My longest campaigne lasted about five years, and it still holds epic in my mind.

We started playing the Wheel of Time d20, running through the two provided scenarios, then we started mixing in a bit of every other d20 game we could get our hands on.  It was a lot of fun, there, but after awhile it got kinda stale.

So... we built a magical air ship, tried to fly over the ocean to find a new land, and ended up getting sucked into Rifts.

THAT was a blast, playing the same characters, trying to deal with extreme culture shock.

I think we ended up stopping that campaign because Rifts was never meant for high level characters.

I ran Champions for about 8 years in the late 80's/ early 90s. Mostly the same people for the entire run. We played weekly and ended the game when a number of the players were headed off to college, getting married, etc. I set up an ending involving a character sacrificing himself to stop his arch nemisis and saving the world in the process.
I came back to it and ran a few times after that with other gamers and on occasion, an old player would get involved for a bit, but I could never recapture the magic....

The longest I was in myself was about 4 years of weekly spread over 6 years time. In game?  Probably less than a year of ingame time.

Character turnover wasn't that high. Some player turnover but only new people coming and leaving. I played the same character from start to finish. Another player only switched characters voluntarily right at the end.

The game disolved because of player fustration with pacing (the DM had a bad habit of getting bogged down in minutia, because the rules were telling him to, that's why only only months of ingame time passed) and overall D&D burnout. Another smaller contributing factor was a newer player getting busy with another player who was the sister of a third player who did not approve.

I was however part of another game that ran longer. The DM seat was rotating and some world hopping was involved. But there was a continuous trail of PCs, even if they did hop up and down levels at times. I played/DMed in that for maybe 3 years. I'm not even sure how many years it ran in total. Or even exactly who was an original group member. So maybe it ran longer?  There were end conditions sometimes but only end conditions of a segment.  It ended because a cancer joined the group and the group as a whole didn't cut out the cancer. Instead people just one-by-one quit till apparently the last two people effectively quit leaving nothing but the cancer and spouse (or so I heard, I'd already quit by then) which effectively ended it all.

25 years of my own Majestic Wilderlands spread over a dozen or so groups and 25 years of in-game history. The longest run was in the early 90's with two players running the same characters for five years in GURPS. I ran AD&D from 1982 to 1985, Fantasy Heroes from 1985 to 1987, and GURPS from 1987 to now with  two campaigns of 3rd edition 2001-2002.

My games aren't generational rather they involve the players reaching a point where they have made their place in the world and we moved to a new campaign. Examples include, players seizing control of Viridstan, becoming a king, forming their own Mages Guild, becoming a Duke, become a Master of the Metalcrafter Guild, gaining control of the Thieves Guild, owning a potion shop and so on. Along with a handful of total party wipeouts.

One practice is that I use this that old character become part of the background of the next campaign. In my main campaign area around City-State  the "present" situation is because of what various players have done in the past. The more prominent shops and NPCs are old characters.

Never had a campaign that ran that long but I did have a partnership that ran for about 15 years. We were oft inspired by fiction when I was a kid and a friend of mine ran a Belgariad based game and I took on the Silk character (pushed through the lens of an AD&D Unearthed Arcana Thief Acrobat) . I than ran a game where a player wanted to play a Kull based character which I ran in Sanctuary. These characters then met up in a 3rd game run by my uncle (God Rest his Soul) and stayed as partners in 5 subsequent Campaigns over the next 12 years until Kull moved to Canada.
The characters were only ever loosely based on their fictional shadows and we ended up as a classic Thief/Barbarian combo.
There was a wife and a couple of children for the Barbarian and the thief got cursed such that everything he stole rotted away before his eyes, not bad for gold, terrible for apples and awful for rescued maidens.
And if I ever catch up with Nezaglub the Zaquinqartet he's dead.

I find all these stories about decade long campaigns really inspiring! The longest game I've been a part of lasted for 2 years. It was a 3.0 DnD game ran by a buddy which was set in a mix of a homebrew/Forgotten Realms world.
Not to be difficult, but I would love to read a bit more about the stories that were develop during these decade long campaigns. Were they all homebrew worlds or published worlds?

Mine was set in the published world of Glorantha. Mind you, from the late 80s to about 2000 there was very little coming out for it, so we had to fill in a lot of our own blanks.

There weren't a lot of stories as such happening in that game (unless 'story' includes 'small band of adventurers set forth in search of fun and profit'). There was a lot of exploring the world and seeing the sights.

I suppose you could see an overall sort of arc of 'small band of adventurers battle their way through many enemies, becoming ever more committed to the struggle against the Lunar Empire; finally they settle in a frontier town and begin expanding their power base'.

Quote from: vomitbrown;280389I find all these stories about decade long campaigns really inspiring! The longest game I've been a part of lasted for 2 years. It was a 3.0 DnD game ran by a buddy which was set in a mix of a homebrew/Forgotten Realms world.
Not to be difficult, but I would love to read a bit more about the stories that were develop during these decade long campaigns. Were they all homebrew worlds or published worlds?

Mine was homebrewed. It later became the setting of The Book of Jalan, though there were some changes due to differences in the games (AD&D vs. StarCluster.) Jalan is the only game I ever wrote that was a complete commercial failure - it didn't even begin to pay back what I spent in cash, let alone time. The problem is, it isn't fantasy at all. It's really SF/historical dressed in fantasy clothes, and that applies to the game we played for 20 years as well as the setting as later developed. I have no clue about fantasy - I didn't even see the tropes I crushed, not did I care. My old players loved - and the new ones love - it, but that is apparently the limit.

BTW, I ALWAYS had trouble running the game with AD&D. Eventually, I had to basically rewrite the entire system to get it to do what I wanted. When I designed the StarCluster system, I had Jalan firmly in mind. It's now a joy for me to run, instead of ever increasing drudgery.

-clash

It's really interesting that all the really long games seem to be set in home-brew settings. I have yet to come across a Ravenloft or Warhammer Fantasy game that has been played for more than a couple of years.

Not really surprising, actually. There's a lot more room for player initiative on the larger scale in a homebrewed setting. My players' characters founded cities, religions, and even nations over the ~200 years game time we played. They helped create one empire, and then overthrew another empire at the end - or rather caused that empire to be dissolved. It's awful hard to do stuff like that in FR or Ravenloft. Not that they always played at that high a level. We had plenty of low-level stuff along the way as well.

-clash

My guys never did much on a large scale until the last few years. Again, it might be that incremental advancement in RQ (it takes years to build up abilities) that kept them focused on the small. It wasn't until the last few years of the game that they felt confident in jumping up in scale.

I've basically run the same world since 1981.
I've heard that there are GOOD players out there, who can actually come up with a plan, stick to it, and are interested in achieving goals.
I don't know why I can't find any like that.