>Been working on this campaign for many years now
>Sort of a side project that I pick up from time to time
>Basically, it's taking all of my favorite adventure modules and puzzle-piecing them together so that they overlap and make cohesive sense as one big, open gameworld
>call it my "Dream campaign"
...
>Had a thought earlier
>"Huh, this is a lot of modules... I wonder how long this would actually take to run?"
>Went through and stripped out several modules and adventures I thought were not absolutely 100% necessary
>Went to RPGnet and found all of the minimum estimates for playtime for each module and added them together
If a group sat down and played twice a week, every week, without missing a single session, and if they only did the bare minimum and stayed completely focused and did NO side content or didn't get distracted by random events outside of the campaign's main storyline...
...The game would take 3 years of sessions to complete.
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May we see it?
Maybe I should put it in a zip file and upload it somewhere as "Anon's PHAT ASS campaign" since I'll probably never run it.
It's B/X and OSR compatible.
Please do
Send it nyikkah
alright homies you know what time it is, stand and deliver
I'll play a big booty b***h if you run the game anon
You are not going to post it because OP is a homosexual and everyone knows that, but if you want to pleasantly surprise us, please do
And this is a problem because..? I wish I had 3 years worth of session prep laying around.
>start actually running this campaign
>players decide to do something you didn't expect
What now? Do you insist they stay on the rails or do you toss out those three years of prep? This is why you shouldn't plan out a whole campaign beforehand.
That's part of the beauty of how I designed it.
I based it on physical space and what's going on within that space, rather than just making it a story based plot to plot sort of thing. The campaign has a main storyline, but the nature of that story is an overarching series of events that bend depending on what player characters survive and what they do with their time.
It does have some railroady parts though, I'll admit. Though I'd like to think they are buried well and the "rails" are interconnected. That's what's taken so long to work on the campaign itself. It's mostly all published modules.
And again, that's what I meant by the absolute minimal amount of time if they stayed "On track". If they went off and did their own thing, (Which they absolutely would!) then it would take even longer, perhaps even multiple times as long.
It is good you will never run this campaign, because you would quickly realise you're not half as smart as you think you are and have your spirit crushed. You will live in your illusion, and you will be content with your fantasies.
getting whiplash from your trolling, anon
How would the campaign take three years when they would obviously level up from doing all this content and then become able to easily solve the low level content?
they get brought down to level at the start of every arc, clearly.
>That's part of the beauty of how I designed it.
>I based it on physical space
You innovated Hexcrawl, congratulations.
52 years after Arneson used it in Blackmoor.
It's more a chain of locations and ongoing world events than it is a story beat by beat.
That's how I design my stuff aswell.
You can have the main quest details planned out and improvise if your players go off and do something else. Not hard at all.
Scrambling can be avoided by making sure your players let you know what the plan for the next session is, with the understanding that if they do something off the wall it'll take time for you to prep it.
>running stories instead of games
Pretty much how my highschool group went. IIRC we were getting swamped, so we left it to the DM to grind down an AP into 'easy-play' chunks to help distract from the fact the homework load had effectively tripled and it wasn't even a quarter way through the term.
cringe
I mean, the campaign I'm currently running is a few months into its third year, so what's the issue?
I thought you were going to say something cool like it would take 10 years. Your dream is weak.
I keep meaning to pile up that much prepwork, it'd save me a lot of time.
At least you won't be lacking for content.
First off anon,
>twice a week
0.o
Secondly, just because you have this big interconnected world doesnt mean the players or going to get to all of it before the campaign fizzles, be it sooner or later they all do
They might not even get to whichever ones you'd consider to be the "capstone" adventures
Here's a blog post detailing this exact phenomena dissecting a 70 session campaign built exactly like you describe
https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2019/05/dissecting-frog-team-tsathogga-in.html
we just finished the first campaign in a series of games. Lasted 3 years. You can do it too.
I don't believe you.
Post everything you compiled, or you're a lying homosexual. "Idea Guys" like you always brag about the work they've "claimed" to do, but the reality is they've already decided their "perfect idea" is too big to actually do anything about it.
Bullshit stories like OP's always remind me about the side job I took in 2010. A publisher was trying to get a new TTRPG going in my country, after 7 years of not publishing new games. We sat to the project with a team of 13 people in total, it was effectively a full-time job with office and all, 30 hours a week...
... and after a month, the team was down to just me and three other people, because all the idea guys flaked like badly pointed fence. Our actual work concluded with 50 pages of Generic Reinessance Setting #1234 done in two months that we didn't give a single flying frick about, as it was just a job. All while during the first month, idea guys were throwing around the most outlandish and experimental IDEAS, but not a single line of text came out of them. The project fell through anyway, but I got paid for it and I have a back-up setting whenever running not!Warhammer
>Post it
If this thread is still up tomorrow, when I will return home from Easter, it will be posted, just to spit on all the idea gays. Hope you can read Polish[/note]
>Generic Reinessance Setting #1234
>not!Warhammer
Based Witcher creator, I'll be back tomorrow.
Bumping for Anon's PHAT ASS campaign. Don't be a Bargle, OP, I'm counting on you.
Also Bump for the abandoned Renaissance setting.
Could someone bump the thread in a few hours? I would very much like to read when I come back tomorrow.
I await eagerly.
You better deliver, anon. I will be waiting.
its time to deliver, straggot
Campaign, let's go
>bullshit stories remind me
the answer was there all along
I can’t read Polish, but my friend is fluent.
Share the goods, anon.
Does the curse spell give the Popierdolilo status?
>stringing official d&d modules together
>work
It is work, even preparing one module is work, try running Temple of Elemental Evil without any notes on the 4 factions. That said, waiting for OP to deliver.
works in any TTRPG, at best you just have to plan some sort of 1-2 sessions as a bridge to connect them, rename some shit, badda bing
>Things that never happened to get pity from random strangers online
Use that gun and fricking eat the bullet, you sorry homosexual
... So?
I've been in more multi-year campaigns than I've been in short ones.
>If a group sat down and played twice a week, every week, without missing a single session
Okay, but how long do you consider a "session" to be? Apparently, there are people on this website who play for 2 hour sessions, so this needs to be clarified. Otherwise this "3 years of sessions" figure is meaningless.
This didn't happen and you are full of shit. You want a dopamine hit for something you wanted to do, but didn't and couldn't, so you are baiting all these gays.
That's the perfect number of years and you know it, you're just using a self-pity image to farm attention.
>>Been working on this campaign for many years now
That's your first problem. Hit the fricking ground running. Don't spend years thinking about how good it's going to be when it's done. You're never going to get that 3-year long campaign if you don't start running it ASAP, you moron.
This.
The best time to start was years ago, but second best time to start is right now.
You hear that, Polish man? Sorry that the wind blew off your car but post your setting now, there's no better time.
Why do that to yourself? I started with a module, homebrewed it on the go to be 90% my own and it's just started to near session 100 after 2 years. You're not going to live forever, just do it. If the group you start playing that campaign with falls apart midway after 2 years, do you think you'll want to replay the same campaign? I would guess not, so just start before it's too late, or you'll never play that one or any other campaigns you come up with
Can you trust your table with a campaign that long, or are they going to diarrhea all over it the moment things don't go their way?
Imagine putting a tenth of this effort into making your own personal setting and world with locations and npcs and threats that you can't just look up in a book and are unique to your group and your table.
Seriously those mofo ain't gonna deliver no nothin'? Colour me surprised.
OP didn't have anything and Polanon was tossed off the road by strong winds while driving home.
It's no less than we deserve for trusting a man on April First. homosexual probably wasn't even Polish.
Is nothing sacred? Not even Poland??
Teaching example of what to do right here.
I had a problem of prepping my campaign for like 8 months, made worldbuilding from the zero... friends started memeing that the campaign was vaporware and was never going to happen.
Then I scrapped everything, made a completely new world more mystery-centric in like 3 weeks, then just fricking started running it.
I didn't even have the answer to the mysteries myself during session 1, but since it's one session per week, that's 7 extra days for me to worldbuild even more or consider actions and theories from the players for more worldbuilding.
In one hand I didn't have idea of what was going down when the campaign started, in the other hand I got a good grasp and ideas way quicker by just jumping into the frying pan compared to slowly doing things "comfortably" month after month.
My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined.
I'm holding on to the thought that Anon may deliver.
Even if it is just to shame him for seeing the thumbnail in the catalog.
3 years is perfectly doable and a reasonable goal for any gm/party. Your party would be blessed.
I kind of get you though. I finally got to adding up all my missions for a game some friends are RABID for me to do and its only 26 sessions after a year of scrawling ideas and notes. 52 with downtime sessions inbetween combat, but that's only about a year of once per week games. I need more.
>...The game would take 3 years of sessions to complete.
Okay, and?
Is Polish Guy back? I could use a not!Warhammer setting.
>his "dream campaign" is just slapping a bunch of modules together like a toddler playing with lego blocks
I find trying to plan out a whole campaign in advance is really dumb, the players are going to have colossal impact on the campaign with the choices that they make so you may as well leave yourself a lot of room for improvisation otherwise you're going to end up throwing out entire arcs and villains and session ideas.
I've been playing with the same group since 2014. We switched to 5e in 2020, but from '14 to '20, we played AD&D and we played as the same characters the whole time, just moving into different modules when we finished with one.
I kinda miss my AD&D characters bros
Bring them back as influential characters / quest givers / lords
He should use them as heroic figures of the past, mentioned as founders of the kingdom/magic school/whatever, have them as statues in a shrine or something.
> OP is not a nogame
> 1st of april
I mean hey I've had 2 to 3 year long games....
Tho not sessions a week type games, so yeah like double the Play time
I do not believe you, but nice reddit bullshit greentext for some copypaste ai read drivel
OP has one again been proven to be a homosexual, and Poland has once again proven to be a country of homosexuals.
Well, fricking start it already. Stop being such a b***h.
If one group doesn't last the distance, recruit a new one and continue the story with them, even if nobody sees the whole narrative but you.
A good setting should NOT be wasted. Autism is a precious resource. You should be working on a couple of novels, an artbook and a video game out of this, regardless of what the players do.
You don't get away that easy OP, now deliver.
Even Fatal 2e was posted in another thread yet no sign of OP. I guess not everyone is going to make it.
Hell, a samurai setting for Fatal 2e was posted, what's OP's excuse?