How long do your campaigns generally go for? Also what is your ideal XP span (i.e. how long to you want it to take for characters to get to different levels).

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here... My campaigns go until they're "done".

*DONE* means any one or more of the following:

Real Life Happens
Players lose interest
GM loses interest
TPK and the somehow the setting is rendered unplayable (yeah it's happened.)
PC PVP get waaaay out of control
Mutually Agreed End Point - which if things ended well, could mean we revisit the setting and pick up again from a new angle later.

Mine typically run 6-18 months.  It usually ends when a particular goal or event is reached or when our group decides its time for something new.

I've been running my first Traveller campaign for a year now and I think this one might be the exception and go longer since there are so many possibilities to explore for this game.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1079799How long do your campaigns generally go for? Also what is your ideal XP span (i.e. how long to you want it to take for characters to get to different levels).

My longest campaigns usually run 6-8 months. If you consider a campaign to be roughly the same players in the same game.
One was Earthdawn, which ran from 1st to about 9th Circle. (level)
The other was 2nd edition Dark Sun, which ran from 3rd to 20th level. That wound up crazy, gonzo fun, but got horribly unbalanced towards the end.

My current thought for leveling is to start fast and then taper off. I use the standard XP system, and budget the adventures to take a session per level. So 1 session to go from 1st to 2nd level, 2 sessions to go from level 2 to level 3, etc... I like for the players to get some advancement early and develop their characters abilities to face greater challenges, and then taper off so they have something to work towards.

Sometimes it's not clear when a campaign ends - I GM'd Wilderlands from January 2015 to January 2019, with one PC going 1 to 20, but two PCs from that campaign/world are currently in my resumed Runelords of the Shattered Star game, which initially ran 2 years November 2015 to end October 2017 in 64 sessions, 18 levels, before resuming this February.

My 4e Loudwater game ran 1 to 29/30 in 5.5 years and 103 sessions. I think that's my longest continuous campaign.

I think about 2 years is a typical campaign duration for me. Speed of levelling will vary by system, I like 5 sessions/level in Mentzer Classic, 4 sessions/level in 4e D&D. Desired end level will vary by campaign & system; I think 5e suits play 1 to 20 more than other versions of D&D.

I often start in January and I often finish in August the following year, since an old friend visits in August and he likes the epic high level stuff. I recently started running weekly Primeval Thule with a houserule XP system designed to level every 2-3 sessions (I find 5e default XP levels much slower) which should put PCs to 20th level within 15 months if we keep up the rate; or I might need to go to fortnightly play at some point. Either way, looking at around 45-50 sessions to 20th level, and probably hoping to play around 60 sessions. It might end earlier if group falls apart etc - I generally find groups tend to fall apart after 2 years as people move away.

I prefer short-arc campaigns. I hate/hate/hate and extra hate when campaigns end as described by Tenbones. I vastly prefer a beginning / middle / end and I don't care if the PCs win or lose, the end comes and we close the book. Maybe there is new campaign in the same world in the future, but that's for another tale...with its own beginning / middle / end.

For me, the short arc campaign works best because it forces players to focus.

Here's my Mazes & Minotaurs mini-campaign: Olympus is struck by a divine plague, the gods are dying, if Zeus dies, the world of Athenos fades with him, but Lo and Behold! The cure for the plague exists within the Hidden Archipeligo where only mortals can thread.

Boom. Done. Go sail around the islands. Kick ass. Find the various bits to make the cure. Save the gods, or Zeus dies. I can easily tailor that to 6 or 12 or 20 sessions. We can get into a bunch of side quests for longer campaigns or just drive down the main highway.  

And there's no railroad. Visit any island, deal with the NPCs as you like, wander about smelling the flowers, but Zeus dies on the night of the first Winter Moon if you haven't found the cure.  That's on you, not me.

If I don't want a "big bad ends the world", then I just go for a timelock. I've run an OD&D campaign where portals to a dungeon-underworld opens once per decade for 30 days. The "real" world is terribly mundane, no magic or monsters, and the PCs vie to bring the most gold and magic and power out of the portal to set themselves up as lords. There are plenty of shenanigans in the camps at both sides of the portal, lots of intrigue, but it all ends in 30 days. Or 10 days for a very short campaign.

As for length, I get that sorted out as best we can with the players beforehand. Can we commit to 10-12 sessions over 4 months? Awesome. Then thats the length. Oh wait, we can only commit to 6-8 sessions? Then that's the length.  

My con game playing with Dave Arneson years ago really changed my view on leveling. His view as "survive the adventure, gain a level" and I've used that many times with zero trouble. Does it make sense? No. Zero sense. Do players like it? Most love it, especially as I tend to run high-fatality campaigns.

But overall, I only care about "PC advancement" as much as the players. If they want some "zero to hero" action, I am happy to oblige. If they want a minimal power curve to occur, that's cool too.

I usually aim for 12-18 months of gaming.
I'm looking for the "I AM a Jedi. Like my father before me." moment, in a game.

I also try to leave the door open for returning characters in new campaigns, too.

Didn't we have a similar thread on this last year?

As noted prior. Ive been in a Spelljammer campaign that has been going 8 or more years now. Think 9 now. Up untill it was put on hold by player RL problems was in a 5e campaign that had been going 3 years now. And been in a few other ongoing ones that lasted quite a while.

As a DM I dole out EXP as normal and overall it tends to work out as the players tend to be prone to lots of non-EXP gaining endeavors.

Usually 1 or 2 years. For 1 year, it usually goes from level 1 to level 6. For 2 years, usually level 1 to level 8.

My games trend toward long-term; usually about a year or so at a go, with occasional breaks. In general, I like to start at the very bottom and play until the players are calling the shots in the setting; after that, I tend to have a big explosive climax session as a sort of send-off for beloved characters.

Usually for multiple years and a hundred or more sessions. And often they don't really end. We just stop playing those characters, or that setting, or that system because we (often me) want a change. Or life happens and someone moves away or something. Sometimes we come back to those characters later, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we see those people again later (or play via Skype). Sometimes we don't.

I tend to think about campaigns as what happens to the characters. So I don't often have any sort of ending in mind or even think about the game as having a beginning, middle, and end or a literary climax. I don't think I've ever said, "OK that's the end of this campaign." It's more, "hey I'd like to play something else (system or setting) or someone else (different characters in the same system and setting) for a while. What do you think about X?"

Depends on the campaign. Sometimes I go several years with hundreds of sessions, or did when back in high school. These years I get a day a week of DMing and games have been known to crumble due to players schedules and so on. I have one campaign on hold right now because the 2 players are too busy fighting with each other. Man, I miss school days.

In campaigns where I can sustain a weekly schedule, longer. Up to 1 year and more.

Otherwise, somewhere between 3 to 6 months.

Really depends. I've had campaigns where there was a very clear end-goal in mind, most of which lasted about 8-10 sessions. But then I've run a sandbox campaign that continued for a year... and I'm currently in the middle of another one. I think I probably prefer the latter style of play; it lets you get more attached to factions, characters and NPCs, and I find there's a more organic pacing.

Quote from: Omega;1079875Didn't we have a similar thread on this last year?
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My memory is shot, but probably (and for all I know I stared the thing last time around).