D&D General How often do you complete a campaign as a player?

[TwoSix]

Maybe I've lost track of the definitions of things but I'd have thought the two bolded pieces above would be at least vaguely synonymous: to me trad (being short for traditional) implies long-haul setting-exploration play a la 1e or BX.

No game jargon is really "well-defined", but trad play is generally focused on presentation of a story path. The style of play popularized in the "Hickman revolution", the general standard of play in the '90s and early '00s, and still quite popular with publications like the Paizo Adventure Paths.

Can't help you there.

My bad, I thought we were just airing out our personal idiosyncracies in play styles.

 

[Lanefan]

No game jargon is really "well-defined", but trad play is generally focused on presentation of a story path. The style of play popularized in the "Hickman revolution", the general standard of play in the '90s and early '00s, and still quite popular with publications like the Paizo Adventure Paths.

Huh. I see Pathfinder-style AP play as much more modern, as Hickman-style play (what I saw of it, in the 80s) involved a lot of setting exploration. You couldn't play the Dragonlance modules, for example, without also in the process exploring a fair bit of Krynn (through both the adventures and the novels, which were intended to mesh together).

 

[TwoSix]

Huh. I see Pathfinder-style AP play as much more modern, as Hickman-style play (what I saw of it, in the 80s) involved a lot of setting exploration. You couldn't play the Dragonlance modules, for example, without also in the process exploring a fair bit of Krynn (through both the adventures and the novels, which were intended to mesh together).

You can't play Rise of the Runelords without exploring a large section of Varisia, either.

I tend to think of classic/OSR style play as being oriented towards what I think of as "world exploration" play, generally a sandbox/hexcrawl with orientation towards long-term play and individual PCs being relatively disposable. Those are the campaigns, I feel, that are most oriented on being "open-ended" with no obvious endpoint.

One of my current games is an open-ended up hexcrawl (using The Dark of Hot Springs Island, by Swordfish Games) using a heavily hacked lightweight 5e. But even that is coming to an end pretty soon because it's getting close to 2 years, which to me feels like forever to be in one campaign.

 

[Blue]

I was going to put Almost Always, but by a technicality I dropped it down to Most of the Time. I'm just counting the last 5ish years.

In my "extended D&D group", we finish up every campaign we get into. Which since some of the DMs run hardcovers (or sometimes run hardcovers) and they are less than a year each, has been a lot of them. There have been up to three campaigns going at once. We have started Tyranny of Dragons, did three sessions and switched to something we liked better as of the following session. I don't know if that counts, we didn't really get into the campaign.

I'm in a several-year long 1920s Pulp Call of Cthulhu game playing Masks of Nyarlathotep. However two of our players had a baby so we are on an extended hiatus. That game isn't officially over, but was what I was counting as the not-complete in the "more than 5 in 6" to get Almost Always. BTW, the last campaigns with that group before this did finish.

The technicality is that we started up a filler game of Scum and Villainy while waiting for the two of them to return, and the bespoke, heavily structured rules did not jive with how the GM was running the game. There were only three of us, and it fizzled out. I don't think this was a failure of either S&V or of the GM, but just a bad fit. Trying to run extended adventures in Forged in the Dark half a dozen sessions long with no end in sight and no way to abort or get back to our ship, without downtime to recover Stress or gather information or aything, just isn't a good fit for that tight system.

Hmm, we also have another on-hiatus Fate game in an Expanse/pre-Mass Effect sort of homebrew universe, where two of the four players had a baby. But that was going well and I expect that to pick back up.

 

[MNblockhead]

Huh. When I here of "traditional" play, I think of playing through various modules, swapping through a stable of PC, trying to keep things somewhat level appropriate, but not caring about the wider world building. In the early days, we just played what modules we had or made up our own adventures. I didn't really get into settings or world building until years into playing D&D.

 

[James Gasik]

Some DM's were world builders early on, creating complex game worlds full of lore and things to explore, but it's true, most of us were just running adventures and seeing what would stick. PC's had a high rate of attrition, and at least in 2e, it took forever for players to level up if you were keeping meticulous track of xp- I know of several DM's (including myself) who basically had milestone leveling before there was a term for it, advancing characters when it felt appropriate. It wasn't ideal, since it short shrifts characters who advanced more quickly, and advancement was now at the whims of the DM, but no one was really happy with xp from monster kills either.

The DMG would talk about story awards, but not actually give you much in the way of guidelines, and class xp awards were 1) optional, and 2) required close record keeping and could have lopsided results when Thieves were getting xp for treasure, Fighters were getting bonus xp for killing stuff, and Wizards were getting bonus xp casting their very limited spells, lol.

 

[Hussar]

I haven't voted in the poll yet, because if I did my vote would be "neearly never" but for reasons completely opposite to the point you're trying to make.

It's possible some of those "never" or "nearly never" votes are coming from the same place as mine would: we don't and largely can't "complete" campaigns because our campaigns have, by intention and design, no fixed completion point. There's no 'finish line' at which we intend ahead of time to say "OK, that's done. Let's start over with a new setting, new characters, and maybe a new DM".

Instead what might kill these campaigns are unpredictable things like DM burnout, system overload (e.g. play has got to a higher level than the system or edition can handle), real-life concerns leaving the game without players or a DM, and so forth.

My response would be the reason rarely actually matters. If campaigns are fizzling in the middle, then use shorter campaigns.

As far as voting goes, this will be the third time I’ve stated this: do you feel that the campaign has had a satisfactory closing? Then it did. I refuse to dive down into “what does end mean”. It means whatever you feel comfortable with it meaning.

 

[MNblockhead]

Some DM's were world builders early on, creating complex game worlds full of lore and things to explore, but it's true, most of us were just running adventures and seeing what would stick. PC's had a high rate of attrition, and at least in 2e, it took forever for players to level up if you were keeping meticulous track of xp- I know of several DM's (including myself) who basically had milestone leveling before there was a term for it, advancing characters when it felt appropriate. It wasn't ideal, since it short shrifts characters who advanced more quickly, and advancement was now at the whims of the DM, but no one was really happy with xp from monster kills either.

The DMG would talk about story awards, but not actually give you much in the way of guidelines, and class xp awards were 1) optional, and 2) required close record keeping and could have lopsided results when Thieves were getting xp for treasure, Fighters were getting bonus xp for killing stuff, and Wizards were getting bonus xp casting their very limited spells, lol.

In the 80s, "milestone leveling" for us was often "roll up an X-level character for this adventure I just bought at B Dalton."

 

[Mistwell]

We're close to completing Tomb of Annihilation after three years of playing every Wednesday. Can't wait. Possible TPK to end it. We shall see.

 

[Hussar]

We're close to completing Tomb of Annihilation after three years of playing every Wednesday. Can't wait. Possible TPK to end it. We shall see.

I gotta admit, it is such a fantastic feeling when all that work comes together.