Long-running (years) campaigns

[zornwil]

So what's your thought on long-running (as in years) campaigns? Like 'em, love 'em, hate 'em? See the poll above...

Do you think some gaming systems are better suited or worse suited for this?

I love long campaigns, really long ones, there's a sense of accomplishment for me and I like the feeling of nuance one gets.

I don't know if systems make a difference, though I can say that Traveller seemed to become rather monochrome in characters over time while HERO has worked well for me in long-term campaigns (though I've not gone more than 4 years). Boot Hill worked well for about a year but after that it all started to seem the same. But I'm not convinced any of these were really system-related for sure. In fact I think it has more to do with thinking through the long-term issues. Still, I can see where character evolution can become less distinct in non-class-based systems (such as HERO) where characters start to overlap in abilities more or less "because they can". But in practice it seems to me that super-hero HERO character evolution depends really on the group and GM entirely, for better and for worse (i.e., the rules neither blunt nor sharpen character development over time); I can see where orthodox d20 systems with "hard" character classes sharpen character development in the mid-term and tend to at least combat player overlap long-term, though I've no personal experience with such in the long-term.

Anyway, curious what people think.

[Just A Guy Name]

Voted for long campaigns, but to be accurate, I like the idea of em': I've never actually played in a game that lasted longer than ~ a year.

[zornwil]

That's cool, I posed the same question over on rpg.net, and someone had a question kind of like yours, and I would say that it's fair to answer entirely based on a preference formed without experimentation.

[Lord Mhoram]

As to systems, I can't say the only really long term games I was involved it were a 1st ed D&D and a number of HERO games.

My wife's Champs game ran 12 years.
My Champs game ran 13 years (there was a bit of overlap at the end of hers and the start of mine).
The Champs game I played in longest that wasn't one of ours ran 9 years (mostly concurrent with mine)
I ran a Fantasy HERO game that ran 3 years, and I ran it as fantasy series, with a definate beginning middle and end. I planned to leave it there, but everyone liked it so much I ran a sequel series that lasted 4 years with many of the same characters.

I'm playing solo in a transworld FH game that my wife runs for me that has gone on since 5th came out, and isn't even a third of the way through with the first main overplot yet.


So yeah, I prefer long term games. To me I don't even really get to know my character before 6 months and/or 50 XP.

[OddHat]

GMed my wife and others in a campaign lasting about 10 years, on and off. We still talk about it; it gave us some of our best gaming memories. The only drawback was the overwhelming power that the charaters eventually achieved, and the level of opposition that was needed to pose a challenge. I think that would be a problem in most systems that permit more-than-human characters.

[zornwil]

It is interesting to get a character to make a significant development in a relatively short campaign, though. I did that with my gambler/con artist in a Deadlands game and while the campaign was too brief for a sea change, I could get him from being entirely self-serving to having at least a Jiminy Cricket moment or two.

[zornwil]

GMed my wife and others in a campaign lasting about 10 years, on and off. We still talk about it; it gave us some of our best gaming memories. The only drawback was the overwhelming power that the charaters eventually achieved, and the level of opposition that was needed to pose a challenge. I think that would be a problem in most systems that permit more-than-human characters.

Yeah, I'm giving that some thought as my players are graduating to the deep end of the pool now, the campaign is only 3 years old but I've allowed for fairly rapid growth (deliberately).

[OddHat]

Yeah, I'm giving that some thought as my players are graduating to the deep end of the pool now, the campaign is only 3 years old but I've allowed for fairly rapid growth (deliberately).

The best approach I found was to let them have a few cake-walk fights while dealing with either:
1) Very character driven adventures (business, politics and romance)
2) Masterminds who were smart enough to Not Be There when the plan was going down. This second group eventually had to become very clever to avoid the group.

The toughest problems were not caused by them unexpectedly totalling a foe in a round or two (I got used to that). It was when an unexpected use of wealth, mind control, or a massive VPP suddenly rendered the problem meaningless. "The terrorists want $25,000,000? No problem; I take out my check book." "The Earth is falling out of it's orbit? I'll just shift us into my protected pocket plane while Captain Chaos and Paladin figure out how this hapenned, then we'll go back in time and stop it."

The answer to that, as much as there was an answer, was to take a very careful look at every charater sheet while planning the adventure.

[Zeropoint]

I'd love the chance to play in a long-running campaign, if the GM could put some long-term meaning into it. I'm not sure I'd like ten years of disconnected adventures. On the other hand, I've never tried it. The longest game I've been in was about six or seven months.

Zeropoint

[arcady]

I've never kept a game running as long as the two I'm running right now - both of which began in mid-early 2003.

Usually the characters start to drive me nuts after a while. I almost always have very different tastes from my players and after a while I simply cannot think of ideas for the games I run, and need to get away from it, restart something else, or find some solution.

I'd been dragging through my present games for a few months now in fact.

The situation is similar when I play, though the longest game I've played in I just left. After over a year of play in a DnD game where my PC is STILL level 2, that had to be the most frustrating game I've ever seen.

I loved the PC, but the pace of things drove me nuts and quickly disconnected me from any real interest in the game, and I started wanting to change out my PC several months ago.

The second longest game I played in went for maybe six months, and I hit level 11 by the end of it. There just weren't many plots to do after that. DnD sort of kills itself off after a while in my opinion.

Of course, in both games I have the same problem as I do when I GM - few of the characters appeal to me. There was one character in the first game that sort of appealed, and we had a little subplot together, but not really.



Now I'd like to say something... if you like a long lasting game, do two things:

1. Make sure your PC fits your GMs personal tastes as much if not more so than it does your own.
2. Tell your GM on a -VERY REGULAR BASIS- how much you enjoy the game, and give REGULAR feedback and ideas about where the game could go next.

Fail to do either of these and you deserve it when the game falls apart.

To GMs my advice is to keep progress going. The GM who's kept the DnD game at level 2 for a year is in my opinion making a serious mistake. I find it taxing to go to that game, and while I enjoy all the players and the GM - they are in fact my players in my two games, and while the roleplaying was fun at times...

I'm almost glad to not be able to show up anymore to that game.

Games need to move, they need to evolve, they need progress. If a player actually has a direction they want things to go in, follow it. I won't say I had a direction I wanted to go in though - I had hints at directions from time to time, but it never went beyond that. From the start we got stuck in a plot that dragged from day one and I sort of 'cut my losses' on developing interest in subplots. If that was me, the GM, or the game I do not know...


Different expectations can also really hurt things. This one gets me in the supers game I run, and it got me in the game I played. You have some players who always want a strong sense of idealsm and heroism in their games, and you have other people who want anti-ideals or anti-heroism. Still other people want to remove ideals and moral statements.

These clashing views can cause a lot of trouble if you don't find some way to address and resolve them. I haven't yet found that though... I'm in the last category, the trenchcoat anti heroes annoy me as much as the square jawed shiny-happy heroes.


So... I've gone a little off topic.

Long games start to burn out my energy, largely from the above issues. But I also like variety. I want to write a story and when it is done it is time to close the book on those characters and let them live their lives, then write a different story.

I do fiction, and I tend to go from short stories to novellas. I want a beginning, middle, and end. I can't stand the sit-com and I can't stand the soap opera.

My players seems to want soap-operas, and I don't know if they know how often and how close I've come to dropping the entire game and no longer GMing for them over this. It has happened many times, and at present the only thing keeping me going is that I've set a date for the present game to end, and am spending most of my time actually prepping for the next game.

In other words, I've already moved on, and I just kind of fill time for the current games...

I'm wondering if I should tell my players this URL, especially the one who does that game I just left...

[OddHat]

I'd love the chance to play in a long-running campaign, if the GM could put some long-term meaning into it. I'm not sure I'd like ten years of disconnected adventures. On the other hand, I've never tried it.

We mostly ran in campaign arcs for the first six years or so, until too many people had moved to maintain the old group. Post "retirement," we ran solo adventures and holiday themed adventures when we could get together with old players.

[zornwil]

The best approach I found was to let them have a few cake-walk fights while dealing with either:
1) Very character driven adventures (business, politics and romance)
2) Masterminds who were smart enough to Not Be There when the plan was going down. This second group eventually had to become very clever to avoid the group.

The toughest problems were not caused by them unexpectedly totalling a foe in a round or two (I got used to that). It was when an unexpected use of wealth, mind control, or a massive VPP suddenly rendered the problem meaningless. "The terrorists want $25,000,000? No problem; I take out my check book." "The Earth is falling out of it's orbit? I'll just shift us into my protected pocket plane while Captain Chaos and Paladin figure out how this hapenned, then we'll go back in time and stop it."

The answer to that, as much as there was an answer, was to take a very careful look at every charater sheet while planning the adventure.

Yeah, it's the masterminds that are tough to do now actually, given the talents of the group.

There are a couple uber-powerful characters though. I do have to ask the players if they're willing to see serious mortality occur in the game as they face these ultimate villains (my intention is to give the campaign a long rest after the next set of intertwined story arcs).

[sinanju]

The longest running campaign I know of began in 1978. I started college in 1977 and discovered a) role-playing in general and b) Dungeons & Dragons in particular. I was instantly hooked and played obsessively. After our winter break, I returned to college eager to continue--only to discover that the group had discovered Traveller in the interim and we were playing _that_ now. I still played other games with other groups, but that original Traveller game is still going on. I continued playing in that game during and after college up thru 1991, when I moved to Oregon. But the game continues to this day.

It has evolved, of course. It started out as Traveller...with Stargard weapons and armor and background. We eventually added mutants and mutations from Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha. And more psionics. And over the years, we moved away from Traveller rules to a home-brewed system which continued to evolve right up to today. The campaign has changed, too; it shrank from a "Traveller" universe of hundreds of worlds to a more detailed but smaller universe of dozens, then fewer, then eventually turned into a fantasy game on a single world--though lots of existing organizations and NPCs changed along with the campaign and stayed around.

My Oregon gaming group was just the opposite; we went thru dozens of short-lived campaigns under any of nearly a dozen members acting as GM at any given time. I'm not certain anymore if I could settle for just one long-running campaign any longer.

[Ternaugh]

Last year marked the retirement of my FH game world that originally started in 1990, with the release of FH 2nd ed. The Genshar Kingdoms Campaign (and spinoff Badlands Campaign) mutated several times, with several different groups (and hiatus periods).

Genshar I starred a gaming group suited to action-adventure. Typical events involved lots of combat, with straight-forward plots drawn from a mixture of high-fantasy sources. Magic was illegal in most areas, and so wizards needed a cover occupation. A modification, Ia, was an effort of one of the players to run adventures in a different, though neighboring section of the continent.

Genshar II was a short-run series of games in late 1992, where player motivation led to a collapse of the game (when presented with an urgent need to get involved, one player decided that his elf would rather find a quiet place, and "wait it out", since he had time).

Genshar III was run during the summer of 1993, and centered on political intrigue, mystery, and deception. Its driving force was a player who thrived on just these items. He may be familiar to some Herophiles as Jason Vester, the author of "Broken Kingdoms". And, you know, just a bit of the map looks like the region that I used to run them in. I haven't talked to him for many years, and wish him good luck in whatever ventures he's up to.

After a hiatus of a couple of years, I developed another continent in the same gameworld, as a lost colony of the older empire that originally held the Genshar Kingdoms. This would be a region, where the Wizard Wars and magic persecutions never happened, where mages would actually be the governing force in the strongest of regions. I added a central region, where an indigenous population lived, threw in a very warm cliamate, added matchlocks and printing presses, and brought out the Badlands Campaign. Except for a 3 year hiatus (during which I had been demoted into the ranks of management), this has been the longest game with essentially the same core players. It was this campaign that came to an end last year.

JoeG

[Trebuchet]

Our current MidGuard campaign has run since 1992, making it by far the longest campaign of anything I've ever played in. There's another Champions campaign here in El Paso which I used to play in that's been running since the mid-80's. I think only one of the original GMs and players is still in it, but that still counts in my book.