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I don’t know that I’ve ever had a campaign go more than maybe 20 sessions where the system maintains dominance. By like session 5 or 6, the players sort of come to understand their characters and we end up just telling stories with occasional checks for dramatic moments. Probably also telling my most successful campaign was with Amber Diceless. For those of you who go dozens, hundreds of sessions, do you keep the rules in place?
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Nov 14, 2023 12:38
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And here the only campaign I've had go longer than 10 sessions or so was a text-based run of a module that ended when the module did, and only ran longer because text is so slow. Most attempted campaigns just peter out at 4 or 5 sessions tops. Wish we had some of your groups' longevity 
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Nov 14, 2023 13:57
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PuttyKnife posted:I don’t know that I’ve ever had a campaign go more than maybe 20 sessions where the system maintains dominance. By like session 5 or 6, the players sort of come to understand their characters and we end up just telling stories with occasional checks for dramatic moments. My longest campaign was 50-ish sessions of 4E. We definitely stripped away rules that we didn't think were fun or interesting, and pulled apart the whole adventuring day and rest system. But we were still using the vast majority of the combat rules all the way through. These days I like Monsterhearts style seasons where you do a 10-12 session arc then montage a time-skip. People who like their characters can bring them back, people who are bored can roll new ones after giving them a farewell scene or two during the montage (or getting them spectacularly killed in the last session). Gives you a good point to rotate GM if they need a break, change systems if people are done with it.
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Nov 14, 2023 14:47
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Back in the glory days of being a broke single idiot with no prospects, and a friend group in the same situation, I was in two two-year long back-to-back weekly Exalted games. Each was probably at least eighty sessions after considering a few missed weeks here and there. And then there was a year-long Exalted game after those. And a bunch of one-shots and concurrent games of a month or two length before, after, and throughout including more Exalted and a wide variety of other games. And even all that Exalted combined falls short of my nearly six-year Rolemaster game that started in middle school and ended because too many people started graduating high school.
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Nov 14, 2023 14:47
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SkyeAuroline posted:And here the only campaign I've had go longer than 10 sessions or so was a text-based run of a module that ended when the module did, and only ran longer because text is so slow. Most attempted campaigns just peter out at 4 or 5 sessions tops. E: my campaign collapses tend to be around big important sessions where too many sessions pass where we can't get the full party together but it's too key a plot beat for someone to skip. E2: though my biggest campaign flameout as a player was during college when I accidentally made a "street level" BESM character that was immune to the main plot and could kill God. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 15:28
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The longest running game I'd been in was a 1e D&D game that met mostly every Sunday, running anywhere between 5 and 9 hours, for just over 5 years straight. There was significant homebrew in the game, from races to monsters to spells and so on, as both the DM and one of the players had been playing pretty much since the release of 1e and homebrew was a big way to get around knowing monster stats and stuff like that. While I liked the game, there were definitely times when the rules got in the way. Don't know if I'd ever go back to playing D&D for that long again, but it was definitely a fun time while it lasted.
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Nov 14, 2023 16:22
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Has anyone tried Masks? I wanted to run a teen superhero game and saw a few recommendations for that system
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Nov 14, 2023 17:23
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PuttyKnife posted:For those of you who go dozens, hundreds of sessions, do you keep the rules in place? Pretty much. My group all like to play with systems as much as we like to play out characters, unless the system almost literally falls apart on us and becomes more patchwork than game.
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Nov 14, 2023 17:42
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Splicer posted:A key part is finding the sweet spot of enough people that you can run on a day if someone can't make it but not so many people that that's likely to happen enough to stall things out. Oh, it's not an issue of "people can't make it" for us, generally. GMing is rapidly corrosive to my mental health (as I'm finding out again with Mothership, which might die after 3 total sessions at this rate), and various factors have killed our last several campaigns (picking up new players that turned out to be horrible, lack of interest beyond a few sessions on everyone's part, quality of the game itself being terrible enough house rules couldn't fix it...). Scheduling hasn't been an issue for killing games so far. I'm hopeful the Dark Sun campaign that's intended to run in parallel with our Mothership game works out, but we've had to push back both games quite a bit so far between "Mothership overran the planned one-shot" and "family emergency" so we're not actually getting sessions in there yet beyond the intro that nearly had a PC death already...
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Nov 14, 2023 17:55
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I once ran a Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Campaign of 22 sessions (a full season), with each session being an episode. There was a three-parter and a two-parter as well, but those had been planned in when I was designing the campaign. The hardest parts were timing the story beats like the TV series, with the appropriate appearances of the Big Bad early on, then not appearing until the back half of the season and the middle two-part episode. I even had opening credits made with Flash. These are the opening credits I did for my current campaign (also a cinematic action movie-ish one). At least now I can use Premiere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSxKWaKNKSQ I had a screen with the players' names listed as the 'Writers', but I removed it for this render.
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Nov 14, 2023 18:06
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radlum posted:Has anyone tried Masks? I wanted to run a teen superhero game and saw a few recommendations for that system Yes; it's very good (unfortunate, since Magpie kind of sucks) if what you're looking for is specifically teen superhero drama in the style of Young Avengers/Teen Titans.
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Nov 14, 2023 18:11
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That Old Tree posted:Back in the glory days of being a broke single idiot with no prospects, and a friend group in the same situation, I was in two two-year long back-to-back weekly Exalted games. Each was probably at least eighty sessions after considering a few missed weeks here and there. And then there was a year-long Exalted game after those. And a bunch of one-shots and concurrent games of a month or two length before, after, and throughout including more Exalted and a wide variety of other games. gently caress yeah rolemaster, love that game. We played a bunch of campaigns in it then pulled out the core mechanics and stapled them into other systems, it worked really well.
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Nov 14, 2023 19:02
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Lemon-Lime posted:Yes; it's very good (unfortunate, since Magpie kind of sucks) if what you're looking for is specifically teen superhero drama in the style of Young Avengers/Teen Titans. I wanna second the recommendation for masks! It's a lot of fun. What's the deal with magpie tho
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Nov 14, 2023 19:15
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:These are the opening credits I did for my current campaign (also a cinematic action movie-ish one). At least now I can use Premiere. I have got to complement you on your choice of music. I wasn't aware of VNV's When is the Future until a cover by Collapse Project came up on my feed. Great song. Cool opening credits video Humbug. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LehjQOSFUw
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Nov 14, 2023 20:02
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Helical Nightmares posted:I have got to complement you on your choice of music. I wasn't aware of VNV's When is the Future until a cover by Collapse Project came up on my feed. Great song. VNV's original video is stunning... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF5mf4LV7Jw
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Nov 14, 2023 20:04
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this is the track list for a 2007 prog rock album
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Nov 14, 2023 21:13
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Ominous Jazz posted:I wanna second the recommendation for masks! It's a lot of fun. Mark Diaz Truman is the co-owner of Magpie and wrote some bad blog posts about how we all need to accept Zak S into our hearts to heal the rift between OSR and indie games, and he never gave a satisfying apology for this. (Note: when he made those posts, there really wasn't that much of a rift between OSR and indie game spaces. They didn't talk much, but that's because they were different communities. There were enough Kevin Crawfords and Vincent Bakers in the world that people would give respectful nods to across the aisle, and the old scene drama was only being kept going by the weirdest posters.)
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Nov 14, 2023 21:20
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I was born at just the right time to a) get into VNV Nation and b) not be able to think about VNV Nation without thinking of SimRonan now. MY BURGER! NOT AFRAID!
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Nov 14, 2023 21:42
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Mark Diaz Truman is the co-owner of Magpie and wrote some bad blog posts about how we all need to accept Zak S into our hearts to heal the rift between OSR and indie games, and he never gave a satisfying apology for this. More specifically, he used those bad blog posts to throw another Magpie employee under the bus because that person dared to say that Zak S should stop harassing people, to performatively take Zak's side in the pursuit of clout in the limited spheres where Zak's word was worth anything.
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Nov 14, 2023 23:58
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Re: session count - I got into a discord D&D campaign at the beginning of the pandemic that ran for like 2+ years, once a week, at about 3 hours a throw. I started late with the group and got in at level 6 and by the time the campaign concluded my guy was level 18. I had an Eldritch knight Dwarven archeologist, researching the intersection of ancient cultures and their precursor magics on his quest to become tenured at the college he worked for. I miss having a game, were that my free time not been taken up with other things I'd try to run my own D&D campaign again. Did anyone besides me buy the Candela Obscura core book since it released yesterday? I absolutely adore the Crit Role games of it and it seems like it'll be fairly lightweight and easy to teach to newbies.
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Nov 15, 2023 17:44
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I looked at it but it just looks like worse Blades in the Dark.
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Nov 15, 2023 18:17
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I've had more games reach a satisfying ending than not over the years, but that mostly comes from playing shorter campaigns (2-3 months) when we aren't just doing a one-shot for a week or two. I think my longest completed game so far is Fellowship that ran for 7 months with only the occasional dropped session.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:06
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With the caveat that I haven't looked at the actual game yet, PC Gamer (of all places) had a piece about Candela Obscura last week that made it sound not totally terrible (baby's first explanation of the concept of hacks notwithstanding): https://www.pcgamer.com/critical-ro...s-a-good-thing/
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Nov 15, 2023 21:18
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e; quote is not edit.
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Nov 15, 2023 21:19
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zerofiend posted:I looked at it but it just looks like worse Blades in the Dark. Does the full version still only rate rolls along one axis?
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Nov 15, 2023 21:32
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I'm currently 75 sessions deep in a D&D 4e campaign that started in 2017. At the current rate we probably have a year or so to go. We've been online from the start on account of being scattered across the US, and scheduling has been somewhat irregular, so we end up spending a fair amount of time on recap.
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Nov 15, 2023 23:49
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A few months ago my group finished a 3-year Roll20 5E game that probably had around 100 sessions all told. Someone else DM'ed the middle third, and we had a couple player drops and adds, but it held together.
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Nov 16, 2023 00:16
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:I'm currently 75 sessions deep in a D&D 4e campaign that started in 2017. At the current rate we probably have a year or so to go. We've been online from the start on account of being scattered across the US, and scheduling has been somewhat irregular, so we end up spending a fair amount of time on recap. My Bi-Weekly 4E campaign that started in 2019 at Level 1 is reaching the final stretches soon (Currently level 19).
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Nov 16, 2023 00:53
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Plutonis posted:My Bi-Weekly 4E campaign that started in 2019 at Level 1 is reaching the final stretches soon (Currently level 19). Congrats on that longevity! I think we started at 3 and are now up to 24. Looks like we average about a level a quarter, and I expect we'll take it all the way to 30.
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Nov 16, 2023 02:18
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Plutonis posted:My Bi-Weekly 4E campaign that started in 2019 at Level 1 is reaching the final stretches soon (Currently level 19). hell yeah. that's my dream with the current campaign we have underway currently.
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Nov 16, 2023 02:20
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I didn't run it but I was in a campaign that went from level 1 through 18 and lasted three years and change, despite two key players leaving partway through.
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Nov 16, 2023 05:43
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Probably the longest-running game I did was a weekly 4e campaign that lasted 3 years and took the party from L1-L5. I'm still pretty proud of the near-total reskinning of 4E I did for it, building pretty much every enemy the players faced was a ton of work but it paid off.
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Nov 16, 2023 12:17
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I'm in the middle of my third consecutive Legend of the Five Rings game, the first two went six years each and ended on a good end, spawning the next a while later down the timeline. The first one barely made it, though, it was falling apart as it crossed the line, seven players was too many. That one was more adventure-path than homebrew though, using Heroes of Rokugan 1 as the mod set, even if I ended up blowing up a lot of the tracks.
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Nov 16, 2023 12:41
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That Old Tree posted:Back in the glory days of being a broke single idiot with no prospects, and a friend group in the same situation, I was in two two-year long back-to-back weekly Exalted games. Each was probably at least eighty sessions after considering a few missed weeks here and there. And then there was a year-long Exalted game after those. And a bunch of one-shots and concurrent games of a month or two length before, after, and throughout including more Exalted and a wide variety of other games. I rarely hear about Exalted lasting so long. How did the setting change over that time? Did you roll back the changes when the one campaign ended and the other began?
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Nov 16, 2023 13:59
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drunkencarp posted:I rarely hear about Exalted lasting so long. How did the setting change over that time? Did you roll back the changes when the one campaign ended and the other began? The first one was me getting into Exalted at the very end of the first edition, so the setting was mostly pretty set by then, then the second game was me running second edition with some "insider knowledge" near the end because I was chatting with Michael Goodwin so I ran a couple of Infernal antagonists before the book even came out. Honestly the setting was pretty static between end of 1e up until the Infernal stuff started coming out for 2e, a period of about five years, though there were matters of presentation and perspective as 2e collated and regurgitated 1e, so for the most part it was up to my friend and then myself to determine our own personal big changes to the setting. My friend's game remained pretty low-key so the setting remained recognizably what you'd read right out of the books. My game was more bombastic, with one of the first major story arcs being a war between Lookshy and Mask of Winters riding Juggernaut, and by the final dozen or so sessions there was a time jump and a huge ramp-up in power and a big fight between the PCs and various Deathlords. There was a brief hiatus and then my friend who ran that first long game ran another, year-long game where I got to play an Infernal but the whole metaplot thing didn't figure into stuff. We didn't do a whole lot with Malfeas, I was just a weirdo from hell hanging out with my friends. So again the setting remained largely as you'd find it in the books, apart from my own character's presence.
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Nov 16, 2023 14:53
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drunkencarp posted:I rarely hear about Exalted lasting so long. I was in a 4-year Exalted 3rd game that ended about a year ago. We ended up taking a break for COVID which was extra annoying because it was literally going to be the final session and capstone fight for "season 2" of the game, then we had to stop meeting for just over a year. I think we ended up being pretty faithful to the setting outside of a basic starting change - we set the game in the North and nobody wanted to deal with the Bull of the North so he just didn't exist. We did end up liberating the North from the Blessed Isle but that had more to do with me disguising myself as the highmost monk stationed in the North and literally making GBS threads on Mnemon's desk in a gambit to get her to come help deal with a Deathlord who was our antagonist for Essence 5 and 6. The same guy has been talking about running another Exalted game when he finishes his Master's degree and we'll probably keep the broad strokes of the previous campaign as canon, though Creation is a big enough place that even if it all was true we probably wouldn't even know about it.
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Nov 16, 2023 19:01
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Whybird posted:I'm still pretty proud of the near-total reskinning of 4E I did for it, building pretty much every enemy the players faced was a ton of work but it paid off.
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Nov 16, 2023 19:09
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Admiralty Flag posted:I ran Dark Sun in 4E. I found the DS Monster Manual lacking for my needs a lot of the time, given that I was running a 1-10 campaign and a lot of the material was for 11-30, and had a blast building encounters/monsters from scratch using the business card math and searching through the online compendium to find effects that were appropriate for the opposition. It was a lot of work in the end but I too thought it was well worth it. So many memorable encounters! drat I did pretty much the same thing, ran 4e Dark Sun for a few years and frankensteined all the encounters together from spare parts. Lots of overworld desert survival that 4e (or D&D in general for that matter) is utterly inadequate for gamifying or supporting that I had to constantly improv but I found the Skill Challenges framework to actually be surprisingly good for that once I stapled on some BitD style clocks, in a very bare bones handwavey way.
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Nov 16, 2023 20:49
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I've been in a few long campaigns at this point, but the longest in terms of raw time commitment is probably a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine game. I'm not 100% certain on the number of sessions, it's somewhere around 36-39, averaging 4 hours each. We came to the campaign with precious little understanding of how the game works, and I would say that our adherence to the rules has actually dramatically increased over time. And, indeed, I'd credit them in large part with sustaining the thing. When you explicitly gamify the narrative structure of your campaign's story arcs it really helps keep them going. I know Chuubo's has a bit of a reputation for being obtuse but I really do think more people should check out its mechanics, there's some seriously impressive stuff there.
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Nov 16, 2023 21:11
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willing to settle posted:I know Chuubo's has a bit of a reputation for being obtuse but I really do think more people should check out its mechanics, there's some seriously impressive stuff there. That’s impressive. Were you doing GMD? I think the campaign style of Chuubo’s confuses people. Glitch describes the mechanics much better but has characters even harder to connect with.
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Nov 16, 2023 21:24
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