How long do your campaigns last


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A friend of mine met me out a month ago and we were chatting about the olden days. How back in our 20's-30's we'd make up an epic character, get joined by other players and game on for like a year and a half on the same guy. We waxed nostalgic about making upwards of 15th level, getting followers, and really creating a portion of the gameworld that truly belonged to us.

Over the past few weeks I've been reviewing my own games of late. I've been running homebrew campaigns for the past 7 years. In total over that time I've begun 5 different campaigns; none has made it past 6th level.

I'm wondering if my experience is unique or common here in the forums. If this inspires the telling of epic tales of your campaign, go for it.


We play about a year, and do get in the upper teens, but have not hit 20 yet.


Of the three Pathfinder games I'm running (Play by Post):

-Carrion Crown has been running a year (or, a year in 2 days anyway). We're at the end of Book 2, currently. 6th level, about to hit 7th.

-Skull and Shackles has been running a year and 5 months or so, and has just started Book 3 (with lots of meandering around, doing pirate things rather than plot). 7th level.

-My homebrew "Thieves Guild" campaign has been running a year and 7 months, and we've gone from 3rd to 7th level in that time (though the level ups from 5th to 7th have come in a shorter period). The campaign has sorta morphed from an episodic "Get mission from guild, do thing, return" (where they get to pick from a bunch of missions) to that, interspersed with "Whatever the hell I feel like making happen" (which recently has included a serial killer popping up and killing guild members through Nightmare, and now a world hopping "Hunt monsters for cash" money making scheme).

That was my first attempt at homebrew, and has met with mild success at least. Character creation is entirely homebrewed based on a Freeform "build a class" system I made a couple of years ago, and the player roster is very different from when it started (one player dropped due to busy-ness, and I picked up two more), but everyone seems to have fun most of the time.

I also have a Mutants and Masterminds game but it's only a few weeks old.

Of the three, the Skull and Shackles game and the Myrial (Thieves Guild) campaign have provided some of my best stories to tell. The Carrion Crown game has just had its roster shaken up quite a bit (Two players quit, two characters died, so there are NO original members left as of the second half of Trial of the Beast), including the addition of a Totally-Not-A-Belmont and a pyromaniac Oracle, so I may get some there soon.

Skull and Shackles in particular has made me notorious among my usual player group for characters with Improved Critical or Keen weaponry ALWAYS critting.

Gortus Svard, the Keen Falchion using side-villain actually TPK'd the party (technically). He won Initiative, moved in...crit the Soulknife. Dropped him.

Party rolls terrible, barely damages him.

Rolls again, crit. Drops the Alchemist from full HP to -23 in one shot.

Again, the party rolls horribly.

Moves in on the Barbarian (who he has Shield Bashed several times now as his secondary target) and...crit. Slices off both his arms and his left leg. AKA "Dead".

It is at this point I take pity on them and deduct some funds from their party fund for Sandra Quinn to have a Breath of Life scroll in her back pocket, and she saves the Barbarian (sadly, not his leg...he got a mechanical one instead), while the rest of the crew assaults Gortus simultaneously, just BARELY bringing him down (good thing they recruited the Ranger and the Ghast from earlier, or he'd have still lived...).

Fun times.

Since then, every character with Improved Critical has achieved several critical hits in a row, across multiple games (including the newly minted Mutants and Masterminds game).


Our group has an odd dynamic. We have two (and soon to be three) different campaign "universes" going at once, currently set up on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Each one has different characters, as well as slightly different people. There's a few of us that are around for all three, but there's a lot of switching around based on how friendly life decides to be. So while the group's been together a while and plays a decent amount, individual settings don't often get far.

I don't think we've ever made it past early teens. Usually we end up with too much going on and with two many holes punched in the campaign, we have to let it go. Right now we're running Emerald Spire on our Wednesdays, which seems like it's a fast track to early-mid teens, so we might actually break that roof for once. Fingers crossed! We have Runelords going on for Fridays, and then may be starting up our old Kingmaker campaign again on Saturdays. So I guess we're looking at one fast campaign, one sorta medium, and one long term?

Contributor

I've been running a solo campaign since 2000 that converted from 3.0, to 3.5, to Pathfinder. I am running Wrath of the Righteous now for a different character, but my campaigns generally tend toward long-running ones, thus we don't experience the play of different classes at the rate a lot of folks do.


Depends. One is 11 years and counting, but infrequent.
Otherwise they usually last 2-4 years. There have been some that have lasted less time but those have usually died rather than been properly finished.


Mine and the ones my friends have done have only been a few months at best. People haven't been really good at staying committed to making time for the game. Like after 3 sessions a guy bails "because guardians of the galaxy was released today and I have to see it today", and that puts you at too small of a group to play without him. Or that the GM's get tired of running their story/of the players not finishing the GM's story.


My first Pf campaign went for a few months, to level 20.

Then the follow up was a continuation, carrying the characters to around 30.

My most recent campaign only made it to ten, but we decided to end it prematurely rather than get into the PvP plotline that was looming.

In the 3.0/5 days, the games I ran usually went until 16 - 20, unless it had to end due to players not being able to play.

I tend to feel like a game (that I run) wasn't successful unless it gets at least near 20.


When I was a kid playing 1st and 2nd ed my usual run time was like a year and a half. We'd start the summer before school started, keep things going a couple times a week through the school year and end up usually around 20-something level.

After college we all got "real" jobs so gaming became less frequent. Even still I managed to keep a Marvel Super Heroes game running off and on for 5 years leading to 2 super hero teams in my game's version of Chicago. Justice was the first incarnation and consisted of all of us fresh out of high school, except with super powers. We got them from power levels around that of the 60's X-men and ended with more Avengers' style PCs. When some folks dropped out and the game picked up again we brought in Vigilance. It was 5 years later in the continuity, Justice had disintegrated as the characters of the folks who'd dropped out became villains or victims, and the grizzled old heroes were dealing with outside threats leaving Chicago vulnerable once more.

During that time I also ran a couple White Wolf campaigns and 1 3e campaign that ran for about 3 years. From the 3e game I developed a whole section of my homebrew, raised it up from D&D to magic + tech and eventually sank an entire continent into the sea. That was a really fun, epic campaign and the PCs got up to 30th or something ridiculous.

But at that point I moved states. After I finally found gamers I had also newly discovered Pathfinder, so I tried homebrewing. My attempts just don't seem to hit for some reason.

I had one campaign die at 2nd level due to scheduling. The next one ran through 3rd level but then a guy moved and I felt burned out, so I called it. A buddy picked up 4e and ran it so I could be a player, but we only managed a few sessions. I started up PF again and that's the one that made it to 6th, but by the end we were spending more time arguing than playing. My 4th attempt at PF died in the first session, then a big long break, and finally a few new players entered and we kept it going for a year, making it to 5th level. That one again ended in personality conflicts.

After all that I took another long break. I felt fried. I pulled together a megadungeon and some of my older players wanted to run through it so that's gone from a mindless hack n slash fest to kind of a stumbling, rambling campaign, but it lacks focus.

Just a few weeks ago I started what I've considered my 6th campaign. Something about it feels, I don't know... familiar. It plays like those old games from when I was a kid. Not too many tangents, but when we do veer off I laugh so hard I nearly cry.

So far this new game is weekly and only for 3hrs at a time. We don't get tons done per session, so its likely to be fairly slow level progression, but no one seems to mind. I want this game to run, to have a full life. I want to see what happens to these characters in 5 or 10 levels. Hopefully this one's got the distance.

Sovereign Court

When I started gaming about 10 years ago my groups usually flamed out around level 5-6 after 6-12 months. I found the reasons to be a combination of lack of commitment and clashing playstyles. As much as it killed me to do so, I had to accept my best friends just made the worst gamers.

After a few years of DDO filling my TTRPG itch, I had to get back to the table. I decided to use meetup.com and PFS. This way I was able to meet other gamers that shared my commitment and playstyle. I also had an out as meetups and PFS is a quit anytime you feel kind of thing.

So after meeting folks I was asked to run an AP for a home table. We ran kingmaker and had a blast. I then rotated out to player for Serpent Skull. We really enjoyed the APs style and really forged a great gaming group. We have been going for over 5 years strong.

Through play we have discovered that we really dont like high level 3.x/PF. The APs calling it quits around lvl 14-16 is just right for us. We take about 2-3 years to complete an AP. We meet twice a month for about 4-6 hours; sometimes longer.

We also rotate in a few shorter term RPGs like Call of cthulhu and Traveler. The mix allows us to recharge our batteries and try new things. The variety is important as is our compatible playstyles and desire to game. Those are our secrets to success.


The longest I have played in have lasted two years, more or less. One character reached 18th level, and another 14th level. In high school and a couple years after, my friends and I took turns DMing 2nd ed. within the same group of characters. So, maybe five years? But we never got past 10th or 11th level. We're running S&S now, but no telling how far that will go.

Of course there have been countless shorter ones. I enjoy developing characters over the long term, but without these short games I'd never get a chance to try out a variety of characters.


None of the campaigns I have played in lasted more then a year. The GMs in my opinion let way too many people join and the people who joined with a few exceptions never took time to learn how to playk the sessions kept getting bogged down until finally we established a player cap. I am currently in two campaigns both of which look like they may die soon. I would love to be in a group of more committed gamers but have yet to find one. Not to say the people I game with now are bad, some of them just don't know how to play and dont bother to learn.


8-10 years. 1/week or 2/week will do that for you.


About a year ago, we finished Second Darkness and that took us about 2 years (12-2011 start). Obviously that took about 15 levels. We are in Rune Lords and expecting 15 levels out of that.

Before that we were playing 3.5 and the module Riverport and that went to like 8th level.

Pathfinder is the only game that has TAKEN a character from first to 15th. I have played 15th level characters in 1st edition AD&D.

I always envied those who had game worlds, though most of the people that talked about it gamed once a month for about 6 hours or something.


Variety. I guess I hadn't thought about it before. When I was younger we'd intersperse other games even though we had ongoing campaigns. I didn't realize until now that it had any impact on my brain.

I've been running PF non-stop for about 7 years. During that time we've had board game nights or just nights where we meet out or over to someone's for drinks, movies, and socializing. But as far as actually running a game I've done only PF.

I have been genuinely jonesing to run a Marvel Super Heroes game. Not that I have any great campaign in mind or anything, but I just like the casual fun. Plus I'm a sucker for anything super hero related. Couple all that with the fact that I'm constantly barraged by TV shows and movies all over the place with super heroes in 'em and you can understand why the urgency.

Maybe some selection of my players will let me work it in. Otherwise I can design a couple one-shots and just plan a meetup. Whatever the case hopefully I can just scratch that itch and regroup.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Four days ago I wrapped up a campaign. One of the characters was first created in 1991 in 2E... though there have been gaps.

Other than that utterly epic saga, my games tend to run anything from 4 months to a year.


We generally go for 18-24 months per game but that isn't straight through. We play our main campaign 8 months out of the year, and we play a "distraction" game the other 4 months. We just finished our previous long running game last April which took about 3 calendar years. Players ended at 12th level. We are now about 5 months into our new long game (which we started at 5th) and will probably continue for quite some time.


I've run 3 adventure paths, each took 16 months.

Buddies homebrew campaign went on for 8 years.

Other buddies campaigns go 2-3 years.

Dark Archive

I ran a home brew basic D&D back in Uni which lasted 3 years and took characters up to about 16th level. I switched it to AD&D 2nd Ed and it died a short time later. Was also co-GMing a Star Wars D6 game that went about 3 years too.
Then moved cities.
Ran AD&D home brew that went maybe a year and 4 levels.
Played in another campaign or two that went a few levels over a year.
Eventually ran a 3rd Ed game that went 3.5 over another 3 years and got character up to 14th level or so.
Was in a game that finally got my own PC from 1st to 12th level. Lasted a few years but fold after the GM had her second child.
Ran Kingmaker- died at the end end of the first book as players didn't gel or have time.
In a Carrion Crown that just died (on hold) after 3 years, 11 levels and halfway through book 5 as 1 player working out of town and another just had her 2nd child.
Ran Skull and Shackles weekly for over a year to halfway through book 4 before scheduling and party split up.

So, all over the place really. :-)


I'd say that the "average" campaign for the groups I play in lasts about two years. This seems like enough to complete a Paizo AP with weekly 3 hour sessions or biweekly longer sessions. Sometimes the games last a little longer if we intersperse multiple campaigns in the same group. One game which I've been running off and on since 3.5 is poised to start up again after a long hiatus and will probably have stretched out to at least 7 years. The group I run it for usually has at least two campaigns going at any one time, so when I'm not ready to run other DMs fill in (which is most of the time for the past few years). The other game I was running fell apart around 11th level due partially to one of the players being incarcerated (a long and terrible story not really worth telling). The last game I ran before that ran out of steam at 16th level. If I do another homebrew maybe I'll plan the highest levels first or use a Paizo AP as a starter to sow the seeds of my own high level adventure (or maybe I'll just plan on ending around 15th level like the APs tend to...)

The 3 campaigns I'm currently playing in all started around May of last year. One is theoretically a weekly game but suffers from some occasional scheduling trouble and only averages around 3 hour sessions. Still, we’re about halfway through 10th level on the standard XP track by this point. The biweekly games both started out with standard XP, but one DM later switched to fast XP while the other switched to slow XP. The fast game averages around 5 hour sessions and is at 10th level while the slow game runs for around 6 hours and is currently at 9th level. I think the slow game is keeping up so well mostly because the DM uses a lot of higher CR encounters. That’s mostly balanced out by the fact we have cohorts for 3 of the 4 PCs along with 2 Mythic tiers (soon to be 3)

Two of the three DMs have never run Pathfinder before though one ran a 2e game for some of us many years ago which I think died off around 10th level when he went to med school. The DM of the Mythic game ran a 3.5 game which reached 24th level over around 2-3 years a while back. I'm not sure how far he plans on taking this game, but it is kind of a sandbox which seems to have more adventure hooks than we could ever possibly follow up on, so I expect it might go on for years.


Games I play in tend to last about three or four sessions at most. Games I run last about two to three years.

I usually start players at level 3-8, and end campaigns around level 18-30 (I will have to make up epic rules for my current campaign, they are 19/mythic 9 with about seven or eight sessions of content left).

I have played in campaigns that lasted for several years, but usually at best 2-3 years.

I WISH I could be in a campaign that ran from 1-20 (or more) but my group isn't made up of GMs (hence the short number of sessions unless I run).

Play frequency matters, we only play about once or twice a month.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

The longest I've managed to go is about a year. 1st level to about 10th.

With the adoption of Roll20, I expect to be able to complete full adventure paths, so long as I can wrestle players into the game. We've seen slight fluctuations in our roster for Skull and Shackles, while Reign of Winter has been a little more stable. No clue as to how long that will last.


I'm running a weekly online Savage Tide camapaign. We're at level 15, it has run for more than six years. We are currently between chapters 6 (Lightless Depths) and 7 (City of Broken Idols).


Most things I DM nowdays run about 12-18 months. Play averages 3 5hr sessions per month. Level wise about 6/7th lv to 15 or so. Some lower, some higher. Three things typically cause the end: 1) The story naturally concludes. 2) Or we simply reach a point we all agree is a good point to end/pause & play something else. 3) A TPK happens that makes it impossible/virtually impossible to continue. (This is how our Skull & Shackles inspired campaign just ended. The pcs got overly ambitious, located Harrigans lair & launched an attack against it when they knew he wasn't present.... They did better than I expected, but even with Harrigan & some of the named defenders away they still ran into more than they could handle....)

Things I play in?
*Our Thur night game (when it runs) covers Feb-Nov. 5hr sessions about 3 weeks out of a month. Levels vary wildly.
*The AD&D 1e game down at the shop has been going nearly 2 years now. Same campaign, same characters, every Tue night. We're now 9th-11th lv.


As a GM:

My longest campaign was a homebrew 3.5 campaign that went on for about two and a half years, ending at 35th level.

My longest Pathfinder campaign (Carrion Crown, including a side trek to Carrion Hill, that went went past book 6 to L20) so far went on for about a year and nine months.

I ran a casual (i.e., I did nothing to raise difficulty) Rise of the Runelords game that took about 10 months from start to finish (for various reasons, Book 5 took the longest of all of the books to get through), so that's my shortest so far as GM.

My "main" current AP campaign (Mythic RoW; I am gleefully rewriting stuff) is at about a year and three months, though we're about 3 months behind due to scheduling/illness/weather problems.

I'm also running a semi-casual (I'm updating/re-writing foes but not escalating stuff) Curse of the Crimson Throne game that's about halfway through at 3 months, but then we lost a month due to the aforesaid scheduling/illness/weather problems. Hoping to resume it tonight with a side trek into The Harrowing. We might get through the second half fairly quickly once we get going again.

As a player:

My very shortest Pathfinder campaign lasted under two months and ended with the horrible death of my poor witch at the claws of a weretiger at level 3. The GM decided to stop the campaign and try a different system after that.

My shortest successful Pathfinder campaign so far was Serpent's Skull (ending with completing book 6) in about 6 months.

Kingmaker (ported into a homebrew setting with lots of modifications (such as starting with a side trek to the Sunless Citadel, and the after book 2 the BBEG banished the PCs to another planet and we had to get home), and going to L20 - Choral the Conquerer was replaced with Ashardalon, who was directly working with the AP BBEG) took a little over a year.

A couple of homebrew campaigns (one being set in Golarion dealing with Ihys and the Starstone (and including side treks to both The Moonscar and the Witchwar Legacy), and the other being a direct, 10 years later, sequel to our homebrewed Kingmaker) each took about a year.

I played in a Jade Regent game (with a side trek to the Ruby Phoenix Tournament) that took ... a little over 2 years I think? We actually finished it, though the GM severely shortened Book 6. The length of the campaign had far more to do with table issues than anything else.

I'm currently playing a mythic homebrew campaign that's been going for over a year. We're level 10, tier 3 so far; I believe the campaign is going to L20, tier 10, but could be wrong.


Most of my campaigns last about 4-6 months, but some run much longer. One game I am in has been going for just over 4 years now.

I greatly prefer longer running games so its not boredom or wrap ups, its usually life that gets in the way somehow. I also usually have as many as 3 games running concurrently. Right now I have two, but I was invited to join 2 others, one I dropped after a month because of TERRIBLE table manners and the DM was atrocious, the other hasn't started yet.

I usually use the slower xp progression chart. We also do a weird sort of point buy, all abilities are set to 8, you have 30 points to spend, no more than an 18 in any ability prior to racial adjustments, 2 bonus feats at first level, and you gain an ability point at every even level instead of just every 4 levels. I also like to play Mythic adventures. Generally granting a new mythic tier every 2 to 3 levels. So far the highest pathfinder game has gotten to about 8th level. The game I have been in for 4 years is 18th level, but its 3.5e darksun.


My longest running game was a heavily customized gestalt Slumbering Tsar campaign that lasted for about 9 months and had 22 or so 3-5 hour sessions. Eventually I just got fatigued and now someone else is running. As far as games I've played in, I've been part of one that's ran for about 3 years now off and on. Started at 1 and now we are 16, and oh wow, that glacial leveling.

Shadow Lodge

My group has pretty consistently played 1-2 year games for the last 8 years, running level 1 to level 10-15.

In undergrad we had a few 4 month summer games which ended closer to level 8.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Mark Hoover wrote:
After all that I took another long break. I felt fried. I pulled together a megadungeon and some of my older players wanted to run through it so that's gone from a mindless hack n slash fest to kind of a stumbling, rambling campaign, but it lacks focus.

Hopefully, a break as a player will let you recharge a few things to come back to it. As a player in one of these campaigns, I can totally be OK with being thrown a plot hook and running after it too. :)


Our last 5 campaigns have been multi-year efforts. We've been playing through RotRL for over 2 years now (though we took an intermission to run Dragon's Demand). Almost everyone in our core group has children, and so we do pretty good to game once every 2-3 weeks.


I'm running a Carrion Crown game here by PbP which will be 2 years old in July. We are currently halfway through book 4 and have a realistic chance of finishing that campaign with all of the original players still playing (except one who quit after three weeks but that doesn't count :p)

At tabletop, both Jade Regent and RotRL took just over two years to complete.


Seeing how short some campaigns are makes me feel privileged to have played in so many campaigns which reached high levels and not quite so guilty about my own DM efforts sometimes ending prematurely around 15th to 16th level. I'm going to get the 16th level game back on track and finish it though (just like I was going to last year, only this year I'll really do it!)

I think the toughest thing about running a homebrew is probably deciding what should happen next and then prepping it in time for the session. Sometimes I get too stressed out about trying to "develop a good story" and worry about quality instead of concentrating on developing enough quantity to keep the game rolling. As a player I've frequently had fun in games where the DM was clearly just delaying us with random encounters so he could get some extra time to prep. I should have more faith that my custom maps and minis will convince the players I'm well prepared.

I also intend to run an AP at some point and see how that goes. I always felt like it would limit my sense of creativity, but I could always tack on some side quests and maybe some additional material after the AP wraps up. With minis to customize and various NPCs to roleplay I suppose there should also be plenty of ways to be artistic even without writing the plot - more like an actor, director, costume maker, and set designer but just not the screenwriter. I guess the idea of a tabletop RPG as theater might seem a little pretentious, but the theater I'm aiming for here is more like Sasha Baron Cohen meets Conan the Barbarian than an art film or something with Sir Laurence Olivier.

Liberty's Edge

When I ran 1E decades ago we played for over a year, several days a week in the summer, and hit the 20s in level. Until the last couple of years, my campaigns didn't usually last past 6 months.

With 5E out, I am back to longer campaigns. We started a D&D Next campaign that moved to 5E and lasted for over a year and a half to get to 21st level.

We just started a 5E campaign from 1st level and it is going well. I expect it will run for over a year as well and likely go further than 21st level.

High levels in 5E work because after 20th there is just one page of rules to use for epic levels. It works really well.


If run "as is," I've found that PF APs usually last us between 18-22 months. Kingmaker will probably make it to the 3 year mark because I added a large amount of stuff to it, both my own and other module/mini-campaigns (playing weekly, ~4 hours/night).

When I used to GM 2E, the campaigns were much, much longer! I've run five 2E campaigns to their conclusions. The shortest took about two years. However, the last one I did completed in just over three years, while the CoRD game (2E Forgotten Realms -- our primary world of choice) took almost 7 years, and our Ravenloft 1890s game ran for about 9 years.

In 2E, our characters averaged about 12-14th level by completion. PF really streamlines the leveling process, so we're usually finishing APs at about 17th level.

Sovereign Court

I ran an urban campaign for a year and a half, level 1 to 15, was fun.

As a player been in a campaign that lasted two years (ended at level 15), currently on one that is almost over, been going on for 4 years (one year break) we are level 16+ and about to finish it in 3 months or so since the DM is leaving.

Played many other campaigns, which never got any ending.


I'm running the only Pathfinder campaign I've ever run at present so I can't really offer an example, but my plan as GM is to run the characters all the way to 20th through a collection of modules. It should take the better part of the next year or two.

My original AD&D campaign went to about the 20th level equivalent.


Well I for one would like to get a years worth of gaming in and feel the progress from that. I'm not talking in terms of level but character development; there's a difference.

If I just wanted the characters to level then even playing just 12 times a year I could level the PCs 12 times. Rather I'm thinking of development in terms of the PCs doing epic things and truly modifying the game world around them.

I'm jonesing for games where the PCs make things, influence people, and create significant change. In those campaigns from my youth it was the old 1e/2e rules granting followers at a certain level but even before that level the players knew that was coming so they got ready for it.

Adventure #1: clean out a ruin. After a few game sessions at that and dealing with every last enemy power unit in the ruin the PCs then took the ruin. Sure they'd only gone up a few levels and didn't have followers yet, but now they had a base. After that downtime was spent actually convincing people from nearby settlements that it was ok to live near the old ruin again and spending gold fixing the place up.

Suddenly there's a whole new region of the campaign world set aside JUST for the PCs. A couple of these APs seem to have this component built in, like Kingmaker, Rise of the Runelords or Skulls and Shackles, but in a homebrew I can't MAKE the players get involved.

In the 2 games I have running right now the players in both are taking a few fledgling steps towards this. I hope they keep at it. I have a lot of fun when the players are engaged in building the campaign with me; when they create their own goals for the PCs and achieve them.


When I was GMing on a regular basis we tended to go 18-24 months with breaks at christmas. After a couple state to state moves I have yet to find a group that can work around my odd work schedule. To fill the gap, I continue to work on my homebrew world that I have been tinkering on for the last 13 years now.


I tend to finish half of them. I would have finished them all except for one if real life did not get in the way. The average is 6 to 8 months.


I've been playing for 20+ years. What once were weekly 8 hour sessions on Sundays have dwindled to 3-4 hours of play time once the kids are asleep, fortunately still on a weekly basis though. We've played numerous campaigns, both home brewed and adventure paths, but have only made it above 15th level once or twice, and generally tire out anywhere from 8 to 12. There is always the occasional group that never makes it past level 5, but those seem to be fewer these days.

With life interfering with our hobbies, our group has grown as high as 8 players, and as low as 3 at times. Some times you have to force it, and sometimes it just flows naturally. When I can't or don't play for extended periods of time, I'm just not myself. For me, withdraw from gaming was worse than withdraw from cigarettes.

I have to admit that modern day technology is a blessing. If we had to rely on meeting at one location and dragging along all of the sourcebooks, then finding the time and energy to play would be infinitely more challenging. Being able to store dozens, if not hundreds of books on tablets is a gaming must these days, and with web sites like roll20.net and others facilitating remote play, well, it's almost like life support for our gaming in that it's allowed us to continue on when it probably would have died years ago. Having said that though, there's nothing quite like flipping through a new hard-cover source book and drooling over the new possibilities.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Been playing Kingmaker since book two of Kingmaker came out. We're approaching the end of Book 5.

So... uhh, a while.


I'm running Rise of the Runelords on Fridays. We play 4-5 hour sessions.

The party just hit session #31, and they're barely level 5. Only a short ways into The Skinsaw Murders.

I can only hope every book takes just as long.

Scarab Sages

My "campaign" has been going since before I was born. My dad took me to his group when I was around 8 (ish?) we played for a long time and then I moved to university and took the game world with me - but I advanced the timeline. Children, grandchildren and now greatgrandchildren of the original characters have shown up.
"My" campaign is about 33 years old. But try telling the origins we play the same campaign. My dad's paladin has a (little bit ridiculed) place in my mythology.

Scarab Sages

Just did the maths. 24 years old (while I was alive).


Usually a semester, since my groups are typically college student.
We've had a few shorter ones, during summers and such.
So, I guess the average is around five months, and we meet once a week or once every two weeks.


I returned to gaming less than a year ago. I found a group that meets almost every week for 8 hour marathon sessions. I love it. But, I'm frustrated that we can never stick to one or two games. We play a couple sessions of a Pathfinder campaign, and it gets forgotten. Then it's Gurps or Traveler before another 2 sessions of a new Pathfinder campaign. To be honest, I'm tired of making characters that never get a chance to develop. It takes me a couple sessions just to figure out their personalities.


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I have 2 gaming groups and the session types couldn't be more extreme. One group is playing 6-8 hour marathon sessions 1/month. The other is a weekly 3 hr session. The funny thing is what happens to getting things done.

In the monthly game the players are VERY laid back, to the point of needing some prompting from me, the GM, to interact with the environment in order to pick up clues, use skills and advance the plot. The game moves VERY slowly and subplots tend to get missed/ignored.

In the weekly game things get done in rapid fashion. There isn't much room for subplots but the one that's been worked in so far was seized upon and finished all in one night. The downside is that my setting and NPCs feel more like the background from a video game.

I have to say though that as a GM I'm loving the 3hr sessions. Its the challenge to GMing I think I've been missing. I only have 3 hrs/session so even if I'm going to ad lib something I really have to have a good handle on what's going on and where I'm going with a particular scene. Plus any detail that I add gets investigated; the players don't have the leisure of mulling something over for an hour and coming back to it.

I think another thing helping the engagement by the players in the 3hr sessions campaign is that it meets weekly. I didn't realize just how much gets lost between monthly sessions even with recap emails and an Obsidian Portal site. My players show up every week, take a few minutes to hang out, and then once the game is on they tell ME where we were and immediately start making decisions.

I think I'm discovering that my ideal campaign would meet weekly for 4 hour sessions. In a perfect world that would happen on Saturdays during the day. No one would show up right from work hopefully and have to decompress from that stress, and folks would be awake and ready with a bit of daylight in their senses. We'd attack the game hard but have maybe just enough time for sessions where all we do is Downtime or social/skill-based encounters. Add in a main plot where things progress each week and a single sub-plot from time to time with things like a time crunch or a set objective to add some pressure for resolution and I think I'd have an incredible, long-lasting campaign.

But that's what started this thread. Chatting with a friend about old games, looking back over old campaign maps and realizing that some of the longest and most loved games evolved out of that formula: shorter, weekly sessions with primary and secondary plots. Missing that fun of having some dude that survived the last campaign make a guest appearance in this one or showing up as a demigod eligible for the granting of spells.

The Exchange

Face to face games - I ran two homebrewsand into level 20, using 3.0 and 3.5. Each of those took close to 2 years and by the end the characters were famous on multiple planes of existence.

I ran Age of Worms all the way to conclusion. Level 20 to 21 characters by the end. Took a bit over two years and we transitioned to Pathfinder in there as well. By the end one layer had become a Demi god and another a Lich. All the characters from that game feature in the law of our games now.

I ran Legacy of Fire all the way through. Got characters to level 17 in that one. By the end of that I'd had enough of DMing. Took a hiatus for a while.

My mate ran us through the pirate campaign from the Dungeon mags. Can't remember its name. We capped out at level 20 for that one as well.

We're nearly finished second darkness with him too.

I'm running carrion crown sporadically as time permits.

Our F2F games run between 2 and 3 years


minoritarian wrote:
Just did the maths. 24 years old (while I was alive).

Are you not alive anymore? This is getting weird.

The Exchange

PbP is different. I used to be able to guarantee at least a year of character development and story in PbP I ran for others. That was daily posting from me with personal story development added in.

Now I'm lucky to get two months in before life and my health stops me contributing effectively. Which is crap because that really lets people down. Sadly, it's only recently that I've come to understand that I need to stop the impulse to run or join PbP any more as I know I'll not be able to commit for the long term any more.

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