foreclusion. It basically gives me an excuse as a DM to mess with the space/time continuum as my needs see fit. I've used it to introduce a retired sergeant from 1800s England who thought he was on safari in Africa, which was a fun encounter. However, the best thing was when I realized it gives me an excuse to drop PCs in and out as I need to. Three sessions ago the fighter, rogue, and mage learned that the fighter's teenage sister had run away from home, so they set out to find her. In the next session, both the fighter and mage had RL obligations and couldn't make it. So, rather than run the runaway sister adventure without the fighter, I just recursed the rogue to where the druid was, which was 100 miles away and two weeks in the past. They dealt with the minions of a lich who were trying to obtain the phylactery of a dracolich (they prevented the lich from obtaining it, though I'd been near certain they'd fail). Then this week the fighter and mage were back, so I recursed the druid and the rogue over to them and they found his sister, along with slaying a dragon and preventing a ritual that would have had world-shaking implications had it succeeded.


So yeah, I definitely agree, for someone with WCS (Wandering Campaign Syndrome) broad scope is definitely a good way to go.
 
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I campaign to me is a bunch of adventures with an overarching story and/or theme. In practice a campaign for me (sadly) is a one shot with one of my friends who I can still get together with somewhat reliably and we get through character creation and one encounter. Usually by the time we get back together again to play we have forgotten most, if not all, of what we had done previously and our characters feel like complete strangers.
 

A Campaign is IMO:

1. Continuity of the same setting being used over a long period of time.

2. Continuity of characters in said setting over time.

3. Continuity of players using the same characters in that setting over a long period of time.

4. Continuity of players leveling their characters over a long period in said Campaign.
 

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