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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2012 13:50:37 GMT -8
This is obviously incredibly subjective, but I'm curious what you all think is a good length of time to devote to campaigns and what the determining factor is for you in terms of how long to go.
Does the type of plot inform how long you run the campaign?
The two ends of the spectrum seem to be:
one shots - one or two sessions: - good for learning new systems or exploring unusual ideas - work well with a pretty linear plot (as in the con game discussions)
Many years: - I feel like this almost requires a sandboxy approach, as I just can't see someone sitting down and writing a story arc this long from scratch, but perhaps you could string a lot of more linear/scripted adventures together for this amount of time...
The in-betweens are the ones I'm most interested in hearing about though. How long do you keep a campaign running typically and how do you a) decide to end a campaign and b) actually go about ending it?
Cheers,
Mark
P.S. (yes even on the forums) I am beating you all to this answer: 12.5 sessions is the ideal campaign length and it should end because I have savagely murdered all the players.
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HyveMynd
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Preferred Game Systems: PbtA, Cortex Plus, Fate, Ubiquity
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Currently Running: The Sprawl
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Post by HyveMynd on Jul 19, 2012 19:50:52 GMT -8
This is going to sound wishy-washy, but I think the campaign should end when the major story and character arcs are all tied up. Running a gritty mystery campaign where the PCs have to figure out who the murderer is and decide how to resolve the situation? Then the campaign ends when they've accomplished that. Running a high fantasy game where the PCs are meant to rise to their epic destinies and depose an evil god? Same deal. The campaign ends when they do that.
I think that's why it's important for the players to have some sort of goal in mind for their PCs. It's also important for the GM to have some sort of idea about the main situation that needs to be resolved. That can develop as play continues though; you don't need to figure everything out before you start playing.
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jfever
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Post by jfever on Jul 20, 2012 21:44:41 GMT -8
The first game I ever DMed was a 3rd/3.5 edition D&D game when I was a senior in high school. We played every Saturday from 12 PM to 2 AM for an entire school year. It ended when the big bad died. My players made it from 1st level to 20th level. It was awesome and I don't think I will ever "complete" a game like that again. The big bad was dead and everyone had reached their max level so the constraints of D&D and traditional story telling hinted to us all that the game was over. But what about systems that don't do that? (now, I will answer my own question)
I played in an episodic Deadlands (original) game that was ended when our GM thought that our characters were getting outlandishly powerful. We fought the devil's top lieutenants. Ending it felt right, because our characters had been through a lot. Our stories weren't all tied up and pretty by any means, but it just felt that whatever they were going to accomplish would not be told in an adventurer's life. They might have traveled the world, started studying ghost rock, or wrote books about their lives.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that when the game is ready to end, everyone will know. It will become apparent, and feel right to retire the characters/game.
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Post by malifer on Jul 21, 2012 3:39:09 GMT -8
I think it all depends on what the game is and what the GM's plan is.
I am not really a fan of campaigns.
I don't like meandering about, or to put it in video game terms grinding levels.
If there isn't a world story or a character arc it is easy to get bored.
Sandbox is a little different in this regard, but even then it can start to run out of things to do.
I prefer a more episodic game style, where you can jump foward in the PCs life instead of keeping track of a daily routine. This way you can tell the big event stories.
I also try to keep a more realistic thought process to my character, even if it's a fantasy game, about why they're doing this. Getting to level 20 is not something they would consider.
My favorite example is the Die Hard movies. I like them all, but the first one is the good one. John McClane is a regular guy throw in extreme circumstances.
The sequels are fun action schlock, but McClane is no longer a regular guy he is a superhero because if a person goes on vacation and is thrown into one horrible situation it would be traumatic.
If next Christmas you go on vacation and have to fight terrorists once more, you are never going to leave your house again.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 21, 2012 8:09:16 GMT -8
I just finished a 2 year campaign that ran 33 sessions. I didn't write a huge script, what I did however was decide that in a set in game time period events would happen that would end the campaign. This was in Dark Sun so I decided a Sorceror King was working on becoming a Dragon. Which would essentially be the end of the world. Between the point the game started and that end point I made a little calendar and placed big world events. The attack by a large army on one of the neutral cities. The assassinasion of some semi important people, and several other things that would happen at set times in set places.
Now I didn't tell the party this, I never mentioned anything about the Dragon or anything else when we started. They had a nice big sandbox to play in while I dropped hints here and there of the greater events happening around them. Sometimes they happened to be in the right place at the right time to witness the things I planned, other times they found out about them from gossip with traders and the like.
They eventually decided to go after the Sorcerer King and did kill him, but it wasn't until the very last session they realized what he'd been planning. I'd already cleanup most of the linger plot points, though a few were left with hints that there might be more, and though they didn't know it the campaign was going to end that day regardless of what they did. But as they killed the guy the world gets to live a little longer and we may revisit it someday.
The point of that little ramble being to have an end point in mind at all times. When you get to it you can reevaluate and continue on if you like. But have that end point set down in you head so that you can work towards a satisfying end point for most of the plot lines and stories weaving through your world. That way when its time to end it you can give the party a nice climatic end point, where they feel they've done something, as opposed to the campaign just drifting off to die because no one cared to bother wading through the quagmire of story anymore.
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Post by jazzisblues on Jul 22, 2012 10:33:33 GMT -8
There's not an optimal length, the campaign ends when either the characters have been played out (reached the point where they've done everything they want to do and reached the point where they're thinking of settling down to the quiet life, or when the players have had enough. It's not a fixed point and for some campaigns it's very long and for some just a handful of games.
Sorry to not be more definitive.
JiB
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jul 22, 2012 11:51:30 GMT -8
The ideal campaign length is fourteen sessions of 4-6 hours apiece. No more, no less.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2012 13:01:14 GMT -8
The ideal campaign length is fourteen sessions of 4-6 hours apiece. No more, no less. where did you come up with those numbers out of curiosity?
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Post by inflatus on Jul 22, 2012 13:38:56 GMT -8
The ideal campaign length is fourteen sessions of 4-6 hours apiece. No more, no less. where did you come up with those numbers out of curiosity? I think from the snarky GM guide. thecheeseshop.org------ (Reliving the RPG Obsession Through GURPS)
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2012 15:37:51 GMT -8
Hi folks, thanks for the responses. I've been thinking more on the subject and I agree completely with the "it's over when the story is told" idea, but I think that deciding which story to tell and setting a campaign length are basically the same concepts.
For example, telling the story of "the night that terrible thing happened" is likely to be a shorter game than "the epic rise of peasants to godhood" :-)
It sounds like tentagil and jfever's games, for example, had a pretty big scope and had a correspondingly long runtime. I'm pretty sure that if I tried to run a game for that long, gamer ADD would kill it before it got to a suitable ending point and it would be another casualty of the games-that-fizzled-out problem that seems so very common.
So, basically, while con games are constrained by an arbitrary time limit, gamers' attentions seem to have a time limit too and I'd like to set my pacing and scope such that the story doesn't exceed their interest.
God, I am being wordy here. This is what happens when left-brain nerds attempt social stuff, you get questions like "how long is an attention span?" :-)
-Mark
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2012 18:21:40 GMT -8
Well then you fall back on the golden peice of advice for all RPG related things, talk with your players. See what they want to do, and how long they'd want to do it. If they are just interested in short one or two session adventures then go with that, on the other hand if they want to do something more epic then go with that.
My two year game for instance didn't end because my players wanted it too, they were ready to keep going. I on the other hand was a little burned out with the system and had finished telling the story I wanted to tell at that point. So we have switched over to a few one shots until I put together things for out next longer campaign.
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Post by Forresst on Jul 24, 2012 10:50:51 GMT -8
You could always think up some grand arc (for example, my favourite campaign I GMed had a grand arc that went "these guys start out trying to find some treasure, but end up swept up in events that take them to the dawn of time to save the creator of the universe from a horrible evil trap") but then run it like tv show seasons. So, my campaign, the first "season" was finding the treasure. That worked good, people were into it. The second season rose out of the first, when the PCs learned that this treasure was being used to fix some terrible mistakes by a secret society (ooo) that was in a civil war, so the second "season" was about the PCs picking a side, and bringing the secret society back into functioning order. Then the third "season" involved a grand tour of the neighboring countries, to establish a new trade agreement and also to subtly allow secret society people to access some of the troubled parts of the world and keep it all together. This is where my campaign ended because my gamers got bored. But had they continued, there would have been more stuff to do, until they were fighting the ancient evil tried of gods, and figuring out how to unravel time so it would choke the universe out of existence.
tl;dr try stringing together a bunch of "little" campaigns into a "larger" campaign, so if it falls apart, it's still pretty complete.
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Post by jazzisblues on Jul 25, 2012 6:19:50 GMT -8
I tend to start out small and immediate (what's going on in this small town or this part of this city) and let it grow from there. This is largely because I have no idea at the outset what will ultimately interest the players. I may have some larger overall thought in mind or I might not.
As an example, and I'm not revealing anything the players don't know already, in my SW pulp game the basic idea is (cliche though it is) that it's 1935 and the nazis are trying to gather historical artifacts (Yeah I know it's not an original idea), and the pc's have been gathered by a secretive world wide agency to thwart the nazi plans. Ok that's all there is to the over arching story arc. That's it. So far the pc's have been romping around England and Scotland trying to keep the nazis from getting their hands on the Stone of Scone and in so doing have discovered that the Stone in Westminster is not the real one and that magic is real.
Next they are off to Egypt where the nazis are after something though they don't know what yet. That's pretty much the whole campaign at this point. Where will it lead? I really don't know yet.
JiB
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Post by HourEleven on Jul 25, 2012 14:07:10 GMT -8
I always start by asking the players what they want.
When we first sit down and I get a reading on what genre and mood they want, I talk to them about the benefits and negative aspects of each length.
A campaign with a finite ending has a chance to be more epic than a sandbox (the players can sacrifice themselves in a blaze of glory, etc) but we won't spend as much time developing the world and relation ships. Things like that.
My 2 favorite formats are the 2 I'm currently running:
1. Fully living sandbox world. As a GM, I create the machinations of the world, the large scale outcomes of NPC actions, etc.
The players have their own goals and also react to the world around them. As long as there is one player with goals, and at least one NPC with a background plan, I can keep the story going forever. If things ever get slow, I make the players re-evaluate their list of short term and long term goals (what's changed in the characters needs, what have they accomplished, etc.)
2. Episodic. Our Hunter game runs like a TV show. Everything wraps up by the end of the session and is practically reset for the next session. It's formulaic: get a mission, investigate, make a plan, fight the evil. Rinse and Repeat.
It's a great Beer and Pretzel way to run a campaign. There's nothing to remember (if there's weeks between our games) and if someone can't make it one night, their character isn't in that "episode."
The character's emotional progression is slow, but it is there.
My players wanted a no commitment game, where the group could be flexible and the consequences were small.
My 2 cents. Don't ever feel you need to stick to a "conventional" structure. Talk to your players. One of the best campaigns I ran was a Shadowrun campaign in reverse. We knew how it would end and worked our way back until we discovered how we got there. The characters met in the final session - then we fast forwarded back to the frozen moment of the first campaign and they finished the fight that ha been hanging there for months while we tried to discover what it all meant.
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