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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6093703" data-attributes="member: 42582">If by D&D campaign you mean a game run using the D&D mechanics, I am currently GMing my longest-lasting D&D campaign: it is entering its 5th year, and the PCs have advanced from 1st level to 3000-odd XP short of 21st. The campaign will end not long after they reach 30th level - that is the endgame for 4e D&D - but that will not preclude world-changing developments. It's inherent in Epic D&D characters that they will change the world.But I have run two Rolemaster campaigns drawing heavily on D&D story material (one Greyhawk, the other Oriental Adventures), both from 1st level to the mid-to-upper 20s. One ran for 8 years, the other for 11. The first one - which somewhat fit your description of "people moving in and out of the group, and some character leaving play and being replaced by others" - ended up fizzling out: the mechanics broke down and I wasn't agile enough as a GM to respond, and the plot got so convoluted that even I, as GM, didn't really know what the PCs' principal enemy was up to. One of the players mercifully ended things by deliberately leading the PCs into what he (the player) knew to be a trap (although he played his PC as ignorant) - resulting in a TPK, a revisting by the group of some problematic areas of the rules, and starting up the new campaign.The second long RM campaign ended very nicely, I thought. Over the course of the campaign it turned out that the players' principle goal was to have their PCs disobey various edicts of heaven and overturn karmic forces that were (in their view) needlessly punishing humanity generally, and also a range of important NPCs plus one of the PCs. At the culmination of the campaign the PCs defeated their main enemy (that campaign's Tharizdun equivalent), managed to banish and trap their two secondary enemies in the course of doing so (two archdevils), and freed a god who had been trapped in the void fighting an eternal war with Tharizdun. Initially the PC paladin had intended to take the trapped god's place, but he before trapping the archdevils the PCs managed to trick one of them into creating a karmic duplicat of the paladin, who then took the trapped god's place in the void. The warrior-mage samurai PC was able to marry the dragon he'd been courting since 6th level; and one of the other samurai married a wizard whom he'd rescued from a demon's demiplane and dedicated their offspring to ensuring that the karmic breach between the void and the world would never reopen, so long as they remained people of truth and integrity (as that PC had been throughout the campaign).It was a nice way to end.I don't know how my 4e campaign will end yet, because it hasn't happened. But one of the PCs is a chaos-powered drow member of a secret cult of Corellon dedicated to undoing the sundering of the Elves. Another PC is a servant of the gods of law and knowledge (including Bane, Erathis, Ioun and Vecna), who is reassembling the Sceptre of Law (= Rod of 7 Parts) and hence, presumably, dedicated to the elimination of chaos from the universe. And two PCs are servants of the Raven Queen who are waging a continuing war against Orcus, demons more generally, and who wish to liberate Torog's Soul Abbatoir, where that evil god traps and tortures the souls of all who die in the underdark.So it seems likely that the endgame will involve Lolth, Torog, Vecna, Orcus and various other demon lords and/or primordials in some form or other.Generalising a bit, I guess my conception of the D&D campaign - at least in gonzo fantasy mode - is that its natural culmination is the PCs succeeding or failing at their goals at the cosmological level.</blockquote>

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