Have you ever "rebooted" an entire campaign?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


I've been playing D&D since the late eighties. My gaming group has lost and gained a number of players since that time, but one friend I played with has been in most of my groups since then. He and I had a Krynn campaign for 2E that we played and got our characters up to 20th level by the early 90's with. Later with 3E, we tried to play them at epic level for a bit before it got stupid. We really liked the characters and were talking about how much fun it was to play them but how they were too high level...so we decided to reboot them.

We were going to start them over at level 1 in the same setting at the same time we started them the first time.

We realized we're much better at the game than we were, much better DM's, and the setting and the mechanics are soooooo different that it might still be entertaining.

So we re-rolled our characters and started over. We've take turns GM'ing. We vaguely remembered some of the adventures we went through before, but we are reworking them so they are more mature and what happened before serves as more of a baseline. Sometimes the same thing that happened before pretty much happens. Most of the time it's been retooled and is more an homage to our "pretend memories" in a clever way. Occasionally we do the opposite and use the previous experience as a red herring.

I have to say it has been awesome. The rough blueprint of the previous experience actually helps a ton to build our stories out of. Many of the NPC's and Some of the villains return, and some of the more ridiculous things we did also make an appearance if for nothing else than a good laugh (like how Bobo was in the Clash of the Titans remake.) It was long enough ago that no one feels like we're "just doing it again." We make different choices and the outcomes can have interesting consequences. The characters are developing in different ways. My wizard is about to take his test and he might not be the same robe he was the first time!

Anyway I was curious if anyone has tried this. After so many video games where you can start over and make different choices, it seemed like it might work. It's been very rewarding and I wanted to share.


This isn't quite the same, but we played Keep on the Borderlands three or four times. Not with the same characters though.

Grand Lodge

That was a suggestion for my Shackled City campaign with my Austin group after I returned from Iraq. I just couldn't stomach the idea of restarting and losing all that progress, going through the same adventures we had done a year prior.

That said, I think it can work if the time between adventures was longer. A year is just too short a time, even with low-attention-span players.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

I have done this many times. We used to reboot all the time in AD&D because we just liked about 3rd to 10th level the best.

My favorite characters have all gotten updates from AD&D to 3.5 to Pathfinder. Their classes may be a little different and what they can do changes a little but the personality is 100% the same. This is a really fun for myself. I have some others who do not like it as much so they may just bring in a new character and that is fine.

We borrowed from the Time of Troubles type event to justify an in game reason for the changes.

My gnome Illusionist has been on the trail of ultimate power and immortality since 1985. He found some caverns that seem to put him out in different worlds and in slightly different forms each time. He has all his memories so he feels the gods are testing him to see if he proves worthy with each new incarnation. A little like a Quantum Leap scenario.


Hend, if you like 3-10 like I do, you can fiddle with the xp. So quick to get to 3, medium to get to 9, and then truly slow to get past that. Pf had the fast and slow progression, what is better if you want to stay at mid levels it to stagger it.

As for reboot an entire campaign, yes in a sense. I ran a series of macro political games called the Lords' game. They mostly stayed in the Cormyr and Sembian setting of Faerun. One at the start of a civil war, one later on, one on the Sembian and Cormyrean war. Each a bit of a reboot, with the players as new political players.

Led to a great story when you look at it overall.


I haven't in D&D, although I have recently been tempted to.

I have in White Wolf though. Had a game that ran for five years, and have tried several reboot attempts since, with none lasting a full year. Sometimes you can't recapture things like that.


One of my groups has sort of done this. The original campaign was 3.5, and ran from level 1 up to 17. The universe came to an end and was rebooted, wtih our characters, 2 of the primary villains, and a sometimes ally of the group being the only ones aware of what had happened. We started again 15 years in the future, with gestalt characters from level 1. It was about half new characters and half old ones. The old ones had been "in retirement". Sometime later the campaign fell apart due to Real Life getting in the way, but we had come to a decent enough stopping point, in a cliffhanger sort of way. A year and a half later we played a level 10 one shot that took place sometime in the missing 15 years, this time having switched to Pathfinder. When we can eventually get enough of the old group together, we plan on finally wrapping up the characters' story for good, revamping all the characters as gestalt Pathfinder characters.


Not quite the same as rebooting the campaign, but when I DM a new group, I use the same opening to a homebrew world and campaign. The first adventure is always a Mummy and one of the player's always gets mummy rot. I have a blast seeing how different groups handle the same situation.


Laruuk: I tend to do the same thing. I almost always start a new group with "the scar" from an old issue of dragon magazine. The PC's are taken prisoner by a bands of orcs in an underground temple complex and have to escape. I love seeing how different groups handle the same obstacles and choices(do we fight our way out, or try the stealth approach; do we rescue the npc prisoners as well,or leave them to their own fate; etc..), and the different escape plans they come up with.
I think that seeing how different player groups handle the same scenarios makes me a better DM because it teaches me to not get tunnel vision and learn how to adjust things on the fly.

As for the Original topic of this thread:
I've never rebooted the same campaign, but i did have one (doesn't everyone have at least 1 that all others you ever run get compared to. lol) that lasted over 4 years but ended without really ending due to real world stuff and moving to a different state than the players. about 3 years later I was able to travel back and got the original group together for a one shot adventure with new characters that explained the fate of the original PC's and ended the old campaign properly with the new characters as the catalyst of change.


I do think the time away from the character really made a difference. I don't think revisiting a character you hit twenty with two years ago would be worth it. I wanted to add that we are doing the slow progression in pathfinder so we really enjoy it. I've actually found you get more creative with your character when you spend several adventures at one level. You also look forward to that next feat or ability so much more.


A few years ago I ran a 3.0/3.5 Forgotten Realms campaign that started out well but then petered out when players moved away, time became scarce, and other RL issues intervened. I'd put a lot of time into the storyline and didn't want it all to just disappear, so a year or two later I restarted the game where we'd left off, with some of the original players/PCs and a couple of new players/PCs who we just "handwaved" as having been there from the beginning. Not sure if that counts as a "reboot" or not, but it meant the game went on rather than just fading away.....

Grand Lodge

Expedition to castle Ravenloft (3.5) I know we did maybe 4 early restarts due to players being unable to continue and I didn't want an unending supply of fresh reinforcements and\or ADHD replacements in a Ravenloft campaign.

And then in another 3.5 adventure (Demon Web Pits maybe?) We got an early TPK from a bear and used a magic dice mojo siphon to murder our faces off. We "woke up" from a feverish dream with a "vague" notion of what was in the next area of the ruins.

And recently in PF we made it to somewhere in the 3rd book of Kingmaker and our current ADHD player just kept on wondering off during sessions. In addition our GM started an arms race because our inquisitor had to Optimize to make up for our 1 ADHD player and our "fighter" building a bard quality melee prostitute (that sadly had the highest CHA and ended up being the Queen and bragging about it constantly).

We've since rebooted KM with myself, a friend that has been playing since 1st ed, a new guy that is tickled %*&#ing pink that he can cast light at will as a fighter, and my roommate that refuses to update her own character sheet (at least in a timely manner) and gets super b$$&*y when we try to help her.

And now I'm depressed!
*Edit Spelling


3 people marked this as a favorite.

Not as a GM, but I have as a player.

Shortly after D&D 3.0 came out, our three-year-long GURPS "Modern Conspiracy" game came to its conclusion when our team of psi-endowed US Marshals allied with a coven of vampires to prevent the Bavarian Illuminati from helping a group of extraterrestrials summon Hastur the Unspeakable in Central Park. (New York City was to be Hastur's blood sacrifice, you see.) It was amazing.

It had been a bunch of years since we'd played D&D, and we decided to try out this new major revision of the rules. Plus, we though the whole OGL concept was pretty cool!

Anyway, one of the players deicded to GM a campaign loosely based on Discworld that he'd been thinking about for a long time. So after two months of playing one-shots and miniatures wargaming, we started campaigning in his homebrewed world of Splendaria.

That campaign went for about a year-and-a-half. It was partly episodic, and partly story-arced, but eventually we found the plot and ran it through the in-world equivalent of Ragnarok.

Fast-forward ten years.

Our group's make-up had changed over the intervening decade, and when our Amber DRPG game fizzled out (due to getting too cosmically weird), we started up a new D&D 3.5 game. After another GM ran his homebrew game for six months, some stuff in his personal life intervened, preventing him from devoting the time needed to run a game. So the Splendaria GM said he'd be willing to run a different game set in Splendaria.

This time, we played members of the King's Guard, and were sent on missions for the Crown. It took us a few months to realize that the events of the previous Splendaria game were mostly happening in the background, and that the old PCs from that game were active NPCs in this one. There were three adventures in which our PCs ended up interacting with the NPCs from the previous game-- in each of which the PCs of this game took the role that had been played by NPCs in the earlier game. We ended up getting to Ragnarok again, this time doing some very important things that had happened in the background of the earlier game.

Of course, only two players actually played through both games, but we caught all of the references! It's a lot of fun to play off a GM's interpretattion of an NPC that had been your PC ten years earlier!

--Hal


Haladir wrote:

Not as a GM, but I have as a player.

Shortly after D&D 3.0 came out, our three-year-long GURPS "Modern Conspiracy" game came to its conclusion when our team of psi-endowed US Marshals allied with a coven of vampires to prevent the Bavarian Illuminati from helping a group of extraterrestrials summon Hastur the Unspeakable in Central Park. (New York City was to be Hastur's blood sacrifice, you see.) It was amazing.

It had been a bunch of years since we'd played D&D, and we decided to try out this new major revision of the rules. Plus, we though the whole OGL concept was pretty cool!

Anyway, one of the players deicded to GM a campaign loosely based on Discworld that he'd been thinking about for a long time. So after two months of playing one-shots and miniatures wargaming, we started campaigning in his homebrewed world of Splendaria.

That campaign went for about a year-and-a-half. It was partly episodic, and partly story-arced, but eventually we found the plot and ran it through the in-world equivalent of Ragnarok.

Fast-forward ten years.

Our group's make-up had changed over the intervening decade, and when our Amber DRPG game fizzled out (due to getting too cosmically weird), we started up a new D&D 3.5 game. After another GM ran his homebrew game for six months, some stuff in his personal life intervened, preventing him from devoting the time needed to run a game. So the Splendaria GM said he'd be willing to run a different game set in Splendaria.

This time, we played members of the King's Guard, and were sent on missions for the Crown. It took us a few months to realize that the events of the previous Splendaria game were mostly happening in the background, and that the old PCs from that game were active NPCs in this one. There were three adventures in which our PCs ended up interacting with the NPCs from the previous game-- in each of which the PCs of this game took the role that had been played by NPCs in the earlier game. We ended up getting to Ragnarok again, this time doing some...

That is really, really awesome!


I do this with my homebrew setting pretty much every time I get a new group of players who want to play in it. One of my great joys as a DM is running an adventure I've written with two different groups, and seeing it turn out in two totally different ways. I really enjoy seeing how the setting itself changes based on the players' input as well.

Grand Lodge

I too love running the same adventure for different groups. Pathfinder Society has been a wonderful tool for that. And I can say that my two runs of Shackled City were wildly different, although my incorporation of community material helped in that respect.


Another sort-of reboot:

I joined a 3E-converted-to-3.5E play-by-email game in progress and we got up to level 12 or 13 before the GM decided he couldn't stand high level 3E play any more. At this point, 4E had just come out so he rebooted the game and said that the previous 3E campaign was a story that was being told to the new 4E PCs (who shared some of the same names and concepts as the 3E PCs).


One of my favorite sets of PCs was originally created for an Amber Diceless game. When that campaign ended after like 2 adventures, we took the same ideas for PCs and tried to roll them up as D&D characters, as closely as possible (except obviously as mortals instead of gods). These ended up being some of the best-realized, most 3-dimensional characters I've ever seen in game play.


I generally only play with one group, so if a campaign is going badly, we scrap the campaign and/or setting and try something else. I enjoy creating settings, and we've got more than one on a shelf, so if one setting goes down the tubes, we move to the next that. That said, since I develop the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror with Rite Publishing, I enjoy running different groups (which I rarely do, but have a couple times in recent years) through the Curse of the Golden Spear trilogy, with and without the additional one-shots. These are generally groups that play at the FLGS. Mostly, however, I play with my old group - so these opportunities are rare. We never reboot campaigns in the same group, however.


One of my GMs apocalypsed the setting for the switch from 3.0 to 3.5. It was a pretty big change in the world itself, and heralded a transition from relatively low-magic, beat the evil wizards, to plane-hopping stargate.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / General Discussion / Have you ever "rebooted" an entire campaign? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.