"We Need Long Campaigns"

My aversion to conflict frequently blunts the sharpness of my posts. Case in point being my recent one about lengthy campaigns. My desire not to offend anyone who, through circumstance or preference, doesn't play the same RPG with the same group of people for years on end led to a much weaker post than I had intended. Fortunately, noisms over at Monsters and Manuals said it better than I did:

We need long campaigns. We need to sit down with the same group of people on a regular basis over the course of years, telling the kind of stories which require concentration and thought and, above all, loyalty; stories which gain their own momentum through peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows, ups and downs and ins and outs; stories in which the events which happen matter because they have a context and a background and an unknown future waiting to be discovered. We don't need the inconsequential frippery of the one-shot; we need time.

This is spot-on. It's exactly what I was trying, in my detached, restrained, and roundabout way, to say and yet failed to do. I'm pleased that noisms was nevertheless able to intuit what I should have said more boldly and I am grateful that his own formulation is so unambiguous. 

I remember reading, back in the early days of this century, when the D20 craze was still in its infancy, a post or an article (possibly by Ryan Dancey, though I could be misremembering) that claimed the average length of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign was 18 months and that 3e was therefore designed to take characters from 1st to 20th level in that period of time (assuming weekly play for a given number of hours per week, etc., etc. – the precise details elude my memory). Even at the time, when I was still quite deep in my affection for the new edition, I thought that figure was absurd. 18 months? A year and a half is no time at all – scarcely enough time to develop a meaningful campaign.

In recent years, I've developed an allergy to one-shots. I'll participate in them if it's the only way I can play with certain friends or get to try out a RPG I might otherwise not, but I nevertheless consider it a poor substitute for the pleasures of an open-ended, even languorous multi-year campaign. Indeed, I'd argue this is the way D&D at least was intended to be played, as Gary Gygax states in the foreword to OD&D: "it is the campaign for which these rules are designed." 

Since September of this year, I've been posting summaries – brief and recondite – of my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. I do this partially for my own benefit, since having a written record, however succinct, is helpful to me in keeping many details straight. I also do it to show the "peaks and troughs" of our sessions week after week. Not every session is, in itself, significant, let alone exciting. Many are filled with what to outsiders must seem like minutiae: planning, investigating, interacting with NPCs, and so on. Over time, though, these activities pile up and contribute to the depth and texture of the campaign and the characters in it. 

While there are several throughlines in the campaign, most notably a sinister cult of one of the Pariah Gods and the brewing war with the nation of Yán Kór, little of what has occurred over the past five and a half years has been planned. The "story" of the campaign, such as it is, can only be seen after the fact, as we look back on the slow accumulation of events, NPCs, and details and see in them the seeds of things that would eventually flower into importance and in turn become seeds for yet more, much of it not yet in bloom. It's an amazing process to be a part of and I'm not boasting when I say that we're all participating in some of the greatest entertainment of our lives.

This is great stuff and none of it is possible in "campaigns" of only a few weeks or months, let alone in one-shots. Years are what's needed to enjoy this, so it demands commitment and consistency and a fair degree of discipline. You have to be willing to meet regularly, soldier through "boring" sessions, and not fall prey to gamer ADD. That last bit is especially hard nowadays, since we live in an age of untold riches when it comes to RPGs. I've got a goodly number of games I'd love to play, but I haven't the time right now and might never have it, because I'm involved in a number of long-running campaigns and wouldn't dream of abandoning them in pursuit of the novel. 

A multi-year campaign is, I think, the ideal form of most roleplaying games (there are exceptions, about which I might talk later) – and by "ideal," I don't mean some unattainably lofty goal but rather the most desirable and satisfying version of this type of entertainment. Long campaigns are clearly not unattainable, because many gamers have played in them, including many of the gamers who founded our hobby. M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel campaign started in 1975 and continued, with occasional breaks, until a little before his death in 2012. That's nearly forty years! I don't expect any of my own campaigns to run that long, nor do I think such longevity should be treated as standard, but neither should 18 months. 

No more excuses: devote yourself more fully to a long roleplaying campaign.