What is a D&D campaign to you?

[Li Shenron]

Was 5th season Babylon 5 still Babylon 5?

That's a very good example.

I would say that the original B5 "campaign" ended with the old races leaving the galaxy.

After that, there was another campaign with almost the same PCs, and then another continuation campaign (if I remember the storyline correctly, it was a long time ago...).

That's the way I use the term.

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

This is a great topic! I've run quite a few campaigns over the 30+ years I've been playing D&D and most of them have been fairly long-running, both in terms of real time and character progression. My two Parsantium campaigns have been running 4 years each (since 4e came out) and have hit 90 and 46 sessions, with the characters in the low-mid paragon tiers. Before that I ran a 3.x campaign that started in 2000 with Death in Freeport and went up to 20th level, finishing after 8 years. But I've also run shorter, more-focused games too. I ran a Pirates of the Caribbean style Skull and Bones game (see sig) for 25 sessions or so, and also did Red Hand of Doom as a mini-campaign. Back in the 2e days I ran short Planescape, Spelljammer and Al-Qadim campaigns as I wanted to try out these settings.

I think it all depends on what you and your players want from the game, and how long you want to stick with the same characters/setting/system.

Cheers


Rich

 

[pemerton]

I saw the suggestion of just giving each PC an 'onscreen text' send-off like at the end of Animal House. I guess that could work but I'm a bit nervous about the GM writing it, rather than the player playing it.

What about the player writing it?

I do not like sandbox games

<snip>

The world is not created equal, and some parts are simple and boring while others are developed and interesting. I don't think I, as the DM, should be under the pressure to make every location the players want to visit equal.

My games definitely focus more around personalities (mortal and immortal) and the politics/values that they represent, than around geography. When the players have their PCs go somewhere exotic, it will generally be for some non-exploratory reason (eg an enemy or ally is there) which provides the focus for play.

 

[S'mon]

What about the player writing it?

I can certainly say after the campaign ends at 30th level "Tell us about your Immortality", but I find that a bit unsatisfying in D&D; there's no sense of achievement in something where you can write whatever you like. What I could maybe do is post the 'Animal House text' for each PC on the blog after the final session, as an act of closure. I suspect that would be more satisfying, and I would have time to get it right and draw on what happened in the final session. And I wouldn't put "Fragged by his troops in Vietnam" (or "in the 284th layer of the Abyss") unless the player had really annoyed me.

 

[Sunseeker]

What about the player writing it?

My games definitely focus more around personalities (mortal and immortal) and the politics/values that they represent, than around geography. When the players have their PCs go somewhere exotic, it will generally be for some non-exploratory reason (eg an enemy or ally is there) which provides the focus for play.

What makes things interesting in any given area is generally how living, usually sentient things interacted with it at some point either in the present or past. The former is easy for the players to interact with, the latter requires some digging(sometimes literally). Sometimes my players prefer the move obvious "hey look there's a guy over there, lets go talk to him!" over the more discrete "Lets spend a good bit of time investigating this area in hopes of unearthing some ancient ruins."

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Thanks for the thoughts so far. Very enlightening. I'd like to hear more.

So it sounds like I am in the small minority here. Another question: What would keep you interested in a game that lasted 10+ years? Including both staying interested in the campaign and staying interested in a character? This would be a campaign you would play probably 2/month, and would be playing other campaigns the other weeks, or concurrently if you played more than once a week. Breaks would happen, as would flurries of more frequent sessions based on player desires.

If you've followed some other form of media (say a TV series or an MMO) for longer than you've had a D&D character/campaign, why?

I'm planning on starting up this type of campaign (I'll give more details if that will help), but I've got to get serious interest from at least one of my players to make it happen.

 

[sheadunne]

In my experience I have always found that the length of the game cannot be planned. You can only devise a series of adventures around a common end game and see what happens. Players get bored, characters get killed, DMs get exhausted, and life gets in the way. Keep your objectives small and manageable and see where it goes. I never plan to play a PF AP for a certain amount of time, we just play it and keep on playing it until it ends or something happens to put an end to it.

 

[Starfox]

To keep my interest up for 10+ years would require a game with very small, incremental rewards. This could be a system with hundreds of levels, contacts, magic items or more intangible rewards, like political achievements or social contacts. I am afraid I must admit the micro-reward mechanic of MMOs work for me, and I need to be rewarded and reaffirmed with some regularity to keep my interest up. This is very tricky in a level-based system like DnD.

Other than that, I would need lots of interesting NPCs to interact with, and developing relationships with other player characters.

The world would need to have depth and verisimilitude, with an interesting history that feel like it logically leads to current world events. Preferably, it should be developing, not static. This development can be of any kind; political, magical, religious, technological, commercial. But a world that remains static doesn't feel alive enough to bother with over such a long time.

 

[S'mon]

So it sounds like I am in the small minority here. Another question: What would keep you interested in a game that lasted 10+ years? Including both staying interested in the campaign and staying interested in a character? This would be a campaign you would play probably 2/month, and would be playing other campaigns the other weeks, or concurrently if you played more than once a week. Breaks would happen, as would flurries of more frequent sessions based on player desires.

My Loudwater campaign runs fortnightly and has just entered its third year, planning to run it for around 6 years total. Some things I emphasise:

A strong sense of place, a living local environment with interesting NPCs. A (much) nicer Deadwood.
A living world with politics and a developing timeline that can be heavily changed by PC agency - initially local, but broader & broader as they level up.
Broadening scope - local/national/global - but not losing sight of the starting point, the home town and its people remain important all through the campaign.
Lots of different plot threads, with major overarching stuff generally in the background - much like how modern TV series do it.
Player freedom of action, but plenty of hooks - design can accommodate both reactive and proactive play.

 

[Li Shenron]

Another question: What would keep you interested in a game that lasted 10+ years? Including both staying interested in the campaign and staying interested in a character?

I've never been in a game longer than 10 years.

I don't think I would be interested in the same character for such a long time, unless the story arc OR single adventures were varied enough.

I like to try new things after a while, so if the setting doesn't change and the adventures always follow the same patterns, I would probably want to change PC. OTOH it would be also possible that the level advancement offers enough change (so that the game experience significantly changes as you progress towards higher levels) so that even the same PC becomes different.

If rather than a campaign we consider simply a sandbox with same rules system / edition and the same fantasy setting but PC changing all the time, then as long as the DM is a good one I see no reason why I wouldn't keep playing forever But I would still want to try other settings and rules systems in parallel.