Quote from: Bren;1079904I 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."

Funnily enough my longest duration campaign, the 103 session & 5.5 year 4e Loudwater campaign, was based around a planned arc with fighting Orcus in the final battle. 4e D&D seems to suit (loosely) planned arcs. But I generally find 'open' campaigns without a planned arc to be easier and more fun. I like seeing the emergent story develop in play, without me as GM having much of an idea where it'll go. Currently I'm especially enjoying the 5e Primeval Thule 'Heroic Narrative' system as it gives the players a lot of input into campaign direction within a generally traditional RPG/D&D context, no meta stuff. The Thule book has other tricks too, such as the list of Patrons & Enemies (a single list, which is extra clever) for players (& GMs) to pick from.

My group and I agreed that 16 sessions is a good length for a campaign. I award XP heavily and out of all proportions in the rules, as do the other folks when they GM. We like games with a beginning, middle and end.

Quote from: tenbones;1079829PC PVP get waaaay out of control

That's half the fun -- and the draw -- in my games!

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 last campaign ran for 13 years, campaigns before than ran for 5 years and 3 years. My current campaign has been going for under a year.

We play RQ/HQ/D100, so we don't have levels.

A weekly game that lasts about a year is the sweet spot for me. A two-year campaign has been hard to come by with my most recent groups. Running mostly OD&D, it's takes us about one year to get to name-level.

Lots of people have this dream of having a grand epic campaign with the same players for ages where the characters start at first level and over a decade of play all become 18th level demigods and... it rarely happens.

A long time ago on rpg.net I did a survey asking how long people's campaigns lasted for. I specifically asked them to exclude the one-session fizzles - you know, where a bunch of players who don't know each-other meet up, roll up character and then never play again. It was basically 10-18 sessions. After 3-6 months you get Tenbones' scenarios where the game fizzles out in some way. That left a sour taste in my mouth too many times, and it puts people off gaming again for a while.

With that in mind, I thought: if the campaign is going to end, why not plan for it to end? In the decade since then, I've just run closed-ended campaigns - "We'll do this for 12 weeks, and after that have a week's break and then do something else." I've found I get greater player commitment that way, better attendance - anyone who was a bit disgruntled by session 6 will hang out till the end and usually have fun, whereas if it'd been open-ended they'd just walk.

This year I'm doing it with the school terms, so it's basically 4x 10 week campaigns.

The only disadvantage of a closed-ended campaign is that towards the end some players will be fucking idiots. "The game's ending soon so I don't care if I die, in fact I'll try to go out in a stupid and funny way." Up to the GM whether they put up with this, try to talk to them, or just don't invite them to the next one.

I just looked up the first logs for the Spelljammer campaign. My mistake. Its been 10 years now... :eek:

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1080323Lots of people have this dream of having a grand epic campaign with the same players for ages where the characters start at first level and over a decade of play all become 18th level demigods and... it rarely happens.

I'm more worried about the pace of advancement in 5e D&D causing PCs to level out of the campaign prematurely. I set up my current campaigns for fast advancement - the 2-3 sessions/level 5e default - but now I'm worried that the weekly Primeval Thule game will hit 20th in under a year and I'll have to stop playing with all these wonderful PCs and players! :confused: Not sure about the best way to handle it - slowing advancement, using multiple PCs per player, playing demigod-level campaign punching Cthulu in the face...

PCs die when they die. Could be turn 1 of their first combat. Almost never is.

Campaigns worlds don't end. I'm running some characters now in my first campaign setting, from 39 years ago.

Campaigns do sometimes end, but often they just stop being played.

The best ones ran steadily for 5 to 7 years, with occasional replays from time to time thereafter.

Shorter ones focused on single adventures lasted as long as the adventure took to conclude.

I recently ran one group that died in their first encounter in their first session, in a random encounter.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1080323Lots of people have this dream of having a grand epic campaign with the same players for ages where the characters start at first level and over a decade of play all become 18th level demigods and... it rarely happens.

A long time ago on rpg.net I did a survey asking how long people's campaigns lasted for. I specifically asked them to exclude the one-session fizzles - you know, where a bunch of players who don't know each-other meet up, roll up character and then never play again. It was basically 10-18 sessions. After 3-6 months you get Tenbones' scenarios where the game fizzles out in some way. That left a sour taste in my mouth too many times, and it puts people off gaming again for a while.

With that in mind, I thought: if the campaign is going to end, why not plan for it to end? In the decade since then, I've just run closed-ended campaigns - "We'll do this for 12 weeks, and after that have a week's break and then do something else." I've found I get greater player commitment that way, better attendance - anyone who was a bit disgruntled by session 6 will hang out till the end and usually have fun, whereas if it'd been open-ended they'd just walk.

This year I'm doing it with the school terms, so it's basically 4x 10 week campaigns.

I like the idea of a campaign world , where players/characters can drop in and drop out, but the campaign will still be there. Without planning for it, that's how I'm treating my current 2nd ed Dark Sun campaign. One player (my brother) is a constant, but others have drifted off, and so it's a situation where I'm going to keep the state of the campaign until we get another group.

QuoteThe only disadvantage of a closed-ended campaign is that towards the end some players will be fucking idiots. "The game's ending soon so I don't care if I die, in fact I'll try to go out in a stupid and funny way." Up to the GM whether they put up with this, try to talk to them, or just don't invite them to the next one.

Heh. In one game, we were wrapping up a campaign, but the group was sticking together. One player decided his thief would steal everyone's stuff just before "retiring'.

Quote from: S'mon;1080335I'm more worried about the pace of advancement in 5e D&D causing PCs to level out of the campaign prematurely. I set up my current campaigns for fast advancement - the 2-3 sessions/level 5e default - but now I'm worried that the weekly Primeval Thule game will hit 20th in under a year and I'll have to stop playing with all these wonderful PCs and players! :confused: Not sure about the best way to handle it - slowing advancement, using multiple PCs per player, playing demigod-level campaign punching Cthulu in the face...

My reccomendation is to slow down advancement. Especially at "name level" (9).
Dunno about you, buy my games tend to get ridiculous at high levels. Tossing demon lords and demigods at the players gets stale.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1080369My reccomendation is to slow down advancement. Especially at "name level" (9).
Dunno about you, buy my games tend to get ridiculous at high levels. Tossing demon lords and demigods at the players gets stale.

Yeah, at level 10 Primeval Thule pcs get their 'Name Level' Heroic Narrative benefits and are high enough level for any published PT adventure. But are still very playable within the setting. So I think maybe halving rate of advancement could work, and maybe slowing it progressively in the teen levels as the game becomes more political and less dungeon bashing -  pretty much the opposite of default 5e xp.

I want to play through the published adventures levels 1 to 10 which pretty much requires standard rate of progression 1 to 10, but for open ended play beyond 10 no need to stick with that.

Let's see, my niece turned 12 this year so... twelve years on my current campaign; somewhere in the neighborhood of 360 sessions. As our epic level mains have turned most of their attention to building their respective realms (which in turn led to some time skips where a half-dozen campaign years ended up passing in a couple of months play time) we've started running their retainers and now teenage heirs more, but we still break out the adults on a pretty regular basis (though its typically for political head-of-state level interactions and summits... leave the ground level implementation of policy to the young).

Four-foot-1!

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1080367I like the idea of a campaign world , where players/characters can drop in and drop out, but the campaign will still be there.

I've been running my setting like this for close to 20 years, now.

Ran plenty of games, had... I dunno, maybe 30 or 40 people play in various games over the years. Each game winds up having an impact on the setting in some way, and the few consistent players I've had have taken the persistent setting to heart. For instance, in the last game I ran one of the guys played a character who was the nephew of an important NPC from a game eight (IRL) years earlier.

At this point I find it hard to imagine running games outside of the context of a "living" setting.