Saturday, August 15, 2015

#RPGaDAY2015 Day #15: Longest Campaign Played

Although  I've played dozens of different RPGs, there have only been a few that can be categorized beyond a one-shot or "mini-campaign" completing the storylines the GM wanted to tell.

I'm going to get picky with a vague topic of "Longest Campaign Played."  Sessions?  Hours?  Game years?  Real years?

Sessions?    During our Senior year, my friends in high school, Scott and Charles, would go to Scott's house everyday for lunch and played D&D.  I do not complain that I wasn't invited because it was D&D Masters level epic fighting by the end of the year, and that's not my style.  With everything else, they put in at least 125 sessions of this game, an hour at a time.

Compare that to my Second Edition AD&D "Georic game run from 1990-1992.  There were at least twenty sessions alone when we went through the Temple of Elemental Evil, and those were four hours apiece and lasted half the summer.  Still, with high school and jobs and other social life, I think if I put 100 of sessions down, I'd be generous. Only one character reached "Name" (9th+) level. Gaming is truly wasted on the young...

Longest Campaign by Sessions?  Hackmaster: September 2001 to May 2004: A weekly game with some one-on-one sessions to offset the holiday downtime.  I estimate about 120 sessions. One TPK and the realized threat of another kept the levels lower than expected.  I believe Gwen, the party druid, reached 10th level.

Longest Campaign by Real-Time?  That goes to Call of Cthulhu, hands down.  After a later Hackmaster campaign resulted in a TPK, and the current group dropping to three players (and me), I switched gears and busted out a CoC Avatar game (everyone plays a 1920's version of themselves). That was April 26, 2008 and it's still going strong.   Sure, we only have 29 sessions but it is the same campaign for seven years real-time, and four and a half years game time.  One character is still alive from session 1, and the other survivor of that first game recently went insane and jumped out of a second story window, only to survive and run through the streets of SoHo in the rain.

If and when we finish Masks, we may put this game on hold to let "Dr Bob" run the updated Horror on the Orient Express with different characters, but it will be back.

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