I and several others in my group will DM, but it's usually just me and one other who do so regularly.  We favor long campaigns, switching off when one of us gets fatigued (the worlds/campaigns are separate with different characters).  We've had some that only lasted five or six sessions, when we all decided that the setting or premise wasn't working out.  Others have gone much farther: we are in the middle of a campaign in the other DM's world where we've played our characters up from 1st to 15th level.  It's taken more than a year. So I'd say we mostly play long campaigns.

A long time ago on the Big Purple I put up a poll asking people how long their last campaign lasted. Once I excluded the one-session fizzles, it was 10-20 sessions. And there were lots of regrets expressed, and at the same time some resentment when people got stuck in longer campaigns they weren't happy with.

Given that most campaigns die off in that time, and that if players are unhappy they might take longer than that to say so, it seemed prudent to plan limited length campaigns. And so I stuck to 12 session campaigns, allowing a few less or more based on what the players did. Then there's been a 1 week break from it, and after that, the next campaign.

If a campaign was insanely popular, I ran a sequel to it next time - with all previous players welcome.

Limiting the length I found made players stick around for longer - they might like the game but not the group, or vice versa, and knowing it'd end in X weeks made them willing to see it through. And the players had a chance to leave gracefully if the game or players annoyed them ("well, it's the end of the campaign...") and be able to come back another time months or years later. The new campaign gave us a chance to bring new players in, too.

It also forced constraints on my campaign design, I had to design only what was strictly necessary and not a single page of notes more. This tighter design was a better one, I tended to go for deep (detail all of one village and surrounding hexes) rather than broad (draw the kingdom map, list all the deities, etc).

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on December 10, 2020, 11:19:01 PM
A long time ago on the Big Purple I put up a poll asking people how long their last campaign lasted. Once I excluded the one-session fizzles, it was 10-20 sessions. And there were lots of regrets expressed, and at the same time some resentment when people got stuck in longer campaigns they weren't happy with.

Given that most campaigns die off in that time, and that if players are unhappy they might take longer than that to say so, it seemed prudent to plan limited length campaigns. And so I stuck to 12 session campaigns, allowing a few less or more based on what the players did. Then there's been a 1 week break from it, and after that, the next campaign.

If a campaign was insanely popular, I ran a sequel to it next time - with all previous players welcome.

Limiting the length I found made players stick around for longer - they might like the game but not the group, or vice versa, and knowing it'd end in X weeks made them willing to see it through. And the players had a chance to leave gracefully if the game or players annoyed them ("well, it's the end of the campaign...") and be able to come back another time months or years later. The new campaign gave us a chance to bring new players in, too.

It also forced constraints on my campaign design, I had to design only what was strictly necessary and not a single page of notes more. This tighter design was a better one, I tended to go for deep (detail all of one village and surrounding hexes) rather than broad (draw the kingdom map, list all the deities, etc).

Lot of good food for thought here. Thanks!

In the last 10 years I preferred running short arcs, usually 6 months in duration ( 5e D&D, d20 Modern, COC).  Then I found Mongoose Traveller 2e and I've been playing my own universe for 2.5 years - last week was actually session 100 - Traveller is really the prefect game to fuel creativity for me.  Will continue that for the foreseeable future.  I did just picked up Free League's Alien and hope to run the occasional cinematic one shot with that.

Also want to introduce my kids to D&D.  Going to run B/X.