Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkM" data-source="post: 8752709" data-attributes="member: 7025557">Thanks! The challenge for me is that it takes our group about 8-10 sessions (moving fairly slowly and deliberatively) per chapter and we play once per week. In ideal circumstances, that puts the length of the entire campaign at around 2.5 years -- a very long campaign taking the same characters from 1-20 (or 3-20). Since the first Zeitgeist chapter on Roll20 came out the additional modules have been coming about once every 4.5 months, that pushes the length of the whole campaign to 4.5 years, with 2.5 years of play and 2 years of stalling with filler material. What makes it harder is the complexity of this story and campaign. If we take a 2-month break to play other characters or do an unrelated campaign between each chapter, it's difficult for my players to get right back into the story and to remember all the little details as they try to solve all the mysteries. This is getting worse, not better, as we continue to introduce the hundreds of npcs and multiple plot threads built into the story. I've thought about just pausing for a year or two to wait for more material, but I think that would make it even worse. In another campaign I would just fill in with some homebrewed adventures while waiting for the next installment, but this story is already so long and has so many interconnected characters and stories. It also leads to the characters complaining (even more) that their characters don't level up enough -- doing 30 sessions or more over a period of 4 months at low levels and gaining only one level during that time is frustrating for players, but if you let them get ahead or accumulate extra magic items the rest of the adventures are not power-balanced properly. I've tried sending a PC B-team on side adventures, adding 3rd-party modules in the middle of a chapter, sending them through the vault of heresies (twice - once with characters 100 years in the past and a modified and updated version with the main PCs in present), and converting the new Zeitgeist adventure to put it back into the Adventures in Zeitgeist timeline, but we still have had to take long pauses waiting for the next release.I'm not trying to complain (I completely understand that life throws unexpected challenges), just to explain the impact that the release schedule has on actual play, and hopefully to help with solutions.</blockquote>

Verification