Hi All
I have an idea for a campaign at my local club and wondered if anyone had run/played/heard of something similar or had any thoughts or tips on how to make it successful.
The idea is to run a series of short adventures. The first one would use the original d&d white booklet rules, the second would use 1e AD&D, et.c. Successive adventures would use each of the d&d editions in turn including 3.0 all the way to 5e.
Adventures would be two or three sessions each with a gap between each for me as gm to get the rules down and the players to prep characters.
I'd ideally come up with a unifying story arc through successive generations of heroes and the players' characters would ideally be descendants of each other.
The idea is to get a feel for how the game has evolved and also have the story evolve with it.
What do you think? Has anyone run anything like this before?
Something like this has an appeal to me. Though having such short adventures in each edition less so. Making each edition last 6 months is probably what I would do. Gives everyone long enough to get a feel for the editions, and get attached to the characters. Then, have a short gap for everyone to create the offspring of their first characters (or, depending on the races, grandchildren), advance the timeline a couple decades or so, and get everyone into the next edition.
That's how I would do it, personally. But that's me. If everyone is on board with such a campaign, I don't see why not do something like this.
I would just be wary of players who are rules lite.
All the fiddly different rules variations could get confusing.
I wouldn't make any edition changes for several months of real-time play. One short adventure, then switch editions would totally prevent me from playing in this campaign. I don't want to have to spend time re-familiarizing myself with a changed character every 1-3 games.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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I think the concept sounds really intriguing. Bonus points if your worldbuilding includes societal reflections of the different mechanics and design paradigms.
For example, the relative availability of various sorts of magic items changes drastically between editions, ranging from "rare and awe-inspiring" to "buy it before you leave town". City structures, social norms, and plenty else could be affected by this. Seeing the differences in the setting based on how each game works, and then seeing how your characters fit into each setting, could be a really fascinating.
But this is a pretty massive undertaking. Brace yourself.
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I did something like this with 1e Dark Suns and going from 1e to 2e with a game reason. I had a campaign in 1e Dark Suns in which the players 'saved' Athas and it became the Forgotten Realms (explaining the 'rule' differences as part of the story). Each player became a god in Forgotten Realms and they rerolled 1st 2e characters. They really liked having their retired PC's as part of the new game world.
So I think a great idea, just link the editions by the developing story!