I'd say my experience over the past 30 years has been campaigns seem to last 12-24 sessions. I don't think I've ever GM'd or played in a campaign longer than that.

Our current Gloranthan Pavis campaign is 12 years old and still going. It has morphed slightly and has gone from being members of a Pavic street gang, becoming Sun County militiamen, becoming River Voices, resurrecting long lost gods, fighting in the Hero Wars, bringing back Orlanth, bringing back Genert and now being major players in the Hero Wars. We play every week, for around 3 hours and only really miss sessions when the GM is ill/on holiday or when multiple players are ill/on holiday.

Before that, I ran a HeroQuest campaign, the Lightbringer Quest, for an established group, that took about a year.

Before that, I ran an on-off campaign based around Dorastor and Balazar, which was around 6 years long, played every month or so.

I don't mind short campaigns, as long as they are designed to be short and to have an end point built in to the campaign.

I tend to run longer multi-years campaigns, but they're alternated with series of one-shots in different systems.
My main group generally doesn't want the campaigns to end, if possible. When they run, unless something comes up to cut them short, campaigns could easily last years.

Quote from: Dumarest;975838So what did they balk at? I'm very curious.  

I've always wanted to play Call of Cthulhu but never found anyone else into it.

Second bit first--one can of course give a "Mythos twist" to nearly any scenario and that might help accustom folks to it.

As for the first bit, the club I belong to has members that are equally at home with miniature wargames, and roleplaying, and there are extensive collections of miniatures that I could take advantage of, and wanted to.  So, I came up with a story arc that involved some investigation in Rome, some investigation in frontier provinces (role playing) the bad guys agitating the German tribes over the frontier (off screen unless the players went after it), a Germanic/bad guy incursion over the frontier (miniature wargaming battle) and a confrontation at "Bad Guy Central." (final bit of roleplaying, with another story in mind if the players wanted more.)

The players took this and handled the first two parts brilliantly, noted the bad guys agitating over the frontier, and, when the invasion came to pass, handled it brilliantly as a wargaming battle, in this case using an "oversized" D.B.A. battle for the barbarian vs. Roman business.  In the roleplaying story, one of the Roman legion commanders, an NPC, was in league with the bad guys, and so while most of the good guy commands were handled by the players, I handed that command off to one of the non-roleplaying wargame club members with some instructions, making him, in effect, a deputy GM--he was simply to pull his punch and let the auxiliary and German allies do the work, and if they won, they won and he could help clean up, but if they lost, he was to help the bad guys mop up.

The good guys won easily, as I said, and the players, still having no idea that their extra was anything other than an honest broker, now reverted back to their player character roles, declined to go after "Bad Guy Central."  The conversation went something along the lines of "There are still an awful lot of fugitives there and the Roman troops are going back home.  We think we want a better opportunity to get after the villains."

GM grumbles and goes off to write some.

So, I try again, throw in some one-offs while I figure out what I am going to do with the main story-line, and write another wargaming situation, since the game itself was well-received, in which the Roman legion commander rebels, and takes about half of the troops in the province with him; the players have to pull it together for the other half, which they do.  And then, at the moment they can finish it off, and have the final confrontation, they elect to stand on the defensive.

So, somewhere in alternate reality, there is a civil war on hold and two discredited prophets wondering what the devil happened.

The default mode for my campaigns is "as long as we want to keep playing" which usually ends up being several years.  Sometimes campaigns don't end they just go on hiatus, usually due to real-life of the players, then we switch to something else, and pick up the old campaign later.

Quote from: wombat1;975967Second bit first--one can of course give a "Mythos twist" to nearly any scenario and that might help accustom folks to it.

It's the "mythos" that turns people off in my experience. They think they need to know it and have read the stories. I've barely read any myself as I find them largely boring, at least the ones I've read, but the background seems really cool for a game.

Quote from: wombat1;975967As for the first bit, the club I belong to has members that are equally at home with miniature wargames, and roleplaying, and there are extensive collections of miniatures that I could take advantage of, and wanted to.  So, I came up with a story arc that involved some investigation in Rome, some investigation in frontier provinces (role playing) the bad guys agitating the German tribes over the frontier (off screen unless the players went after it), a Germanic/bad guy incursion over the frontier (miniature wargaming battle) and a confrontation at "Bad Guy Central." (final bit of roleplaying, with another story in mind if the players wanted more.)

The players took this and handled the first two parts brilliantly, noted the bad guys agitating over the frontier, and, when the invasion came to pass, handled it brilliantly as a wargaming battle, in this case using an "oversized" D.B.A. battle for the barbarian vs. Roman business.  In the roleplaying story, one of the Roman legion commanders, an NPC, was in league with the bad guys, and so while most of the good guy commands were handled by the players, I handed that command off to one of the non-roleplaying wargame club members with some instructions, making him, in effect, a deputy GM--he was simply to pull his punch and let the auxiliary and German allies do the work, and if they won, they won and he could help clean up, but if they lost, he was to help the bad guys mop up.

The good guys won easily, as I said, and the players, still having no idea that their extra was anything other than an honest broker, now reverted back to their player character roles, declined to go after "Bad Guy Central."  The conversation went something along the lines of "There are still an awful lot of fugitives there and the Roman troops are going back home.  We think we want a better opportunity to get after the villains."

GM grumbles and goes off to write some.

So, I try again, throw in some one-offs while I figure out what I am going to do with the main story-line, and write another wargaming situation, since the game itself was well-received, in which the Roman legion commander rebels, and takes about half of the troops in the province with him; the players have to pull it together for the other half, which they do.  And then, at the moment they can finish it off, and have the final confrontation, they elect to stand on the defensive.

So, somewhere in alternate reality, there is a civil war on hold and two discredited prophets wondering what the devil happened.

That's the problem with players: they seldom do what we plan for and expect. Well, the guys (and gal) I play with don't,  but at least I can depend upon them coming up with a "cunning plan" that results in the PCs winding up in the hoosegow or the grave.

Quote from: Dumarest;975970It's the "mythos" that turns people off in my experience. They think they need to know it and have read the stories. I've barely read any myself as I find them largely boring, at least the ones I've read, but the background seems really cool for a game.

There's no need to know anything about the Lovecraft Mythos to play CoC. I've read all of Lovecraft's stories and it doesn't add up to more than 'Evil Monsters are the Real God and want to destroy us.' It is purposefully all left vague and mysteryious. Really the less the players know the better because they're closer to the state of the Investigators who usually start with very little knowledge of the Mythos.

Just tell everyone that the adventures are really deadly, the mere sight of a monster can cause insanity and it is okay to run away rather than fight and play a short adventure like Dead Man Stomp.

I find people take to CoC pretty easily as the system is straight forward, it doesn't rely on combat to solve things and there is a strong black humour element in the character's death, disfigurement and insanity.

Quote from: wombat1;975967The good guys won easily, as I said, and the players, still having no idea that their extra was anything other than an honest broker, now reverted back to their player character roles, declined to go after "Bad Guy Central."  The conversation went something along the lines of "There are still an awful lot of fugitives there and the Roman troops are going back home.  We think we want a better opportunity to get after the villains."

GM grumbles and goes off to write some.

So, I try again, throw in some one-offs while I figure out what I am going to do with the main story-line, and write another wargaming situation, since the game itself was well-received, in which the Roman legion commander rebels, and takes about half of the troops in the province with him; the players have to pull it together for the other half, which they do.  And then, at the moment they can finish it off, and have the final confrontation, they elect to stand on the defensive.

So, somewhere in alternate reality, there is a civil war on hold and two discredited prophets wondering what the devil happened.

I'd call that the mark of excellent players:D!

The person running this website is a racist who publicly advocates genocidal practices.

I am deleting my content.

I recommend you do the same.

In response to several posts, in no particular order:

1 ) I never deny my players' excellence--they are scary good, and very hard to keep up with or find anything new for.

2 ) They are astonishingly timid, though, which eventually leads to a deadlock in Call of Cthulhu, where neither player nor keeper can ever fall in love with the 'capital equipment,' i.e. the characters, as they tend to depreciate rapidly.

3 ) So their cunning plans, and oh boy are they cunning, are designed to wind up with the characters in neither the hoosegow nor the grave but in the retirement home, safe and sane, many years after the events of the campaign have ended.

4 ) I agree with Justin Alexander; the less the players know about the adversary for as long as possible, the better--the game is described as a 'horror' game which is something of a misnomer.  A better description would be 'mystery' or 'suspense' game.  The satisfaction for me comes from feeding out clues a bit at a time, and then having one of the players exclaim, "My God, so that's what happened," and then either figure it out or, better still, draw a slightly wrong conclusion.

5 ) The older Mythos stories can be a bit of a slog, I agree, but that doesn't invalidate the idea that one can try to craft a role playing scenario in that vein.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;975369Is that the stupid kobold "Dragon Trainer" in that one asinine module?  My players promptly dubbed him "Jar Jar Binks."  We got about halfway through "Sunless Citadel" when we decided en masse it was shit.

hah-hah! I did better than that. As a player we were apparently in that module and we met Meepo and... well... I kinda got the kobold killed... oops. :cool:

Never knew it was a module or that that was the character that gets mentioned so often until many a year later. We got fairly far into the module before two of the players moved out of state. But I am pretty sure we made a total shambles of the module due to not knowing. We had a mission and that probably kept us on kinda track. Which is how it should be rather than some of the chain gang railroads.

I think we suffer from GM burnout (and family responsibilities), which means the campaigns have become increasingly shorter over time and the gaps between sessions have become longer, which also adds to the disconnect on campaigns (i.e., what were we doing and why?).  My gaming group has also done a fair number of one-shots/three-shots just to check out the new hotness and board games (e.g., Spartacus, XCOM, Bloodrage, Time Stories, X-Wing and the GMT COIN series) have come to take an increasing large place on our table for longer periods of time.  I posted in another topic earlier today, but we had a 3 year campaign back in the day which was one of our longer ones (i.e., Midnight Setting).

Midnight 1e, 2e (essentially DnD 3.5): 36+ months
Eberron+Red Hand of Doom (Dnd 3.5): 20 months
4th Edition Campaign Arc 1st - 20th: 24 months
Dark Sun DnD 4th Edition: 12 months
Star Wars FFG: 5 months
Current: 5e DnD Hoard of the Dragon Queen

Right now we are trying out a 3-4 session arc per GM to avoid burnout, where the GM has a PC in the background as something of a higher functioning retainer, but not driving the action.  More for color and then the GM can hand over the reins to the next player while having some connection to the story.

Quote from: Harlock;975353That's pretty darn impressive! What game and campaign? And, if you don't mind answering, how long is your average session?

Thanks. Honor+Intrigue was set in 1620s France (and Europe). Average session length was 3.5-4.0 hours.

Quote from: CRKrueger;975969Sometimes campaigns don't end they just go on hiatus, usually due to real-life of the players, then we switch to something else, and pick up the old campaign later.

That is my usual modus operandi. The H+I campaign was unusual in that I did an intentional ending and wrap up.

Almost all our campaigns have been relatively short term - 6 to 12 months. Various levels, not higher than 10, mostly 1-7.

In high school we had a game that ran about 3 years (got to about 13th), awesome fun, and also 4e which ran about 3 years (got to about 18th).

Overall I prefer the 12 mth campaigns.

Let me put it this way: In between the end of one regular-length campaign of mine and another, I like to run some game for a "short campaign".  Those short campaigns usually last a year of real time.