I ended a short, 5-session campaign just a couple days ago: The PCs had accomplished the immediate goal they had set for themselves at the beginning of the campaign. I took a short break and brainstormed an epilogue that described the course their lives would take. Then I came back to the table and delivered the epilogue. (The epilogue evolved a bit based on player feedback as it developed: For example, I had assumed that one character would stay on as an enforcer for the cult/exploration group the PCs had created. It turned out she actually left to help guide a couple of NPCs they had befriended back to their homelands.)

I've never had a campaign longer than 15+ sessions reach a proper "conclusion", however. I appear to operate at scales of either:

a) Small and likely to be completed;
b) Open-ended and not structurally suited to proper conclusion; or
c) Epic on a scale where the campaign fizzles out in real life instead of drawing to a proper close

I suspect I'm missing a middle ground in there somewhere.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728042oh, and 10th level isn't high level play.

I'm sorry, I must've missed the Sacrosanct Bible commandment on what is or isn't high level play.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728042oh, and 10th level isn't high level play.  I swear, sometimes it seems you have to argue over the most minor things just to argue.

You know it's high level in all D&D editions pre-3e, right? 9th is the 'Name Level' for most classes, where they get to found domains, get castles, temples, thieves guilds, wizard towers et al. White Dwarf used 'high level' for ca 7-9, thinking of high level to mean the adventures you have in the leadup to Name level & domain founding, with low level 1-3 (D&D Basic level) and mid level 4-6. That tends to be how I think of levels in pre-4e D&D.

In 3e officially 6-10 is Mid Level and 11-15 is High Level, though IMO it works better with the pre-3e level demographics. 4e doesn't use the low/mid/high concept as it has the Tiers instead. IMO Epic Tier (21-30) roughly corresponds to 3e Very High (16-20) and Paragon Tier (11-20) roughly matches 3e Mid-High (6-15), which would put 4e High Level starting at 16, just over halfway through the game.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728031what a stupid phrase, because making assumptions based on a strong theory happen all the time.  This is easily resolved.  Of the people here who said their campaigns never finished because of people quitting, moving away, or got bored, did you reach high level game play before this happened?

Traditionally people played Gygaxian style old school open campaigns for many years, often got PCs to very high level, and the campaign slowly faded away as people moved away. That matches my original high school 1e campaign and I think this is what people here are describing, not an ADD thing where they're unable to keep a game going for more than a few months.

Hrm.  Let's see.  How I've wrapped GURPS campaigns in recent years ...

One group, having run the characters up over 300+ points, decided that they preferred not to take on the Armageddon-level challenges that were their speed by that point, and asked to flip to new characters.  That group went another couple years, before we ended with the wedding of two of the characters.  (Also, I was soon to move from the area, one of the players was about to have her baby, and another was entering the service.)  The one player who wanted to keep her high-point character's been doing private runs since.

My second group ran through a several year plot arc that concluded a year ago.  After the Main Event and the denouement, that campaign wrapped up.  They would've wanted to keep running the characters, but just about every one had a different trajectory, with the heat off: one wanted to take up a once-in-a-lifetime offer to study under one of the world's great swordmakers, one wanted to take their merchant ship on trading voyages, another wanted to take religious vows ...  So, new characters.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;728049I'm sorry, I must've missed the Sacrosanct Bible commandment on what is or isn't high level play.

when a game has xp tables reaching into the 20s, and releases a book called "high level campaigns" that is very specific about PCs being at such a high level that monsters are no longer a challenge and "super spells" are needed, then no, level 10 isn't high level, and it's not something from my bible.  Jesus, do you have to be a hyperbolic dick about everything?

think about it.  If you have low, mid, and high level descriptors, and the level band is up to 20 or higher, are you saying 50% of that level band means high?  The very definition of "mid" means middle, where that level 10 is located on that band.  This isn't me making some wild interpretation from my "bible".  It's me using the common definition of what words mean.  Sorry YOU don't agree, but tough.  No need to be a prick about it

Quote from: S'mon;728059Traditionally people played Gygaxian style old school open campaigns for many years, often got PCs to very high level, and the campaign slowly faded away as people moved away. That matches my original high school 1e campaign and I think this is what people here are describing, not an ADD thing where they're unable to keep a game going for more than a few months.

as I said, its very easy to resolve this.  A lot of people said their campaigns ended long before they planned.  So of those people, was it the norm in those situations for the campaigns to end before they got to the mid teens or higher?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728116when a game has xp tables reaching into the 20s, and releases a book called "high level campaigns" that is very specific about PCs being at such a high level that monsters are no longer a challenge and "super spells" are needed, then no, level 10 isn't high level, and it's not something from my bible.

It's already been pointed out to you that your point of view is fucked, so I don't feel the need to belabor the point.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;728140It's already been pointed out to you that your point of view is fucked, so I don't feel the need to belabor the point.

So that's a 'no' then, you are physically incabable of not being a dick.

Good to know.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728142So that's a 'no' then, you are physically incabable of not being a dick.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Quote from: S'mon;728059Traditionally people played Gygaxian style old school open campaigns for many years, often got PCs to very high level, and the campaign slowly faded away as people moved away. That matches my original high school 1e campaign and I think this is what people here are describing, not an ADD thing where they're unable to keep a game going for more than a few months.

Yep that fits with my experience as well, where you'd play up until very high level (read: 15+) and then the game would dramatically slow down unless there is a good reason (challenge) to get back together and run the same hardened characters again.

That kind of game play is sort of based on the notion that a "campaign" is centered around a specific group of characters and often predicated on the party going on an epic adventure with "plot points" and so on. Once that adventure "arc" is over, the campaign's over. This isn't what a campaign used to mean, in 1e and prior, where instead it is the ongoing action of a game taking place in the same world, i.e. the campaign is milieu-centric, not character-centric, so the world just goes on, the characters come and go, some players have different characters at different levels of experience, they explore different parts of the world, some characters get killed or fade away for this or that reason, and you just pick another one and do something else. In that sense, a "campaign" doesn't have to "end" ever at all. It just "is", and you play in it whenever you feel like it.

That's the way I construe my campaign now.

(PS: Anything beyond superhero level is high level, to me.)

I don't run games anymore where "level" is a meaningful word. I have no irons in this fire, and I don't think I can in any way be helpful to this discussion, which has degenerated in any case into a mutual slap-fest. I shall, in this case, bow out.

Quote from: flyingmice;728164I don't run games anymore where "level" is a meaningful word. I have no irons in this fire, and I don't think I can in any way be helpful to this discussion, which has degenerated in any case into a mutual slap-fest. I shall, in this case, bow out.

I'm sorry you feel that way.  I felt that "high level" was in the upper teens and higher, and I presented the material in teh books as to why (level ranges provided, etc).  S'mon presented a fair response to why he feels it's different.  BV just had to come in and shit up yet another thread because apparently he is unable to disagree without insulting people or resorting to excessive hyperbole.

The sad part is that his hang up has nothing to do with the point I was making.  Don't like my term of "high level"?  Fine, replace it with "super high level" if you want.  The point was that it appeared to me most people's campaigns got cut significantly short than what they intended, and because of that, it didn't seem as if the high teens range of levels were ever experienced.  And therefore, would it make more sense to make campaigns with a smaller scope, since it appears many of them are cut short anyway.

I think the problem has to do with your terms because there are plenty of games out there that do not use levels for characters.