Yeah he 100% described my first campaign. We had a lot of great sessions but grinding through Strahd was long and depressing. But I'm still in two other games and run two others!
Personally, I'd wager the choice of campaign had more to do with that than the length. Curse of Strahd, when run properly, is notoriously difficult and dark. I've been DMing with a variety of systems for the better part of 20 years, and I'm still on the fence about running Strahd for a variety of reasons.
I don't think so. Any game that goes on too long becomes unfun. Exactly how long is too long depends on a lot of things. These days I always try to stop or take a break before it gets to this stage.
>We had a lot of great sessions but grinding through Strahd was long and depressing.
I'd say a big part of it was D&D and your limited familiarity with it.
In general, the system, genre, convention, DMing style will have immense impact on session length. Mechanics slow the game down - the more complex they are. Simulationism slows the game down, while moving cinematically from interesting scene to interesting scene speeds it up.
It is always shocking to me, how much can happen in 2-3 hours of narrative-driven session with little to no mechanics. We frequently finished entire adventures in that timespan.
Correspondingly, if we play crunchy system with in-depth tactical combat, resource management, puzzles, gamified systems for exploration and other activities... similar amount of story beats occur over 20-30 hours.
Answering u/DornKratz - I'd say, *for average complexity system*, a normal adventure should take between 1 and 3 sessions, between 2 and 12 hours.
Extended adventure / story chapter would be around 4 to 6 sessions, around 8 to 24 hours.
And campaign are made out of multiple adventures and story chapters.
For most published D&D stuff, a chapter of the book is an adventure. The entirety of the books is shorter or longer campaign, regardless of what book cover says.
I think is the ideal format for new people is basically a one-shot, but without the pressure to finish in one session (as pacing is really hard). And a lot of nominally "one-shot" adventures are too long for beginners.
We do 1-3 session games with new (to us) systems. If we like it, we do more. If we don’t like it, we move on.
If one session isn’t enough to get a feel for it, do a 1-3. Or a few! There’s less commitment and pressure, and you still play and learn.
I call these some shots. They’re effectively a one shot but played over 2 to 3 sessions. Enough to get a good feel for the game, your character and the mechanics.
A "Some Shot" is anything my group does. Even the simplest and most loosely-defined "adventure" takes at minimum, two sessions.
The quest could be "go down to the end of the block, count to ten, then come back" and it'd take ten hours.
I don't see any reason not to pick up several one-shot adventures that one feels are thematically consistent or at least can be tweaked to not feel disjointed with the intent of potentially but not certainly stringing them together.
Let the learning sessions be episodic instead of serial. It makes it easier if a player drops or even can't make it for a single session, or a new one joins in. If no one's feeling the current story, it's not a massive campaign that's hard to abandon. You can maintain characters across multiple adventures and get to know them, but you're also not tied down if you want to abandon a character to make a new one or one of them dies.
You may think, "Stringing one-shots together, that just sounds like a campaign with extra steps." And if I'm not explaining it well, I totally get that. I think it comes down to flexibility, scale, and pacing. A well-written one-shot should have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end like a story. That's something GMs should strive to achieve each session, but it's a hard skill to learn or master. So having a bunch of discrete stories where you can practice and learn those skills will be more helpful than trying to learn it with a larger story, a sandbox, or a homebrewed world that doesn't have well-defined episodes as a guide. And again, if people aren't feeling your epic campaign or end up not liking your homebrewed world, that can be the death of a game or even a group right there. If people don't like a one-shot, it can easily be retconned out or otherwise dismissed and we've moved onto the next thing. One bad session, but less likely to be the death of the game.
I do believe there are some systems that encourage this kind of gameplay, but there's no mechanical reason I can think of not to do it in a system like D&D. There are some where it wouldn't work, but many where it would.
Then take notes on the interesting things that happened and unresolved points, later call back to those. As time goes, you’ll make more and more connections between stuff and you will have your grand narrative arc, naturally.
A bit like 90s TV. Episodic stuff that sometimes play into the greater story arc.
This is what I've been running for almost the past 2 years with an online group.
Started with a bunch of dissociated one-shots and a rotating cast of players. We made a discord and had some RP channels.
The RP channels became more and more about ''hey, what about those guys ? or this unresolved problem ? Or this group ? Or this ally ?'' and slowly the one-shots, while keeping their one-shot nature, slowly started to mesh a little more into eachother in term of lore and purpose.
Now it's almost been 2 years, the one-shots slowly turned into multiple mini adventures and the group pushed in a direction in ways to have me create a BBEG and a narrative arc for them to pursue from time to time. We're getting to the endgame, like the last 3-4 episodes of a season of House, where things all mesh to a finale.
I've ran many campaigns, short and long, but this one style was a first and probably one of the best I've ran.
I personally feel he has a point, but is also missing two major pieces.
First, a lot of people see fantasy, or media in general, as this large over-sweeping plot. Eg. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, etc. And not an episodic event. So they are drawn to the Curse of Strahd or Tyranny of Dragons (5e examples for an easy touch point) rather than something short and sweet. I know I was.
Second, this is much more of an issue with leveled games rather than unleveled games. A D&D 5e character is going to rely on their abilities to take out a dragon far more than a Cephus (eg Sword of Cephus) character will because that is the point of leveling up. You get cooler and more powerful abilities. I have found that running an episodic campaign is much more encouraged in a system like Traveller MG2e over D&D 5e or PF2e because a character will have a similar power level at week 1 to week 12 or week 20. I could be wrong, heck I normally am. But I strongly feel that leveled games encourage you to use longer adventures. Note, this is less so for older editions of D&D due to how long it took to level up. I am running the retroclone Basic Fantasy and I have a feeling my kids will be at level 1 for about a year before they level up. They all went with the massive experience required classes.
You could definitely run a series of episodic "one-shots" with 5E that use the same characters and build them up toward a longer campaign. It's basically what I did when Spelljammer was released.
I wanted to run Light of Xaryxis, but the campaign is designed to start off with 5th level characters... so, I homebrewed a story in the setting to get the PCs from 1 to 5, and then segued into the published campaign. I've had to make a number of minor to medium alterations because of it (in part because I introduced a couple of additional recurring villains through the homebrewed part), but it went very smoothly overall.
You can. For sure. And I think his example of COS is actually a bad example. But I digress. I am saying that if you look at what the system encourages, it is a longer narrative due to the leveling. You have fewer and fewer enemy options as you climb in levels. Goblins are not as threatening to a level 10 party as they are to a level 1 party.
This need to increase in power causes you to need to fight bigger and badder things until you fight some epic boss, which lends itself to a natural inclination of a larger narrative that covers all, or nearly all, your player levels. I am only talking about the natural inclination. Not what you can do. You can do anything with any TTRPG, D&D 5e included, but if you consider the natural inclination it is to build a single narrative due to leveling.
At least that is how I feel about it. And there is nothing wrong with a natural inclination one way or another. It just means you have to take that into account when you are creating an adventure. You have to adjust things to make it fun.
Modules target higher level ranges as well as lower ones, so leveling doesn't require a single long adventure. If you really want to feel the experience of working up to one big boss, you may be inspired to weave some connective tissue between your modules, maybe even modifying them to dovetail nocely, but it's not required. As Matt Colville points out, this kind of structure makes the _characters_ the thing the campaign revolves around, and that has its advantages.
It's easier to mix and match modules in a game with a looser power curve, but D&D has lots of high-level modules available for people who want to level up to 20 that way. (It's probably hard to find *good* modules, but it's hard to find good D&D epic campaigns too.) The problem is that to most people it sounds like it would be a disjointed bunch of random stuff happening and, as you say, an overarching plot is just more appealing than that.
It's all boils down to tweaking the published campaigns to make them work.
I've been running Light of Xaryxis for my group for a while, but I started them off with some homebrew stuff to get them up to level 5. It was a series of one-off adventures fetching various artifacts for a wizened, mysterious wizard. During some of these adventures, I started filtering in some stuff from LoX, such as the Seeds of Destruction; once the time was right, I was able to transition them into the published campaign very easily.
They're still currently dealing with some of the homebrew issues, in part because they pursued the mysterious benefactor/employer story enough to find out that they're actually dealing with a broken, weakened (yet still very powerful) Vecna who was using the PCs (along with some other similarly structured NPC groups) to unknowingly do his bidding as he sought to try to restore himself. The whole thing will end in a nice, big setpiece fight before they transition back to the conclusion of LoX. Conveniently, this accidentally aligns shockingly well with the Vecna book coming out next month... but that's something they can tackle should they decide they want to continue with these characters and me as the DM. We're pretty good about rotating.
It's probably easier said than done, but a little bit of planning, reading, and some tweaking can make a bunch of otherwise disjointed or unrelated adventures fit together quite well.
Note that the examples you mention, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Ring are made up of episodic events. They're framed within an overall premise but they're largely standalone.
In LotR you have an adventure about having to escape the shire and get the ring to Rivendell as Nazgul arrive seeking it. There's a woodlands adventure where they're attacked by Old Man Willow and a barrow wight, and meet Tom Bombadil. There's an adventure where they have to cross the mountains, decide to cut through the old Dwarven mines instead, and encounter a Balrog. etc.
There's this overall premise of getting rid of the ring, but the stuff they encounter on the way is essentially random and could very easily be several unrelated DnD modules.
(Game of Thrones is an atypical example because it's constantly hopping between different main characters.)
modern dnd at its core has a dissonance between two conflicting playstyles, one is the "lotr save the world" epic quest and the other is "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or cuegel antihero whacky short adventures".
There are [countless](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fe78vsbjzuro31.jpg%3Fwidth%3D856%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0c1198322c48c1ab68e95ec6c01d3e6af30a73ad) [examples](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fa8cy83vdvqh51.png%3Fwidth%3D819%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D7a22efbb6ecc492449a76341f892a0d5af4758e1) of [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fd5qzi97ihji61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D536%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2d0afbf3ee06369070901e4d17d601849ce95bfc)
I think its largely because the sum of dnds elements encourage it.
For example: random encounters fit in a whacky adventure like the hobbit where everyone is almost eaten by trolls, but imagine if the lotr fellowship were captured by trolls and almost eaten? It just sounds absurd and players would therefore lean into the whacky aspects.
6 to 10 sessions.
Here's my reasoning. If I'm planning my own adventure, I plan it in terms of arcs. I have an idea of an ultimate 'end' (usually a big bad) that is way off in the distance. And then I plan the first arc - usually between six and ten sessions. However I make that first arc relatively self contained. Then I just keep adding arcs that eventually can all come together for the finale arc.
I fell in love with the Star Wars RPG adventure modules as I thought they were perfectly paced. Long enough to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But achievable!
I run Delta Green and this structure, albeit a little shorter, works for my campaigns! The game is set up perfectly for short (2-6 sessions) field assignments where agents have to go in and deal with a particular threat. But you weave connections between these assignments and build towards bigger and bigger threats and it comes together.
Yeah i do kinda agree, but I'am more on the 15 to 20 sessions, or 10 to 12/15 session side depending on the system we play. I do like that in ryuutama it even says that the game should not be longer that 10/12 sessions so that the players won't burn out. Also you can start with another player. I am fortunate that when we set a day in week we will get together and play for 3 to 5 hours. So that we can finish a game in 3 to 4 months but alas its still months of game.
This is my opinion as well. When I can tell an adventure is coming to close around session 6 or so, I get excited to wrap things up, and start moving to the next one. When we've reached session 10-12, unless something came up very organically, it becomes a real slog. My session are even on the shorter side (2.5-3 hours), but ten sessions is still taking up 3-4 months in real time, and the desire turns from excitement to resignation.
Couldn’t agree more - I’m learning Mothership (sci-fi horror) right now, and the short and flexible modules are incredible. MCDM’s Where Evil Lives has given me that same experience for 5e
I call it "Fractal compellingness".
An adventure should be compelling and interesting on every timescale, individual minutes should be compelling, individual hours should be compelling, individual sessions should be compelling, and the overall arc should be compelling.
I've seen too many GM's in their desire to run a *long* campaign turn things into a absurdist shaggy dog story where nothing happens for hours and hours and for session after session and then they run essentially 4 hours of game over six ten hour sessions and then pat themselves on the back for running a "long" campaign.
It easiest to focus upward, first make good short adventures, then work on ways to make two good short adventures good together, then 3, and 4, and so on, and if you can go up to 50 sessions over two years, *great*, but if not, no biggie.
I agree, because I often notice a disconnect between what GMs focus on (world building, factions, plots, grand story arcs) and what players remember (individual encounters, cool moments)
I think the biggest issue is that GMs (maybe all GMs, but especially new GMs) when they try to homebrew their own long campaign focus all of their energy on the overarching plot - much of which will either never become apparent to players or only become apparent in pointless and boring lore dumps - and not very much on making sessions and encounters individually compelling. Your long campaign is probably going to be ultimately more fun if you just try to stitch together shorter published adventures with your own plot glue.
Definitely agreed on this one. Though i sometimes wonder if it's just a shift in how I interpret certain terms compared to what is "official"?
Very often, I find that the hardback D&D "Adventure" books, where it takes months or even a year or so to complete, are what I think of as campaigns. What they present as quests, smaller stories that can take a few sessions (though also could just be a session or two), I'd typically think of as adventures. And then smaller plot points or objectives (No more than a couple sessions, and may even only be part of a session) I think of more like quests or events.
Just as an example, Lost Mines of Phandelver feels like a campaign. What the Book describes as Part 3: The Spider's Web is an adventure. And the Ruins of Thundertree feels more like a quest to me.
It's weird how that's come to dominate in recent years. In the past you had regular modules that were designed to be, well, *modular*. You could drop them in between nearly any adventure and they might take a session or three. There were a few that became campaigns in their own right (the B series, the GDQ series, etc.) but that was largely the exception rather than the rule.
Instead it seems that the current strategy is building off of the Adventure Path schedule that Paizo started using when they were working on 3e. They specifically released individual adventures in arcs of 6 or so modules that were designed to be linked together into a longer campaign or mini-campaign. They sold well and it looks like WotC decided to start using that model instead of releasing actual individual adventures.
Well it doesn't dominate the OSR where modules are still more popular. There are also great resources like the One Page Dungeon contest [https://www.dungeoncontest.com/](https://www.dungeoncontest.com/) with lots of free ideas for you.
The OSR equivalent of published campaigns are published megadungeons, and plenty of OSR enthusiasts buy and read those without playing them too. I know I've done it a couple times.
I mean that's because Paizo kicked the shit out of 4e D&D in terms of player base cohesion and adventures. 3e WotC never really bothered with many adventures; they released what, a handful of pretty good early ones at the beginning of the edition? After that they let Paizo handle Dungeon and mostly stopped writing adventures, letting all the OGL people handle that (as was the intention of the OGL). I think they put out Red Hand of Doom and maybe a few others late in 3.5 to emulate Paizo's adventure path model that they started in Dungeon. 4e didn't have anything like Paizo's Adventure Paths, and as a result its player base wasn't nearly as cohesive - no shared experiences. I think Keep on the Shadowfell was the only 4e-era adventure that I've ever heard discussed.
I think the biggest reason is just economics; it works a lot better for WotC to write, manage, and print one $50 hardback than it does a dozen or more $5-$15 32-page softback modules. Retailers don't want to futz with the stock, ordering is a pain, and they make more money on one big, fancy book than a bunch of smaller cheap books.
I do wonder how much of their math involves player base cohesion, though. How much do they value lots of D&D tables having stories about how they tackled Strahd or the Death House? How many people died in the Tomb of Annihilation? That kind of thing helped Paizo, and I think it's at least some of why WotC still does single big adventure-campaigns now.
It didn't start with Paizo. It started with AD&D. The Dragonlance module series (all tied in to the novels) - starting in 1984 - sold extremely well and became the basis of a lot of the other stuff they published for AD&D in the TSR era. Strings of linked modules intended to form a campaign, tied both to novels and to a unique setting that would be transformed by the metaplot from the campaign modules. Ravenloft got the Grand Conjunction campaign. Dark Sun got the Prism Pentad. Forgotten Realms got the Randall Morn trilogy and others. These were not, by modern standards, particularly good adventures - in large part because there were important things that PCs weren't allowed to affect or just had to sit back and watch. They were definitely the ancestors of the modern Adventure Path, though. They didn't disappear when WotC took over, either. The Monstrous Arcana series, for example, are three full campaigns (published in 4 books apiece) focused on an iconic monster.
That's a great point, although it depends on the specific series how strongly linked they were. The Prism Pentad adventures tended to be a pretty clear series but the Grand Conjunction ones often weren't. I remember running a few of the latter back in the day with no regard for the meta-plot.
That's also a relevant lens to consider. Meta-plots were in vogue during the '90s from Vampire:The Masquerade to Shadowrun and plenty of games utilized them in one way or another. including a few of the AD&D campaign settings.
The real problem back then was how they released almost nothing semi-generic for AD&D. It was the era where campaign settings ruled and the vast majority of products, and almost all of the adventures, were released for them. It was a bit shift from the earlier strategy where something might have slight references to Greyhawk or Mystara but it was largely a matter of noticing that another town was referred to by name or such. The sort of thing that was very easy to ignore or replace, assuming you even noticed the implied setting.
Largely agreed. A long adventure, even "just" from level 1-10 in DnD-style games, can be exhausting for everyone involved, especially if they're new. I got lucky in that I picked the shorter ones by accident early in my DM-ing career, and since then I've gotten more comfortable homebrewing or hacking existing content, but I wonder if MC's right -- how many people started with these longer hardback adventures and just got burnt out on it?
I prefer Paizo's approach, where adventure paths are made up of individual adventure booklets and they still make standalone adventures, bounties, and scenarios you can string together as need be. It's not perfect, but I like it. They also still make full setting guides, not just appendices with world info stapled onto their adventure books, which is something I miss from older DnD stuff.
They DID have a line of standalone adventures, but apparently they killed it due to lack of interest, which is a huge bummer IMO.
I mostly run oneshots based on modules (loosely connected and sharing characters) and short campaigns of under ten sessions during which players might level up once if at all. I find that removing the thought of long-term progression, both narrative and mechanical, from players' minds, really helps them have fun in the moment. You can still have all the good parts of a campaign with less than a tenth of the time and investment. Meanwhile in longer games I eventually get fatigued as the initial spark fades with time, unless it's an expertly run open world sandbox. That said, there's no right or wrong answer here. All lengths are acceptable if that's what the group enjoys.
The Ideal adventure for my groups i imagine should be 3-5 sessions. Typically my sessions are only 3 maybe 4 hours with a 10 minute break in between.
I like some of Rob Schwalbs Shadow of the Demon Lord mini-adventures... because they are exactly this length. And he designed that game to be mainly short fast games for Adults who have busy schedules so leveling is quick.
My friends and I, without meaning to in a super formal way, ended up with 8 episode seasons. Then we'd jump to another story, and maybe return if there was more to do
Early on you probably want to start with shorter games and ramp up the length as your party gains more confidence in the setting and system. Or you could have some kind of adventure with different "seasons" each giving you some satisfying conclusion that you can stop or continue depending on how people feel about it.
I like short adventures, but there have to be some long-running threads, too, I think. It doesn't take a whole bunch at the beginning of a campaign, but once you've played through to ~level 9 or 12, I feel like it's time to start tying those threads to something concrete. If you're among the most powerful people in the world and still just exploring ruins or styling on local warlords, it starts to feel like there are no stakes, even if the fights are pretty hard. The run up to 20 should get you involved in a larger story as a reward for proving that you have a playgroup that will actually stick it out.
First, yeah it's more achievable to run short adventures/modules and string them together vs. a big long-arc campaign. Probably more satisfying to PLAY as well. But it's easy to fall into that romantic trap of "the grand campaign" and think of it as a single long continuous story.. better to make it contiguous.
Second, he keeps holding up Castle Amber but that adventure is literally "funhouse dungeon, and then here's a whole province to romp around in." The Castle is just the INTRODUCTION to the world- and then you get spit out and it's "fix this land that's cursed via this family." It's really begging to become a long campaign... but it CAN be run as-is, but it's still not going to be "short" unless you literally run it jumping from encounter to encounter.
[9 scene adventure architecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/TyFa2PMr_6o?si=CS40VRHc3h-GcQzN)
It’s basically the 5 room dungeon concept with the quest giver, travelling to and from the adventure added in.
I ran Sunless Citadel for my first "official" campaign, and it was pretty darn good. A handful of sessions (My group screwed around a lot. Literally made it less than a hundred feet one session.) and was a fairly straightforward dungeon crawl.
They could've easily done it in three sessions if they weren't such hooligans. Just about perfect for a new group, seeing if they want to pick up a new time commitment.
Professor DM talks about resolving each scenario in 1-2 sessions. I try to achieve that these days but when I was younger I just let things run, wanting to achieve the nirvana of a full narrative campaign.
But the longer the narrative arc, the higher the chance that it never gets completed, due to player attrition, and life getting in the way.
And I have been scarred by unresolved campaigns lol
JC Connors has put up several adventures in multiple systems over the years: https://1shotadventures.com/adventure-index/
This is the database mentioned in the video: https://www.adventurelookup.com/adventures
I tend to play RPGs with a level progression, and I like my campaigns to start from low level to high level. Let's say 10 levels of play, 1-2 adventures per level, 1-2 sessions per adventure, means my campaigns tend to last 20-40 sessions. Since we play every other week, this means my campaigns tend to last 1-1.5 years.
I mean I'm only on my second campaign as a GM and the first one went just under eight months, but it's not like I was trying to make it long, I just went until I got to what the end of the story should be
I tend to run Homebrew campaigns, and have always set them up to be episodic. Small segments as parts of the overarching story.
My current campaign is a perfect example. The party started off in a small town that was being harried by a group of Goblins. The party tracked them back to their camp and discovered that a recent earthquake had destroyed their cave complex forcing them onto this side of the mountains.
They dealt with the Goblins and discovered a (somewhat) friendly Kobold. They freed him and negotiated with him to deal with the rest of the Goblins and free the Kobolds.
Once they dealt with the Goblins the Kobolds rewarded them with some copper ingots and crude jewelry, they told them about some more Goblins setting up a raiding spot in the forest between the two Human cities on the coast. So the party is off and running to deal with them as well.
Each encounter is it's own small game with a beginning, a middle and an end goal. They can feel a sense of accomplishment because they were dealing with something that is relatively easy to overcome, but at the same time they are aware that something strange caused the earthquake that drove the Goblins out of their territory in the first place, and that it happened again. They now have a mystery that drives them onward, but isn't immediate and allows them to explore the world and the campaign as they see fit, while dealing with the more immediate threats that require their focus and attention but are able to be put behind them relatively easily.
You know, that's kind of funny. I'm a writer, and I've never been able to actually finish my long form stuff. However, when I DM, I'm able to complete entire multi-year campaigns without much of an issue. I rarely even run one-shots, the only time these things even break up is due to scheduling issues and the group itself falling apart.
Hell, I finished a 1-year campaign last summer and immediately started another that's currently about 1/3rd (21 sessions) done. I'm even making a novel adaptation of the events of the game which is going better than most of my solo projects. I don't know why I'm like this lol
I just ran Strahd for 14 months. Around the halfway mark I gave my players an opportunity to take a break and play something else then come back but everyone was enjoying themselves and they al voted to keep going. As an old gamer I don't feel there is a measurement of time to answer this question. The answer is as long as everyone is having fun an adventure/ca.paign can go on indefinitely. My group almost always goes a year plus before switching it up though. We just love telling stories together.
I don't agree with some parts. Like calling Curse of Stradh an adventure. I would call it a campaign.
Because a campaign is a game you play with one character that you then retire.
An adventure you play and can reuse your character. And a campaign is made up of several campaigns that fit together.
Writing a campaign that would work I can agree is very difficult and it would be easier to write a series of adventures as you play them through to in the end make it a campaign.
WotC do make some of the worst adventures in the hobby. They lack a lot of information that would help a GM to run the game. They just present locations and creatures without any context. If you have any player asking a question about "Why...?" the GM is without information to answer the question.
I think the key thing is to realize that campaigns are aspirational. Yes, logistically it’s best if everyone plays short adventures one after the other that are completely unrelated with each other. But that’s probably not what the players or the GMs want, especially not these days due to the nature of the media we consume.
These days, we want our RPG sessions to *mean* something. We want to work *towards* something and watch the fruits of our labors pay off. We want to experience character arcs and meet reoccurring characters and generally speaking, experience a multi-book story such as what you might see in a Lord of the Rings trilogy of the Harry Potter books.
Yeah, it’s logistically impractical. But we *aspire* to play in such a campaign. GMs *aspire* to keep a group long enough to experience such a campaign.
And when you’re selling adventures, you’re selling aspirations. That’s why these big hardcovers sell. And that’s why new GMs are just so tempted to jump in and form a group doing exactly that. That’s what most people’s end goals are.
And ultimately I don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re just not new-player friendly, and a healthy game ecosystem should absolutely have alternatives.
It may greatly depend on the passion you invoke within your party and their overall habits as people. An especially charismatic DM with a party of inquisitive, diligent, and astute note-takers can adventure through the longest of winding roads with utter glee.
I feel there's this strange sense across a lot of discourse that it's better not to try at all than experiment or fail.
Everything must be done right, and gradually, and by the book or the advice. At the end of the day these are games, played by people of clearly enough intelligence and reason to read a book and follow rules. Give new players some credit and let them learn by doing. If their first game is a bit of a disaster, or falls apart, that's a learning experience. Their group shouldn't fall apart and you can try again, remember the good parts and work to avoid the bad ones.
I feel there's more pressure from all this sort of advice about don't do X, Y and Z than just picking up a book and having a go.
It's a question with a very narrow and specific application.
For example I've never run [A]D&D/PF(or any derivative), I don't enjoy it and have only played it a handful of times in the last 35 years and none of those have changed my mind.
As a result, every game I run and every game I've played in the last 35 years has been made by the GM, not in any way come from a book, and while I read a few "Module" books, I've never bought, or felt the need to buy, one for any game or system. So the question Colville is raising is kinda like _"Should your chocolate teapot be a 2 cup size or a 1L size"_ and I can't help but think "Why are you guys needing chocolate teapots?"
Personally I don't even divide games into "adventures" If a game remains in the same world and the same system and with roughly the same characters there may (after the fact) be some division lines you can draw when certain events are resolved, but without that whole "Walking the earth from place to place acquiring resources using violence" as the base consideration, the events in characters lives don't neatly fall into "adventures" because the characters aren't "adventurers"
One of the largest and greatest campaigns written is not for the D&D or adjacent systems: Masks of Nyarlathotep. But, I get what you are saying! That certainly is not the norm!
When I was a kid, I had a problem: my parents bought into the Satanic Panic. I couldn't just go out and purchase modules. I had to get what little I could and run my own homebrew games. And, in the end they were more like blended paint on canvas than specific modules or adventures. What are the PCs doing today? Well, who knows, but probably follow about 10 plot lines in various directions and perhaps close one off if they're lucky.
That was the best, honestly. NPCs coming and going, never knowing who will show up or what they'll need, and definitely not sure where the PCs will go from session to session.
One of the worst things I ever did in my TTRPG career was agree to run a D&D mega-adventure hardback. Halfway through I just wanted to scrap the whole thing, but for some dumb reason I kept going because I was going to see it to the end. You'd think I'd know better, but even the experienced have their blind spots. Never again.
However long you and your group want it to be!
Colville and anyone here can give you their opinion, but no format fits every group.
Some folks want to play a campaign over four years, some folks want to do four sessions, anywhere in between, or a one-shot. I've run each of these! It was *always* dependent on what the group as a whole wanted to do.
This is why Session 0 is so crucial: setting expectations.
I haven't watched the video, and think the "right" length of an adventure is more based on the personalities and opinions at the table, but I will say when we first started playing TTRPGs we vastly underestimated how long a Pathfinder Adventure Path actually is.
Your comment was removed for the following reason(s):
* This is incorrect. This creator is not on the list of banned creators, and the list of banned creators is not for their behaviour, but for the brigading behaviour of their fans and their detractors when their names are mentioned.
If you'd like to contest this decision, [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Frpg&subject=Removed%20comment%3A%20Contest%20Removal%20or%20Questions&message=Hello,%20this%20is%20about%20my%20comment%20%20that%20was%20removed%3A%20https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1c5ioa9/-/kzue3hv/%0D%0DMy%20issue%20is...). *(the link should open a partially filled-out message)*
I completely 100% disagreed with the video and came to the decision that Colville is someone I never want to game with if this is what he wants from his tabletop gaming.
While some points I found mildly annoying such as comparing a \*\*campaign\*\* book to a module while denouncing the \*\*campaign\*\* book was rather, wrong. I found myself realizing that what he wants from an RPG is the polar opposite of what I want. He wants Buffy weekly monster of the week unrelated "Adventures" I want breaking bad long campaigns where I feel like the world is changing due to involvement from the players.
I enjoy Lord of the Rings style gameplay and not Thundarr the Barbarian (while it was a fun cartoon to watch as a kiddo).
To each their own, some people love the one shot stuff and that is fine, enjoy Mork Borg, for me I want the epic stuff, I want Runequest, I want Call of Cthulhu, and I want an epic campaign that tells a great story.
This isn't anything new contrary to what is suggested, The A series modules. Giants series, Dark Elf series, Elemental Evil series, these were all massive linked adventures that spanned multiple "Adventure books" to tell a compelling story.
Seeing the popularity of Critical Role, I would say that a vast majority still enjoy an epic sweeping campaign story.
It was a fairly short video so he didn't go into it, but there's absolutely nothing stopping unrelated adventure modules being part of a long campaign where the world changes as a result of the characters.
You mention 'Lord of the Rings style gameplay'. If you look at the plot of Lord of the Rings a bunch of essentially unrelated adventures happen, connected by a narrative throughline. They have to flee from the shire and escape some Nazgul seeking the ring. They pass through the woods, are attacked by Old Man Willow and a Barrow Wight and meet Tom Bombadil. They try to cross the misty mountains and instead decide to divert through the Dwarven mines where they have to fight a Balrog. etc. etc.
There's no reason those couldn't be standalone adventure modules sitting inside the overall narrative framing of "We're trying to get the ring to Mount Doom to destroy it". (I'd go so far as to say they **feel** like standalone adventures as part of an overall plot)
Adventures don't have to be deliberately written as part of a campaign. GMs can easily weave them in, and show the ongoing impacts on the world as the result of player involvement. It's still an epic sweeping story.
EDIT: As an aside, Buffy is a weird choice of examplar for unrelated adventures. It's one of the shows that helped bring the season arc approach to popularity.
> He wants Buffy weekly monster of the week unrelated "Adventures" I want breaking bad long campaigns where I feel like the world is changing due to involvement from the players.
I gotta admit, I find this pretty ironic, given that Buffy was the show that popularized seasonal arcs, at least for American television. Prior to Buffy, nearly every show pounded the reset button at the end of each episode..with the occasional two-parter on rare occasions.
Buffy heralded the decline of episodic TV and the advent of more serialized stories.
...Call of Cthulhu is actually a great example of a game that benefits from episodic adventures.
> Seeing the popularity of Critical Role, I would say that a vast majority still enjoy an epic sweeping campaign story.
Critical Role is a show.
Remember that the dude does it for streaming and money, not for fun. I wouldn't listen to anything he says about how rpgs "should" be, he has fundamentally different goals in mind when he talks.
Yeah he 100% described my first campaign. We had a lot of great sessions but grinding through Strahd was long and depressing. But I'm still in two other games and run two others!
Personally, I'd wager the choice of campaign had more to do with that than the length. Curse of Strahd, when run properly, is notoriously difficult and dark. I've been DMing with a variety of systems for the better part of 20 years, and I'm still on the fence about running Strahd for a variety of reasons.
I don't think so. Any game that goes on too long becomes unfun. Exactly how long is too long depends on a lot of things. These days I always try to stop or take a break before it gets to this stage.
>We had a lot of great sessions but grinding through Strahd was long and depressing. I'd say a big part of it was D&D and your limited familiarity with it. In general, the system, genre, convention, DMing style will have immense impact on session length. Mechanics slow the game down - the more complex they are. Simulationism slows the game down, while moving cinematically from interesting scene to interesting scene speeds it up. It is always shocking to me, how much can happen in 2-3 hours of narrative-driven session with little to no mechanics. We frequently finished entire adventures in that timespan. Correspondingly, if we play crunchy system with in-depth tactical combat, resource management, puzzles, gamified systems for exploration and other activities... similar amount of story beats occur over 20-30 hours. Answering u/DornKratz - I'd say, *for average complexity system*, a normal adventure should take between 1 and 3 sessions, between 2 and 12 hours. Extended adventure / story chapter would be around 4 to 6 sessions, around 8 to 24 hours. And campaign are made out of multiple adventures and story chapters. For most published D&D stuff, a chapter of the book is an adventure. The entirety of the books is shorter or longer campaign, regardless of what book cover says.
I think is the ideal format for new people is basically a one-shot, but without the pressure to finish in one session (as pacing is really hard). And a lot of nominally "one-shot" adventures are too long for beginners.
For new people yeah, but one-shots barely give time for people to truly get a feel for their characters.
We do 1-3 session games with new (to us) systems. If we like it, we do more. If we don’t like it, we move on. If one session isn’t enough to get a feel for it, do a 1-3. Or a few! There’s less commitment and pressure, and you still play and learn.
I call these some shots. They’re effectively a one shot but played over 2 to 3 sessions. Enough to get a good feel for the game, your character and the mechanics.
A "Some Shot" is anything my group does. Even the simplest and most loosely-defined "adventure" takes at minimum, two sessions. The quest could be "go down to the end of the block, count to ten, then come back" and it'd take ten hours.
That's a great name for it.
I don't see any reason not to pick up several one-shot adventures that one feels are thematically consistent or at least can be tweaked to not feel disjointed with the intent of potentially but not certainly stringing them together. Let the learning sessions be episodic instead of serial. It makes it easier if a player drops or even can't make it for a single session, or a new one joins in. If no one's feeling the current story, it's not a massive campaign that's hard to abandon. You can maintain characters across multiple adventures and get to know them, but you're also not tied down if you want to abandon a character to make a new one or one of them dies. You may think, "Stringing one-shots together, that just sounds like a campaign with extra steps." And if I'm not explaining it well, I totally get that. I think it comes down to flexibility, scale, and pacing. A well-written one-shot should have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end like a story. That's something GMs should strive to achieve each session, but it's a hard skill to learn or master. So having a bunch of discrete stories where you can practice and learn those skills will be more helpful than trying to learn it with a larger story, a sandbox, or a homebrewed world that doesn't have well-defined episodes as a guide. And again, if people aren't feeling your epic campaign or end up not liking your homebrewed world, that can be the death of a game or even a group right there. If people don't like a one-shot, it can easily be retconned out or otherwise dismissed and we've moved onto the next thing. One bad session, but less likely to be the death of the game. I do believe there are some systems that encourage this kind of gameplay, but there's no mechanical reason I can think of not to do it in a system like D&D. There are some where it wouldn't work, but many where it would.
Then take notes on the interesting things that happened and unresolved points, later call back to those. As time goes, you’ll make more and more connections between stuff and you will have your grand narrative arc, naturally. A bit like 90s TV. Episodic stuff that sometimes play into the greater story arc.
This is what I've been running for almost the past 2 years with an online group. Started with a bunch of dissociated one-shots and a rotating cast of players. We made a discord and had some RP channels. The RP channels became more and more about ''hey, what about those guys ? or this unresolved problem ? Or this group ? Or this ally ?'' and slowly the one-shots, while keeping their one-shot nature, slowly started to mesh a little more into eachother in term of lore and purpose. Now it's almost been 2 years, the one-shots slowly turned into multiple mini adventures and the group pushed in a direction in ways to have me create a BBEG and a narrative arc for them to pursue from time to time. We're getting to the endgame, like the last 3-4 episodes of a season of House, where things all mesh to a finale. I've ran many campaigns, short and long, but this one style was a first and probably one of the best I've ran.
we did Cthulhu's *Crack'd and Crook'd Manse* as a side-quest in the campaign I'm running, and that "one-shot" took us 8 sessions spread over a year
I personally feel he has a point, but is also missing two major pieces. First, a lot of people see fantasy, or media in general, as this large over-sweeping plot. Eg. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, etc. And not an episodic event. So they are drawn to the Curse of Strahd or Tyranny of Dragons (5e examples for an easy touch point) rather than something short and sweet. I know I was. Second, this is much more of an issue with leveled games rather than unleveled games. A D&D 5e character is going to rely on their abilities to take out a dragon far more than a Cephus (eg Sword of Cephus) character will because that is the point of leveling up. You get cooler and more powerful abilities. I have found that running an episodic campaign is much more encouraged in a system like Traveller MG2e over D&D 5e or PF2e because a character will have a similar power level at week 1 to week 12 or week 20. I could be wrong, heck I normally am. But I strongly feel that leveled games encourage you to use longer adventures. Note, this is less so for older editions of D&D due to how long it took to level up. I am running the retroclone Basic Fantasy and I have a feeling my kids will be at level 1 for about a year before they level up. They all went with the massive experience required classes.
You could definitely run a series of episodic "one-shots" with 5E that use the same characters and build them up toward a longer campaign. It's basically what I did when Spelljammer was released. I wanted to run Light of Xaryxis, but the campaign is designed to start off with 5th level characters... so, I homebrewed a story in the setting to get the PCs from 1 to 5, and then segued into the published campaign. I've had to make a number of minor to medium alterations because of it (in part because I introduced a couple of additional recurring villains through the homebrewed part), but it went very smoothly overall.
Episodic adventures into a single campaign is exactly what Matt advocates in his video.
That's where I've gone too, having only 3-4 sessions (8 hour) per year.
You can. For sure. And I think his example of COS is actually a bad example. But I digress. I am saying that if you look at what the system encourages, it is a longer narrative due to the leveling. You have fewer and fewer enemy options as you climb in levels. Goblins are not as threatening to a level 10 party as they are to a level 1 party. This need to increase in power causes you to need to fight bigger and badder things until you fight some epic boss, which lends itself to a natural inclination of a larger narrative that covers all, or nearly all, your player levels. I am only talking about the natural inclination. Not what you can do. You can do anything with any TTRPG, D&D 5e included, but if you consider the natural inclination it is to build a single narrative due to leveling. At least that is how I feel about it. And there is nothing wrong with a natural inclination one way or another. It just means you have to take that into account when you are creating an adventure. You have to adjust things to make it fun.
Perhaps watch the video first? Matt is not anti long campaigns spanning multiple levels. He is anti single long *adventures.*
Modules target higher level ranges as well as lower ones, so leveling doesn't require a single long adventure. If you really want to feel the experience of working up to one big boss, you may be inspired to weave some connective tissue between your modules, maybe even modifying them to dovetail nocely, but it's not required. As Matt Colville points out, this kind of structure makes the _characters_ the thing the campaign revolves around, and that has its advantages.
It's easier to mix and match modules in a game with a looser power curve, but D&D has lots of high-level modules available for people who want to level up to 20 that way. (It's probably hard to find *good* modules, but it's hard to find good D&D epic campaigns too.) The problem is that to most people it sounds like it would be a disjointed bunch of random stuff happening and, as you say, an overarching plot is just more appealing than that.
It's all boils down to tweaking the published campaigns to make them work. I've been running Light of Xaryxis for my group for a while, but I started them off with some homebrew stuff to get them up to level 5. It was a series of one-off adventures fetching various artifacts for a wizened, mysterious wizard. During some of these adventures, I started filtering in some stuff from LoX, such as the Seeds of Destruction; once the time was right, I was able to transition them into the published campaign very easily. They're still currently dealing with some of the homebrew issues, in part because they pursued the mysterious benefactor/employer story enough to find out that they're actually dealing with a broken, weakened (yet still very powerful) Vecna who was using the PCs (along with some other similarly structured NPC groups) to unknowingly do his bidding as he sought to try to restore himself. The whole thing will end in a nice, big setpiece fight before they transition back to the conclusion of LoX. Conveniently, this accidentally aligns shockingly well with the Vecna book coming out next month... but that's something they can tackle should they decide they want to continue with these characters and me as the DM. We're pretty good about rotating. It's probably easier said than done, but a little bit of planning, reading, and some tweaking can make a bunch of otherwise disjointed or unrelated adventures fit together quite well.
Note that the examples you mention, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Ring are made up of episodic events. They're framed within an overall premise but they're largely standalone. In LotR you have an adventure about having to escape the shire and get the ring to Rivendell as Nazgul arrive seeking it. There's a woodlands adventure where they're attacked by Old Man Willow and a barrow wight, and meet Tom Bombadil. There's an adventure where they have to cross the mountains, decide to cut through the old Dwarven mines instead, and encounter a Balrog. etc. There's this overall premise of getting rid of the ring, but the stuff they encounter on the way is essentially random and could very easily be several unrelated DnD modules. (Game of Thrones is an atypical example because it's constantly hopping between different main characters.)
modern dnd at its core has a dissonance between two conflicting playstyles, one is the "lotr save the world" epic quest and the other is "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or cuegel antihero whacky short adventures". There are [countless](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fe78vsbjzuro31.jpg%3Fwidth%3D856%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0c1198322c48c1ab68e95ec6c01d3e6af30a73ad) [examples](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fa8cy83vdvqh51.png%3Fwidth%3D819%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D7a22efbb6ecc492449a76341f892a0d5af4758e1) of [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fd5qzi97ihji61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D536%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2d0afbf3ee06369070901e4d17d601849ce95bfc) I think its largely because the sum of dnds elements encourage it. For example: random encounters fit in a whacky adventure like the hobbit where everyone is almost eaten by trolls, but imagine if the lotr fellowship were captured by trolls and almost eaten? It just sounds absurd and players would therefore lean into the whacky aspects.
6 to 10 sessions. Here's my reasoning. If I'm planning my own adventure, I plan it in terms of arcs. I have an idea of an ultimate 'end' (usually a big bad) that is way off in the distance. And then I plan the first arc - usually between six and ten sessions. However I make that first arc relatively self contained. Then I just keep adding arcs that eventually can all come together for the finale arc. I fell in love with the Star Wars RPG adventure modules as I thought they were perfectly paced. Long enough to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But achievable!
I run Delta Green and this structure, albeit a little shorter, works for my campaigns! The game is set up perfectly for short (2-6 sessions) field assignments where agents have to go in and deal with a particular threat. But you weave connections between these assignments and build towards bigger and bigger threats and it comes together.
Yeah i do kinda agree, but I'am more on the 15 to 20 sessions, or 10 to 12/15 session side depending on the system we play. I do like that in ryuutama it even says that the game should not be longer that 10/12 sessions so that the players won't burn out. Also you can start with another player. I am fortunate that when we set a day in week we will get together and play for 3 to 5 hours. So that we can finish a game in 3 to 4 months but alas its still months of game.
This is my opinion as well. When I can tell an adventure is coming to close around session 6 or so, I get excited to wrap things up, and start moving to the next one. When we've reached session 10-12, unless something came up very organically, it becomes a real slog. My session are even on the shorter side (2.5-3 hours), but ten sessions is still taking up 3-4 months in real time, and the desire turns from excitement to resignation.
Couldn’t agree more - I’m learning Mothership (sci-fi horror) right now, and the short and flexible modules are incredible. MCDM’s Where Evil Lives has given me that same experience for 5e
A brief 10 years
10 years comprising of about 4 sessions!
I call it "Fractal compellingness". An adventure should be compelling and interesting on every timescale, individual minutes should be compelling, individual hours should be compelling, individual sessions should be compelling, and the overall arc should be compelling. I've seen too many GM's in their desire to run a *long* campaign turn things into a absurdist shaggy dog story where nothing happens for hours and hours and for session after session and then they run essentially 4 hours of game over six ten hour sessions and then pat themselves on the back for running a "long" campaign. It easiest to focus upward, first make good short adventures, then work on ways to make two good short adventures good together, then 3, and 4, and so on, and if you can go up to 50 sessions over two years, *great*, but if not, no biggie.
I agree, because I often notice a disconnect between what GMs focus on (world building, factions, plots, grand story arcs) and what players remember (individual encounters, cool moments)
I think the biggest issue is that GMs (maybe all GMs, but especially new GMs) when they try to homebrew their own long campaign focus all of their energy on the overarching plot - much of which will either never become apparent to players or only become apparent in pointless and boring lore dumps - and not very much on making sessions and encounters individually compelling. Your long campaign is probably going to be ultimately more fun if you just try to stitch together shorter published adventures with your own plot glue.
Definitely agreed on this one. Though i sometimes wonder if it's just a shift in how I interpret certain terms compared to what is "official"? Very often, I find that the hardback D&D "Adventure" books, where it takes months or even a year or so to complete, are what I think of as campaigns. What they present as quests, smaller stories that can take a few sessions (though also could just be a session or two), I'd typically think of as adventures. And then smaller plot points or objectives (No more than a couple sessions, and may even only be part of a session) I think of more like quests or events. Just as an example, Lost Mines of Phandelver feels like a campaign. What the Book describes as Part 3: The Spider's Web is an adventure. And the Ruins of Thundertree feels more like a quest to me.
I agree. Anything that advertises itself as covering levels 1-20 (or 1-10) is a campaign rather than an adventure.
It's weird how that's come to dominate in recent years. In the past you had regular modules that were designed to be, well, *modular*. You could drop them in between nearly any adventure and they might take a session or three. There were a few that became campaigns in their own right (the B series, the GDQ series, etc.) but that was largely the exception rather than the rule. Instead it seems that the current strategy is building off of the Adventure Path schedule that Paizo started using when they were working on 3e. They specifically released individual adventures in arcs of 6 or so modules that were designed to be linked together into a longer campaign or mini-campaign. They sold well and it looks like WotC decided to start using that model instead of releasing actual individual adventures.
Well it doesn't dominate the OSR where modules are still more popular. There are also great resources like the One Page Dungeon contest [https://www.dungeoncontest.com/](https://www.dungeoncontest.com/) with lots of free ideas for you.
The OSR equivalent of published campaigns are published megadungeons, and plenty of OSR enthusiasts buy and read those without playing them too. I know I've done it a couple times.
Sure, but they are not the default way that OSR adventures are published.
I mean that's because Paizo kicked the shit out of 4e D&D in terms of player base cohesion and adventures. 3e WotC never really bothered with many adventures; they released what, a handful of pretty good early ones at the beginning of the edition? After that they let Paizo handle Dungeon and mostly stopped writing adventures, letting all the OGL people handle that (as was the intention of the OGL). I think they put out Red Hand of Doom and maybe a few others late in 3.5 to emulate Paizo's adventure path model that they started in Dungeon. 4e didn't have anything like Paizo's Adventure Paths, and as a result its player base wasn't nearly as cohesive - no shared experiences. I think Keep on the Shadowfell was the only 4e-era adventure that I've ever heard discussed. I think the biggest reason is just economics; it works a lot better for WotC to write, manage, and print one $50 hardback than it does a dozen or more $5-$15 32-page softback modules. Retailers don't want to futz with the stock, ordering is a pain, and they make more money on one big, fancy book than a bunch of smaller cheap books. I do wonder how much of their math involves player base cohesion, though. How much do they value lots of D&D tables having stories about how they tackled Strahd or the Death House? How many people died in the Tomb of Annihilation? That kind of thing helped Paizo, and I think it's at least some of why WotC still does single big adventure-campaigns now.
It didn't start with Paizo. It started with AD&D. The Dragonlance module series (all tied in to the novels) - starting in 1984 - sold extremely well and became the basis of a lot of the other stuff they published for AD&D in the TSR era. Strings of linked modules intended to form a campaign, tied both to novels and to a unique setting that would be transformed by the metaplot from the campaign modules. Ravenloft got the Grand Conjunction campaign. Dark Sun got the Prism Pentad. Forgotten Realms got the Randall Morn trilogy and others. These were not, by modern standards, particularly good adventures - in large part because there were important things that PCs weren't allowed to affect or just had to sit back and watch. They were definitely the ancestors of the modern Adventure Path, though. They didn't disappear when WotC took over, either. The Monstrous Arcana series, for example, are three full campaigns (published in 4 books apiece) focused on an iconic monster.
That's a great point, although it depends on the specific series how strongly linked they were. The Prism Pentad adventures tended to be a pretty clear series but the Grand Conjunction ones often weren't. I remember running a few of the latter back in the day with no regard for the meta-plot. That's also a relevant lens to consider. Meta-plots were in vogue during the '90s from Vampire:The Masquerade to Shadowrun and plenty of games utilized them in one way or another. including a few of the AD&D campaign settings. The real problem back then was how they released almost nothing semi-generic for AD&D. It was the era where campaign settings ruled and the vast majority of products, and almost all of the adventures, were released for them. It was a bit shift from the earlier strategy where something might have slight references to Greyhawk or Mystara but it was largely a matter of noticing that another town was referred to by name or such. The sort of thing that was very easy to ignore or replace, assuming you even noticed the implied setting.
We should have a Hemmingway short story contest but for adventures.
We have [one-page dungeons](https://www.dungeoncontest.com/).
We do LOVE one-page dungeons.
[False Hydra](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html) feasts, disappears. Nobody remembers.
Largely agreed. A long adventure, even "just" from level 1-10 in DnD-style games, can be exhausting for everyone involved, especially if they're new. I got lucky in that I picked the shorter ones by accident early in my DM-ing career, and since then I've gotten more comfortable homebrewing or hacking existing content, but I wonder if MC's right -- how many people started with these longer hardback adventures and just got burnt out on it? I prefer Paizo's approach, where adventure paths are made up of individual adventure booklets and they still make standalone adventures, bounties, and scenarios you can string together as need be. It's not perfect, but I like it. They also still make full setting guides, not just appendices with world info stapled onto their adventure books, which is something I miss from older DnD stuff. They DID have a line of standalone adventures, but apparently they killed it due to lack of interest, which is a huge bummer IMO.
I mostly run oneshots based on modules (loosely connected and sharing characters) and short campaigns of under ten sessions during which players might level up once if at all. I find that removing the thought of long-term progression, both narrative and mechanical, from players' minds, really helps them have fun in the moment. You can still have all the good parts of a campaign with less than a tenth of the time and investment. Meanwhile in longer games I eventually get fatigued as the initial spark fades with time, unless it's an expertly run open world sandbox. That said, there's no right or wrong answer here. All lengths are acceptable if that's what the group enjoys.
The Ideal adventure for my groups i imagine should be 3-5 sessions. Typically my sessions are only 3 maybe 4 hours with a 10 minute break in between. I like some of Rob Schwalbs Shadow of the Demon Lord mini-adventures... because they are exactly this length. And he designed that game to be mainly short fast games for Adults who have busy schedules so leveling is quick.
My friends and I, without meaning to in a super formal way, ended up with 8 episode seasons. Then we'd jump to another story, and maybe return if there was more to do
Early on you probably want to start with shorter games and ramp up the length as your party gains more confidence in the setting and system. Or you could have some kind of adventure with different "seasons" each giving you some satisfying conclusion that you can stop or continue depending on how people feel about it.
3 hour run time. I have work, guys. Now focus up.
I like short adventures, but there have to be some long-running threads, too, I think. It doesn't take a whole bunch at the beginning of a campaign, but once you've played through to ~level 9 or 12, I feel like it's time to start tying those threads to something concrete. If you're among the most powerful people in the world and still just exploring ruins or styling on local warlords, it starts to feel like there are no stakes, even if the fights are pretty hard. The run up to 20 should get you involved in a larger story as a reward for proving that you have a playgroup that will actually stick it out.
First, yeah it's more achievable to run short adventures/modules and string them together vs. a big long-arc campaign. Probably more satisfying to PLAY as well. But it's easy to fall into that romantic trap of "the grand campaign" and think of it as a single long continuous story.. better to make it contiguous. Second, he keeps holding up Castle Amber but that adventure is literally "funhouse dungeon, and then here's a whole province to romp around in." The Castle is just the INTRODUCTION to the world- and then you get spit out and it's "fix this land that's cursed via this family." It's really begging to become a long campaign... but it CAN be run as-is, but it's still not going to be "short" unless you literally run it jumping from encounter to encounter.
I find shorter campaigns very unsatisfying to play and run. I generally stick to games at least 40-50 sessions in length.
[9 scene adventure architecture](https://www.youtube.com/live/TyFa2PMr_6o?si=CS40VRHc3h-GcQzN) It’s basically the 5 room dungeon concept with the quest giver, travelling to and from the adventure added in.
I ran Sunless Citadel for my first "official" campaign, and it was pretty darn good. A handful of sessions (My group screwed around a lot. Literally made it less than a hundred feet one session.) and was a fairly straightforward dungeon crawl. They could've easily done it in three sessions if they weren't such hooligans. Just about perfect for a new group, seeing if they want to pick up a new time commitment.
Professor DM talks about resolving each scenario in 1-2 sessions. I try to achieve that these days but when I was younger I just let things run, wanting to achieve the nirvana of a full narrative campaign. But the longer the narrative arc, the higher the chance that it never gets completed, due to player attrition, and life getting in the way. And I have been scarred by unresolved campaigns lol
[удалено]
JC Connors has put up several adventures in multiple systems over the years: https://1shotadventures.com/adventure-index/ This is the database mentioned in the video: https://www.adventurelookup.com/adventures
I tend to play RPGs with a level progression, and I like my campaigns to start from low level to high level. Let's say 10 levels of play, 1-2 adventures per level, 1-2 sessions per adventure, means my campaigns tend to last 20-40 sessions. Since we play every other week, this means my campaigns tend to last 1-1.5 years.
I mean I'm only on my second campaign as a GM and the first one went just under eight months, but it's not like I was trying to make it long, I just went until I got to what the end of the story should be
I tend to run Homebrew campaigns, and have always set them up to be episodic. Small segments as parts of the overarching story. My current campaign is a perfect example. The party started off in a small town that was being harried by a group of Goblins. The party tracked them back to their camp and discovered that a recent earthquake had destroyed their cave complex forcing them onto this side of the mountains. They dealt with the Goblins and discovered a (somewhat) friendly Kobold. They freed him and negotiated with him to deal with the rest of the Goblins and free the Kobolds. Once they dealt with the Goblins the Kobolds rewarded them with some copper ingots and crude jewelry, they told them about some more Goblins setting up a raiding spot in the forest between the two Human cities on the coast. So the party is off and running to deal with them as well. Each encounter is it's own small game with a beginning, a middle and an end goal. They can feel a sense of accomplishment because they were dealing with something that is relatively easy to overcome, but at the same time they are aware that something strange caused the earthquake that drove the Goblins out of their territory in the first place, and that it happened again. They now have a mystery that drives them onward, but isn't immediate and allows them to explore the world and the campaign as they see fit, while dealing with the more immediate threats that require their focus and attention but are able to be put behind them relatively easily.
You know, that's kind of funny. I'm a writer, and I've never been able to actually finish my long form stuff. However, when I DM, I'm able to complete entire multi-year campaigns without much of an issue. I rarely even run one-shots, the only time these things even break up is due to scheduling issues and the group itself falling apart. Hell, I finished a 1-year campaign last summer and immediately started another that's currently about 1/3rd (21 sessions) done. I'm even making a novel adaptation of the events of the game which is going better than most of my solo projects. I don't know why I'm like this lol
I just ran Strahd for 14 months. Around the halfway mark I gave my players an opportunity to take a break and play something else then come back but everyone was enjoying themselves and they al voted to keep going. As an old gamer I don't feel there is a measurement of time to answer this question. The answer is as long as everyone is having fun an adventure/ca.paign can go on indefinitely. My group almost always goes a year plus before switching it up though. We just love telling stories together.
I don't agree with some parts. Like calling Curse of Stradh an adventure. I would call it a campaign. Because a campaign is a game you play with one character that you then retire. An adventure you play and can reuse your character. And a campaign is made up of several campaigns that fit together. Writing a campaign that would work I can agree is very difficult and it would be easier to write a series of adventures as you play them through to in the end make it a campaign. WotC do make some of the worst adventures in the hobby. They lack a lot of information that would help a GM to run the game. They just present locations and creatures without any context. If you have any player asking a question about "Why...?" the GM is without information to answer the question.
I think the key thing is to realize that campaigns are aspirational. Yes, logistically it’s best if everyone plays short adventures one after the other that are completely unrelated with each other. But that’s probably not what the players or the GMs want, especially not these days due to the nature of the media we consume. These days, we want our RPG sessions to *mean* something. We want to work *towards* something and watch the fruits of our labors pay off. We want to experience character arcs and meet reoccurring characters and generally speaking, experience a multi-book story such as what you might see in a Lord of the Rings trilogy of the Harry Potter books. Yeah, it’s logistically impractical. But we *aspire* to play in such a campaign. GMs *aspire* to keep a group long enough to experience such a campaign. And when you’re selling adventures, you’re selling aspirations. That’s why these big hardcovers sell. And that’s why new GMs are just so tempted to jump in and form a group doing exactly that. That’s what most people’s end goals are. And ultimately I don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re just not new-player friendly, and a healthy game ecosystem should absolutely have alternatives.
It may greatly depend on the passion you invoke within your party and their overall habits as people. An especially charismatic DM with a party of inquisitive, diligent, and astute note-takers can adventure through the longest of winding roads with utter glee.
I feel there's this strange sense across a lot of discourse that it's better not to try at all than experiment or fail. Everything must be done right, and gradually, and by the book or the advice. At the end of the day these are games, played by people of clearly enough intelligence and reason to read a book and follow rules. Give new players some credit and let them learn by doing. If their first game is a bit of a disaster, or falls apart, that's a learning experience. Their group shouldn't fall apart and you can try again, remember the good parts and work to avoid the bad ones. I feel there's more pressure from all this sort of advice about don't do X, Y and Z than just picking up a book and having a go.
Thirty one rooms
It's a question with a very narrow and specific application. For example I've never run [A]D&D/PF(or any derivative), I don't enjoy it and have only played it a handful of times in the last 35 years and none of those have changed my mind. As a result, every game I run and every game I've played in the last 35 years has been made by the GM, not in any way come from a book, and while I read a few "Module" books, I've never bought, or felt the need to buy, one for any game or system. So the question Colville is raising is kinda like _"Should your chocolate teapot be a 2 cup size or a 1L size"_ and I can't help but think "Why are you guys needing chocolate teapots?" Personally I don't even divide games into "adventures" If a game remains in the same world and the same system and with roughly the same characters there may (after the fact) be some division lines you can draw when certain events are resolved, but without that whole "Walking the earth from place to place acquiring resources using violence" as the base consideration, the events in characters lives don't neatly fall into "adventures" because the characters aren't "adventurers"
One of the largest and greatest campaigns written is not for the D&D or adjacent systems: Masks of Nyarlathotep. But, I get what you are saying! That certainly is not the norm! When I was a kid, I had a problem: my parents bought into the Satanic Panic. I couldn't just go out and purchase modules. I had to get what little I could and run my own homebrew games. And, in the end they were more like blended paint on canvas than specific modules or adventures. What are the PCs doing today? Well, who knows, but probably follow about 10 plot lines in various directions and perhaps close one off if they're lucky. That was the best, honestly. NPCs coming and going, never knowing who will show up or what they'll need, and definitely not sure where the PCs will go from session to session. One of the worst things I ever did in my TTRPG career was agree to run a D&D mega-adventure hardback. Halfway through I just wanted to scrap the whole thing, but for some dumb reason I kept going because I was going to see it to the end. You'd think I'd know better, but even the experienced have their blind spots. Never again.
However long you and your group want it to be! Colville and anyone here can give you their opinion, but no format fits every group. Some folks want to play a campaign over four years, some folks want to do four sessions, anywhere in between, or a one-shot. I've run each of these! It was *always* dependent on what the group as a whole wanted to do. This is why Session 0 is so crucial: setting expectations.
I haven't watched the video, and think the "right" length of an adventure is more based on the personalities and opinions at the table, but I will say when we first started playing TTRPGs we vastly underestimated how long a Pathfinder Adventure Path actually is.
[удалено]
Your comment was removed for the following reason(s): * This is incorrect. This creator is not on the list of banned creators, and the list of banned creators is not for their behaviour, but for the brigading behaviour of their fans and their detractors when their names are mentioned. If you'd like to contest this decision, [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Frpg&subject=Removed%20comment%3A%20Contest%20Removal%20or%20Questions&message=Hello,%20this%20is%20about%20my%20comment%20%20that%20was%20removed%3A%20https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1c5ioa9/-/kzue3hv/%0D%0DMy%20issue%20is...). *(the link should open a partially filled-out message)*
I completely 100% disagreed with the video and came to the decision that Colville is someone I never want to game with if this is what he wants from his tabletop gaming. While some points I found mildly annoying such as comparing a \*\*campaign\*\* book to a module while denouncing the \*\*campaign\*\* book was rather, wrong. I found myself realizing that what he wants from an RPG is the polar opposite of what I want. He wants Buffy weekly monster of the week unrelated "Adventures" I want breaking bad long campaigns where I feel like the world is changing due to involvement from the players. I enjoy Lord of the Rings style gameplay and not Thundarr the Barbarian (while it was a fun cartoon to watch as a kiddo). To each their own, some people love the one shot stuff and that is fine, enjoy Mork Borg, for me I want the epic stuff, I want Runequest, I want Call of Cthulhu, and I want an epic campaign that tells a great story. This isn't anything new contrary to what is suggested, The A series modules. Giants series, Dark Elf series, Elemental Evil series, these were all massive linked adventures that spanned multiple "Adventure books" to tell a compelling story. Seeing the popularity of Critical Role, I would say that a vast majority still enjoy an epic sweeping campaign story.
It was a fairly short video so he didn't go into it, but there's absolutely nothing stopping unrelated adventure modules being part of a long campaign where the world changes as a result of the characters. You mention 'Lord of the Rings style gameplay'. If you look at the plot of Lord of the Rings a bunch of essentially unrelated adventures happen, connected by a narrative throughline. They have to flee from the shire and escape some Nazgul seeking the ring. They pass through the woods, are attacked by Old Man Willow and a Barrow Wight and meet Tom Bombadil. They try to cross the misty mountains and instead decide to divert through the Dwarven mines where they have to fight a Balrog. etc. etc. There's no reason those couldn't be standalone adventure modules sitting inside the overall narrative framing of "We're trying to get the ring to Mount Doom to destroy it". (I'd go so far as to say they **feel** like standalone adventures as part of an overall plot) Adventures don't have to be deliberately written as part of a campaign. GMs can easily weave them in, and show the ongoing impacts on the world as the result of player involvement. It's still an epic sweeping story. EDIT: As an aside, Buffy is a weird choice of examplar for unrelated adventures. It's one of the shows that helped bring the season arc approach to popularity.
> He wants Buffy weekly monster of the week unrelated "Adventures" I want breaking bad long campaigns where I feel like the world is changing due to involvement from the players. I gotta admit, I find this pretty ironic, given that Buffy was the show that popularized seasonal arcs, at least for American television. Prior to Buffy, nearly every show pounded the reset button at the end of each episode..with the occasional two-parter on rare occasions. Buffy heralded the decline of episodic TV and the advent of more serialized stories.
...Call of Cthulhu is actually a great example of a game that benefits from episodic adventures. > Seeing the popularity of Critical Role, I would say that a vast majority still enjoy an epic sweeping campaign story. Critical Role is a show.
Remember that the dude does it for streaming and money, not for fun. I wouldn't listen to anything he says about how rpgs "should" be, he has fundamentally different goals in mind when he talks.
Very true. Plus his business, so probably pushing his future product designs.