Thursday, May 4, 2023

How Common Were Long Campaigns?

A topic that I think is worthy of further discussion is the extent to which the contemporary "old school" RPG scene is characterized by varying degrees of hyper-correction to the real and imagined excesses of the subsequent (post-1990 or thereabouts) hobby. For the moment, I want to focus on one area where this hyper-correction might exist: long campaigns. I say "might," because I honestly don't know the extent to which lengthy, multi-year campaigns were all that commonplace in the past, even among the founders of the hobby. Certainly, if you read things like the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, such campaigns were clearly the ideal, at least in some quarters, but what about the reality? Just how common were long campaigns of the sort that I've been extolling for the last few years on this blog?

By most accounts, the earliest version of what would come to be called the Blackmoor campaign appeared sometime in late 1970 or early 1971. Over the course of the next four to five years, Dave Arneson continued to referee adventures set in Blackmoor, with a rotating roster of players (and characters), though there seems to have been a significant amount of continuity during that time period. Gary Gygax's Greyhawk campaign began sometime in 1972 and continued to be played, off and on, throughout the remainder of the decade, again with a rotating roster of players. Then there's Greg Stafford's Dragon Pass campaign and Steve Perrin's one in Prax, not to mention whatever Marc Miller and the GDW crew were doing in the Spinward Marches.

How many of the foregoing were "long" campaigns in the way we've been talking about them lately? Much depends, I suppose, on how you define both terms. For myself, a "campaign" is a continuous series of adventures/sessions in a fictional setting with a regular, if not necessarily static, set of players. I'm sure people could quibble with almost every aspect of my definition, especially since many of the foundational campaigns of the hobby might not qualify under its terms. Likewise, my definition, for all its specificity, is silent on questions as basic as whether a campaign with multiple referees – like the Greyhawk campaign that was eventually co-refereed by Rob Kuntz – is one campaign or two. Then, there's the Ship of Theseus question of how many of the elements of a campaign's beginning must persist over time for it to qualify as the "same" campaign, to say nothing of what constitutes "long." Is length determined by the calendar, the number of sessions, or the time spent playing?

I think these are all important questions, even if we can't easily agree on the answers. Simply asking them is, in my opinion, a good way to fumble toward a better understanding of this hobby, its parameters, and its history. For example, M.A.R. Barker's Thursday night Tékumel campaign would seem to be a paradigmatic example of a long campaign, lasting as it did, with many of the same players, from the late '70s into the 21st century. Though there are no doubt other examples of similarly long-running campaigns, the "Thursday Night Group" is quite likely the highest profile one of which I know. Its longevity and degree of continuity surpasses that of anything Arneson, Gygax, Stafford, or any of the other founders have the hobby ever achieved. That's no small accomplishment, but is it in any way representative of what a long campaign is or should be?

There's also the question of what RPG players in the wider world beyond were doing. How many of them were involved in long campaigns? Depending on how you want to look at it, I was part of either the second or third wave of roleplayers, entering the hobby at the very end of 1979 and beginning serious play of RPGs in early 1980. My friends and I were young – I would have been 10 years old at the time – and, while we knew older, more experienced gamers and were influenced by them, we mostly forged our own paths. For the most part, that path did not include long campaigns. Instead, we flitted from game to game, playing D&D intensely for a month or two, then doing the same with Gamma World or Traveller or Call of Cthulhu, before returning to D&D or whatever other game caught or fancy at the time.

I doubt we were alone in this sort of behavior and I suspect that, as the RPG industry grew, producing ever more games, our behavior was much more widespread than sticking with one game devotedly for years on end. That's not to say we never played a single game for long stretches of time and to the exclusion of others – we did – but these were exceptions rather than the rule, at least until I attended college. Indeed, it was only with adulthood that I succeeded in refereeing a multi-year campaign with the same players and their characters. All the long campaigns I can recall have occurred after I was in my 20s and I sometimes wonder if the level of attentiveness necessary to maintain campaigns of this sort is only possible after a certain age.

So, how common were long campaigns in the past? I wish I knew, if only because I think it's important to understand the history of the hobby as it was rather than as we wish it were. 

27 comments:

  1. For us it was all about charachters.

    You would play the same charachter for years, jumping game to game, DM to DM.

    No one thought it was strange. And I think Dragon even had articles on how to handle folks bringing there charachter from other DMs to your table.

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    1. This is one of the coolest things about the Muncieverse of "Knights of the Dinner Table". The OTT registration and restriction of Hackmaster characters, combined with the seriousness of the players, is both very funny AND very appealing.

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    2. The problem we ran into doing it like that was that there were DMs who would be far to generous with magic equipment, and sometimes characters would would be far more powerful than the rest of the party.

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    3. When I played at MIT, people regularly brought characters over from other campaigns. The GMs always got to review the character sheets and deny any magic items they didn't want in, and we also got to say what level characters were acceptable. One time a player claimed his character had some kind of power or magic item that didn't allow that review but I told him that no, I got to review the characters that entered my game. Mostly I didn't see too many imported characters except that every once in a while Glen Blacow (co-editor of The Wild Hunt and author of one of the earliest player type articles) would play in my game, bringing in one of his PCs.

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  2. I can't speak to this question scientifically, but I can offer some anecdotes. My AD&D campaigns began in 1980, 1981, & 1986. The one that began in 1980 ended in 1986. The other two are still going (though one only sporadically). All are set in the same campaign world.
    I played in two long-running AD&D games which ran for years, and about half a dozen ones that lost steam or otherwise died in fairly short order.

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  3. GM burnout was the biggest issue. when we had a good module (ToEE, for example) the gm might last a year, but otherwise, after a half dozen sessions, GM quits, someone else starts something, likely another game, as a palate cleanser.

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  4. I always got the feeling that Ed Greenwood's original campaigns in the Realms were quite lengthy, though maybe not as lengthy as those of the founding fathers

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  5. I expect there was a demographic shift about the time you and I got into the hobby, circa 1978. Gygax and Arneson and their game groups were adults, with jobs and families. Barring some major event, their lives were pretty regular, and so running a game session for six hours every Saturday night or whatever for years and years was their "default" setting.

    But a bunch of 13-year-olds in 1978 have very different lives. My own game career is a good example: I ran a D&D game for a year or two, then switched to Traveller when I got my hands on a copy. A couple of years later I bought Call of Cthulhu and switched to that. A couple of years after that, I graduated from high school and went off to college and started a new group there playing Champions, then switched to Star Trek.

    Basically, we got used to short-term campaigns because our lives had milestones and because we were living through the burst of creativity which established the major game options.

    Online gaming may be one factor in the revival of interest in long-term campaigns. When my own kids went off to college, they could take their gaming groups with them via Discord and Roll20. The OSR focus on rediscovering that kind of game could simply be because it's possible now.

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    1. I think you're probably correct on all counts.

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    2. "But a bunch of 13-year-olds in 1978" Funnily enough, I've more commonly seen it claimed that adults' lives are too busy to maintain long campaigns, whereas most kids have stable lives throughout secondary/high school and so can easily maintain years-long campaigns! I think in both cases it's just a question of priorities. Going to University, getting married, having kids, moving house, can all disrupt games, but those milestones are typically years apart. If kids aren't maintaining long games, either it's a lack of commitment (ADD seems common these days!) or the games aren't fun.

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  6. From ages 11 to 17 (1981-1987) I participated in at least four long campaigns that I can remember, two as a referee and two as a player. Our group of four guys started around 5th grade and played mostly D&D through the 11th grade. During the school year, we usually met three times per week! Every six months or so we paused D&D for a month or so of other games like: Traveler, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, and some board games, but always returned to our D&D campaigns. Each campaign always had the same DM and we usually had two going at once. I recall my ranger reaching 11th level and a monk getting far enough along to fight other monks for advancement. Somewhere in there, I lost a magic user and a druid early. Fun times! Happy to revisit if people in Northern Virginia want to rally for some old school play.

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  7. I started in 1983 at age 11, and never managed to be involved in a long-running game until 1991, and that was as a player. That lasted until 1997. I finally ran what I consider a long campaign (of 3rd edition D&D) that lasted from 2004 until 2016. The group itself is still going, but after the 3e D&D game ended in 2016, it's been a medley of games - Traveller, Call of Chulhu, 1e D&D, and now we are playing 1e Oriental Adventures. Point being, I think long campaigns were probably the exception, not the rule.

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  8. I can't confirm any details of long term campaigns back in the 70s and 80s. I know Glen Blacow's Edwyr and Mark Swanson's Goree campaigns ran for several years having started in the mid 70s and still running in 1981 (though not as often). I know for sure my college friend who designed Cold Iron continued his campaign post-college but I think sessions became only occasional reunion events post-college. One or two other Cold Iron campaigns may have also had occasional reunion sessions after the dispersal from college of the players. I'm not sure how long the other MIT gamers with established campaigns ran. I don't know when they started, but by the mid-80s they were definitely drifting away from D&D to other games.

    The longest campaign I have personally been involved in was Makofan's Verbosh play by post campaign on the odd74 forum which made it almost 10 years.

    My own RuneQuest 1st edition campaign is about to hit the 5 year mark next month with bi-weekly Roll20 sessions. The only other thing I've run that touches that is a Traveller campaign that I'm not sure when it actually started and ended, but it was mostly a college break campaign (with two separate short campaigns in the same setting at college).

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  9. I started playing RPGs about 1981, and I don't think I played in anything that could have been called a "campaign" until 1985, when I ran a year-long Twilight:2000 game. The way I remember it, we'd start lots of games and call them campaigns, but nothing went more than half a dozen sessions, about the length of one dungeon. This was high school, and then college. I remember 1 college AD&D game that had the same DM and same characters (mostly) for the better part of 3 years. My wife played in 2 high school games that lasted a year each. Those might have been weekly games, so I'd guesstimate 20-50 sessions in a "year".

    In short, there were a lot more short games than long ones in our youth.

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  10. For what it's worth, I started with the old White Box DnD phamplets in the mid 70's, and I am still running today. We also played a lot of other games, like Call of Cuthulu as well. Most of our campaigns ran at least a year, and often much longer. The longest campaign I ever ran lasted just under four years, the longest I played in for nearly five. We don't play ads often anymore, every other week, but I try to cap my current campaigns at around two years, 50-60 sessions. We always have more or less the same crew, but some attend less often than the core group.

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  11. As a teenager in the 1980s, it seemed natural to run a continuous AD&D 1e campaign from 1987 to when I left high school in 1991. Playing daily, that was enough time for level 3 characters to become literal gods. One of my players discusses it here - https://immortalshandbook.com/shrine.htm
    At the time I had no idea this was apparently an uncommon mode of play!

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  12. A major issue for long campaigns is rules viability. Eg in D&D if you have a single party XP tally, everyone levels in lockstep, PCs come in at that level, then the party is inevitably going to rise through the levels and at some point the PCs are too powerful for the setting, and/or maxxed out. I did run a 5.5 year 4e D&D campaign from level 1 to 29, but IMO a viable truly long term campaign needs individual XP, and if not level 1 start, at least new PCs coming in well below the highest level current PCs. My current 5e D&D campaigns have new PCs start at half the highest PC level, and after years of play they're going very strong, with many more (well, at least several more) years of viable play I think. With individual XP, I find it's natural for the occasional maxxed-out PC to retire from play. As opposed to 'modern' (3e/4e/5e) WoTC & Paizo assumption that you blow through an entire scripted 'campaign experience' of 1-15 or 1-20 levels in a single college year.

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  13. Our Champions campaign was on for stretches at a time, then a new game would come up and we'd do that for a while before returning eventually to the campaign. It even became a shared universe centered around the PCs and the standard Champions Universe villains and orgs at the time.

    However, I would like to say I remember someone with a 'long campaign' just because he ran AD&D set in the same universe with the same overarching plot. This was Bill Homeyer's Kingdom of the Wheel campaign. Multiple adventuring parties venturing into multiple interlinked mega-dungeons that were once a part of a functioning kingdom-wide defense mechanism, trying to clear out the monsters and map out the key rooms of the dungeons to ready the defense structure in time for the return of the Queen of Chaos. You got paid if you discovered new rooms and areas AND were able to make it back alive to update the nearby towns' map guild with the data and locations. New parties could buy these updated maps and venture out down safe(ish) routes to map them anew...

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  14. I played a mix, but it depends on what you call a ‘long’ campaign. Someone would run a D&D campaign and it might go 6 weeks or 60. For about 12-15 years, 1980 or so onward, I was probably in 2-3 games each week, and at least one of those would be a long-ish campaign. Sometimes we’d swap between long campaigns for a break. So, something that lasted 6-12 sessions was either a very specifically targetted mini-game (e.g. trying out Twilight 2000, or doing a few Call of Cthulhu scenarios) - or it was a failed campaign attempt, something that just didn’t gel. In my circles they were fairly common. Just mixed in with shorter efforts, trials of other games etc.

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  15. Yhroughout the 90s I ran two to three year campaigns of D&D which, themselves, were interconnected. This is playing every week for 8-24 hours (usually closer to 8) along with side campaigns and other games on other nights.

    Nowadays I have a D&D game every 2 weeks for 5-7 hours, though I play in 4 other campaigns (D&D, Traveller, Alien, and Pathfinder) at the moment.

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  16. I started with BECMI (well, BECM anyway), so if you wanted to get all 36 levels you had to do a long campaign. But I look at it in terms of characters. We played the same characters for a few years, which I would call a long campaign. I think today's market is not even geared so much toward short campaigns as towards one-shots. Which I find to be an unfortunate trend. Part of the fun of any campaign - whether it lasted 2 years or 2 months - was character advancement; watching your creation grow and take shape.

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  17. I've been a RuneQuest GM since November 1978 and I would say more short campaigns than long in the early days, but it depends on how you define a campaign. Does a TPK end a campaign? My RQ campaign world has never been reset, despite a number of TPKs; if you roll up a character today, you might have to face the consequences of the actions of players who rolled their dice before Reagan was president. Character deeds matter. Does that make my RQ setup a campaign or a campaign world?

    My other campaigns (Stormbringer, Pendragon, Bushido, Twilight 2000) petered out when players moved away (college town) or lost interest. The only other game that still has sporadic life is Call of Cthulhu, but my RQ game is going strong with six or more players, some of whom have been playing since the mid-80s.
    Thanks, guys.

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  18. My experience (near time and place) was the same as yours. We were kids. If someone got a new game or module we'd all switch to that for as long as it lasted, and there were also times when we didn't game for a while. The most sustained campaigns we had were in school --- our middle school had organized sports intramurals of all kinds, so we asked if we could have D&D intramurals and got approved. Those campaigns probably lasted four months each for AD&D and Traveller.

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    1. My players used to hate my purchase driven gamer ADD...

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  19. I started playing AD&D second edition in the 90s, me and my friends played what ended up being an 8-9 year long campaign. We played intermitently, trying out different systems and settings that lasted anywhere from one session to one or two years.

    At least for us, the long campaigns were the goal, but most fizzled out for any numbre of reasons.

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  20. My longest campaign involved my original Chivalry & Sorcery group, using rules so homebrewed that calling it "C&S" became purely decorative.

    It ran from 1980 to 1990. A decade of fat guys arguing about guisarme-voulges and thaumaturgy. :)

    Our characters were members of a frontier knightly order charged with solving problems, securing Ye Olde Realme, investigating weird stuff in nearby ancient ruins, etc. Over time other knights came aboard as existing ones died, retired, etc.

    Our mega-campaign reached the point where some PCs had become nigh-invulnerable to conventional physical damage. Since our rules were Calvinball at that point, we just redid the combat system.

    Our most memorable ongoing foes were a small army of Ssserpent-folk brought along by some evil sorcerers for a conquest attempt.

    When they were out-wizarded, the mages pissed off back to their distant homeland & left their scaly soldiers to die.

    Except... they didn't. So we had this colony of several thousand alien reptoids who couldn't assimilate* but were too powerful to just push into the sea.

    *They couldn't speak ANY of the local languages, physically, so all communication was magical, artistic or improvised sign language. Several of our players crash-coursed themselves on anthro & linguistics textbooks to come up with ideas for diplomatic missions to Lizard Beach, as we called it.

    And yes, it was a blast.

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  21. I've always played (or, more accurately, run) long campaigns, starting back in the 80s with one created by stringing together the modules U1-3, UK2-4, UK6, UK1, I3-5, UK7 and I8. Occasionally the campaigns fizzled out after a fairly short period, but generally they ran long, and the intention was always for them to be ongoing.

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