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Planning for a Long-Term Campaign: When Sessions Turn into Years

It is the holy grail of gaming: to have a game that goes on for years, chewing through PCs and plot lines to build truly epic heroes.  Today's article is addressing how to plan out a long-term campaign and what to expect.

The first aspect of planning a long-term campaign is recognizing that things are going to change. Long-term campaigns only succeed when they can continue through the expected changes. The first thing you can expect is that real life is going to generate absences. To make a game resilient against absence, get a group size that is larger than what you need to play. For my games, I run with 6, knowing that most encounters will do just fine when only 4 are present.  Even with this, there are going to be times you just can't get together a quorum. Expect this to happen around holidays. Whatever you do, maintain consistency in scheduling. It is way to easy for a few skipped session to turn into the defacto ending of your gaming group.

Another change you have to be prepared for is the loss of players. The world is a dynamic place with school classes that start and stop, with jobs that come and go, and with people that move away.  Be prepared to replace players you lose. Players especially tend to leave around May-June, August-September, and around December-January.  When a player leaves, be prepared to find a new player, and be prepared to get them up to speed quickly on both rules and the story. Documents prepared and updated throughout the game can help your with this.

From these expected absences, you can get an idea of when your sweet spots are in the gaming year -- Mid-January to April and September through October. These are the times you want to plan the beginnings and the ends of segments of your campaign. These are also the times you will have the best player attendance and the most motivated players, so save your best story lines for these times.

The second aspect of planning a successful long-term campaign is to break it up into segments. Not every player is going to want to play a single character for all 20 levels.  Having major segments with major story lines breaks up the 20 levels. In between segments, you can give your players a chance to switch characters. It is also a good time to make major changes in setting.  Segments should be chosen to last from 6 months to a year, depending on how quick your group grows to wants changes made to characters.

The third, and most important aspect, of running a long-term campaign is having an overarching story that ties the full campaign together end-to-end. This story need not be a single villain or single mission, but it should connect together the segments, and build larger meaning from the individual challenges that the party overcomes. Possible patterns for this include a large organization that have far reaching influence and apocalyptic plots that will end the world. War also can provide a backdrop for an overarching story. This overarching story just needs to be an outline -- don't add the details and specifics until they come up in the campaign. Prepping too far ahead will be wasting all of the good ideas you'll get in the meantime. It also ties your hands in responding to player feedback.

No matter which story binding concept you choose, be sure to use character backstories to tie characters to it. Stories are far better when the characters have real motivation to move them forward.

Finally, the fourth thing to keep in mind in a long-term campaign is that you need to continually increase heroics required by the party. You can't end a segment on a wonderful climax of saving the day, and then immediately go back at the beginning of the next segment to hunting down bandits. Every story line has to take the danger, the action, the rewards up a notch. Without it, boredom will ensue and the game will fall apart.

I encourage, as you think about starting your next campaign, that you take on the challenge of a long-term campaign. It takes a little extra work, but it is a nice feeling to know you are really bring a regular bit of happiness to yourself and others, throughout the trials of everyday life, something that truly improves the years.

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