I just want to add that in my current situation, I'm trying to mix short-term games with a longer-term group. For a while we were doing purely ad hoc stuff (see who arrives, decide then and there on what pickup game we're playing) which was good but we didn't just that sort of experience. No answers yet - it's still a work in progress.

But I think that's an interesting point: some of the things AMaw talks about are true of long-term groups (if not necessarily long-term campaigns) and are totally vital.

I also find that that every time you change rules, you need to go through a bit of the storming/norming process again, at least a little bit - especially if people are in different roles for the game. (But long-term forming still helps - if you've played enough games together, you can more quickly walk each other through that norming/forming process.)

I dig strategy.
Strategy is nigh impossible in short running RPG sessions.

I like both. In fact, I like mid-length campaigns - three to six months long - best. I ran one of those legendary 20 year AD&D campaigns, and to tell the truth, I began to burn out on Fantasy after the fifteenth year or so. For years I had been asking my group to try different games, which they would occasionally - grudgingly - do, but after the first session of a new game I began getting "When are we going backto the real campaign?" from the players. After fifteen years of this, my game started to stagnate. I found it harder and harder to do anything interesting fantasy-wise. After twenty years, I broke the group up - we're still friends, but no longer play together - and formed a new one with the express intent of playing many different games in many different styles. It was a balm to my mind. I'm still burned out on fantasy, but if I had been doing this all along, I wouldn't be.

I still run long campaigns, and my players and I love them, but now I break them up into seasons. We go away and do something else, run some one shots or return to another long campaing on hiatus, or run a short or mid-length campaign, then come back refreshed and energized. Each type of campaign length has good and bad things about it. If you know that going in, and you switch around, you can keep that fresh feeling going forever.

-clash

"...I began to burn out on Fantasy after the fifteenth year or so."

I like this, because by long term I'm basically talking 5-6 months+, played weekly. I cannot imagine running a game for 15 years. I think that's awesome. (I can imagine running in the same established campaign world for that long of course. By those standards, my Aedorea campaign is just a bit older than 3.0 D&D itself, having been established as a setting for the Window).

Played weekly is an important feature. My friends and I came to the conclusion that in order to really establish continuity, you have to be running weekly.

(The rest is specific to D&D)

If played weekly, D&D characters under the current rules system tend to ride a fairly regular level progression of ~10 levels in 6 months*. (This is my average over the last 6 years).  The current campaign has hit level 13 in just 11 months, which is a bit slower than average for me.

But that's really ok, as I see it. I think we either get to the end of the current campaign plotline and wrap up, or we take a vote and go all the way to 20.  (Many of the players have expressed interest in going all the way to 20 "just to see what its like".)  There's simply no good point to go very far past 20 under the current rules system.


*Faster at start, slower at the end

I'm definitely a long-term guy. For me, what I call a "mini-campaign" is something that goes between two-four months of weekly play (ie. 6-20 game sessions of 6 hours per session).

My long-term games go on for years. Lately (ie. since moving to Uruguay) I would say I've actually been running "shorter" campaigns. My longest campaign since I moved here is only a year and a half old. But at the moment I'm running at least three campaigns that could reasonably end up playing for 3-4 years each (interestingly enough, each one having their own definitive end-point forseen; I don't tend to run "open-ended" campaigns).

The "mini-campaigns" are ok, but these kinds of long-term games are what truly rocks.

RPGPundit

And I just handle this by running short stories instead of endless campaigns.

What's the point of these endless, no goal-in-sight long games?  To hit max level?  Sorry, I don't play games with levels, or classes for that matter.  To do stuff?  I do plenty of stuff in short games, and I have a job to fulfill my need for tedium.  Killing my one millionth goblin is not fun.

What's the reason for these short, one-shot games?  Everyone has to spend hours making characters for just one session.  There's no bond to any NPCs, situations, or characters, because you'll never have to worry about them later.  Getting killed for a cause I don't believe in is no fun.

So I run arcs.  Three to seven games is an optimal number, enough time to tell a story, not so long that players whose committments change end up dropping before the end of the story.  Also, if an arc is really boring someone, it will all be over soon.  

After an arc completes, you ask everyone if they'd like to shelve the game for now and play something else, or run another story with those characters.  It's the idea of running a game like a movie, but a movie with sequals in mind.

EDIT: Didn't notice the comments earlier, but... If your long term campaign DOES have end goals, congratuations, you are a more focused gamer than I.  I don't even know what I'll be doing in real life in 2 years, let alone what I'll be playing.  To a large degree, being in my 20's and in college does not allow for long games.

Quote from: RPGPunditI'm definitely a long-term guy. For me, what I call a "mini-campaign" is something that goes between two-four months of weekly play (ie. 6-20 game sessions of 6 hours per session).

My long-term games go on for years. Lately (ie. since moving to Uruguay) I would say I've actually been running "shorter" campaigns. My longest campaign since I moved here is only a year and a half old. But at the moment I'm running at least three campaigns that could reasonably end up playing for 3-4 years each (interestingly enough, each one having their own definitive end-point forseen; I don't tend to run "open-ended" campaigns).

The "mini-campaigns" are ok, but these kinds of long-term games are what truly rocks.

RPGPundit

QFT -- mini campaigns can be quite fun too, however.

My group tends toward the long-term, mostly due to a bunch of circumstantial factors rather than any kind of intent or preference.

First, we're very large. The group started fairly hefty when I joined it,like 8 including the GM, and while it's lost members over the years, it's also gained, and overall has grown. It's a classic case of "Oh, Person X would be so fun to game with too!" or "Hey my friend really wants to game and has no group, can he come?" And then of course nobody wants to kick anybody out. A couple of times, a person just didn't work out (due to assholery or time commitment or some other reason), but overall, we've got everyone who wants to be there.

So for that reason, it's a rather slow process to get anything done, whether that something is combat, or everyone wandering through town, or. . .whatever.

On top of that, we're splitting time between several campaigns. Our "main" (de facto, not appointed or anything) GM has three campaigns, I've got one, and another guy has one. For a long time we were doing "whatever everyone feels like doing tonight" and it was pretty haphazard. Now we've got a tidy rotation in place; three sessions of the main GM (whichever of her campaigns she/we want to or are ready for), and three sessions of mine, and in between each "shift," one session of the other guy's (since it's not meant to be a really dedicated campaign, just a minor diversion). But any way you slice it, if you look at, say, a year of gaming (we've been doing it, some of us, for like, , not much is happening for any given game.

And there's also efficiency with in the session issues, some springing from the amount of people, some from, I dunno, this alchemy of all our bad habits. Lateness, distracting off-tipic digressions, etc. It all adds up to a very slow progression of any game we play.

For this reason, as well as others,  I'm intensely attracted to a more short-term model of play, with fewer players. I've been moonlighting from the main group a bit to get this. I'd love to try this stuff with some of the guys from our grou, but our regular game night is taxed to the brink; I'd have to find an alternate night that everyone who was playing could make it on. No easy task.



On another note, I find it interesting that Abyssal maw and the Pundit come from two very opposite perspectives on the short term/long term divide. The longest AM is interested in playing anything is to the Pundit a "mini-campaign." I wonder if this sort of misunderstanding is very widespread in discussions of this issue? I had always assumed that "long-term play" meant at least, oh, a year, maybe two. Six months by comparison sounds delightfully focused and self-contained.

Peace,
-Joel

Quote from: CodexArcanumAnd I just handle this by running short stories instead of endless campaigns.

What's the point of these endless, no goal-in-sight long games?  To hit max level?  Sorry, I don't play games with levels, or classes for that matter.  To do stuff?  I do plenty of stuff in short games, and I have a job to fulfill my need for tedium.  Killing my one millionth goblin is not fun.

(snip)

EDIT: Didn't notice the comments earlier, but... If your long term campaign DOES have end goals, congratuations, you are a more focused gamer than I.  I don't even know what I'll be doing in real life in 2 years, let alone what I'll be playing.  To a large degree, being in my 20's and in college does not allow for long games.

Yes, I do almost always have a definite end point to my campaigns. Its usually the middle part that is not overly well-defined. The beginning and then end are.  That, in my experience, is what makes for the best campaigns.

As to the reasons for a lengthy campaign, your analysis of it is wrong. You speak, obviously, as someone who's never played a campaign that's run for more than a couple of months.

The point isn't that you run a long campaign to level up to maximum level. Hell, in campaigns of that length I usually have to take particular measures to make characters advance more slowly; in my Legion campaign, the PCs are gaining xp at a snail's pace, so that they wouldn't all be max level long before the campaign came to an end; in my Roman campaign I have made it extremely difficult to level up; in my Three Kingdoms campaign characters gain xp at a relatively regular pace, but since each adventure has a one-year in-game gap between them, the current crop of characters will all die of old age long before the campaign is over; and the players will end up playing several generations of characters.

The point, grasshopper, is that after you've been playing in a campaign for about six months, the world takes on a whole life of its own, a depth that is utterly impossible to create artificially in any shorter amount of time.  Your character too, will develop a depth of life that can only come from this kind of lengthy connection.

Its easy to tell the difference between players/GMs who have actually experienced this, and those who haven't.

RPGPundit

I'm not proud of it or anything, but I agree with the Pundit person. After a while you hit a critical point, and the setting becomes three-dimensional. It used to be a Potemkin village, but now it's a world.

QuoteIts easy to tell the difference between players/GMs who have actually experienced this, and those who haven't.

Definitely true.

Two things really hold me back from making my own longterm campaign work for me.  My wandering eye tends to draw me towards new systems.  I haven't been so bad about this lately, but for a while I seemed to be on a constant quest to find the perfect system.  And I've still got games from that search that I would like to play.  And then there's the organization part.  I've made several attempts and my notes just don't cohere.  Some days I think I should just get the Wilderlands boxed set or maybe the new setting for the Dungeon Crawl Classics line.

I vastly prefer long term campaigns because of the basic idea of emotional investment.  You may have intense passion and lust/love for someone when you first meet them--but intensity of emotion, is not the same as depth.


This goes for long term campaigns. Something can be fun, and brief. But, it takes time to build the relationships in game to be something real to the player, this is simply an aspect of human nature. By spending time creating the in game relationships and interacting with them, they become valuable. If you present "Inn Keeper Bob" and he's murdered the same game session, the impact will be minimal. If Inn Keeper Bob on the other hand is someone the players see after every "adventure", get to know the person, his five daughters and two ex wives---then when he is murdered it becomes a very powerful change to the player characters. There is no shorthand way to create that depth, that long term familiarity that makes the loss or gains (say being invited to Inn Keeper Bob's third wedding..) valuable.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityI'm not proud of it or anything, but I agree with the Pundit person. After a while you hit a critical point, and the setting becomes three-dimensional. It used to be a Potemkin village, but now it's a world.

Bingo. Sometimes it's fun to rip up the potemkin village, but I really like making a three dimensional world with my players. It's a different kind of reward.

-clash