this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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I really dislike the thought of running epic months-/years-long campaigns. In theory, it sounds like it could be interesting, but then it just breaks down under real world conditions. You’ll rarely find a solid group of consistent players and if you’ve already worked it out that its going to take months to get through, you’ve kind of already decided to start railroading the players (though you can allow for improvisation, the overall story’s structure is pre-written).
I much prefer running one-shot adventures, maybe lasting <10 sessions at most, where I have as little idea what’s going to happen as the players and there’s no pressure to keep things going. It just lets me work on the general feel and concept for the game I want to run and not worry about funneling the players through a set of specific story beats or work out what’s happening in the background amongst different factions, etc. If the players liked running improv, just go with it then, true improv in gaming feels so rare (at least in my gaming group I think).
Luckily we all lived within the same two blocks, so coordinating was easy. Toss your shit in a bag and walk for 180 seconds, you're there. It made scheduling much easier when you don't have to factor in traffic time.
I'm gonna disagree with you on the "you have to railroad them". There's a reason I put 6 months of work into it, so there was something to do no matter where they went, and most of it could be shuffled a bit for convenience, most of it had a connection in one way or another to another part, so if they wanted to follow a lead after clearing out the last dungeon there's a new quest for next session, or you can leave and start walking in a random direction until you find something.
I don't like filler, so no sessions filled with basically nothing but travel.
This campaign was met weekly, for 3 months. I feel like 10-13 sessions is pretty standard for a decent sized campaign. I don't have the patience for years long shit. In my mind "one shot" adventures are things you come up with for today only. 5 sessions is a "mini campaign".
I try to shoot for 6 sessions usually. That way if there's an issue with schedules, we can compress it to 4. If nobody has any conflicts, we can stretch it to 8 by adding in a couple surprises. Hash it all out in session 0.
A good DM knows when to use each type of adventure, and a good group will find what they all like together. Up to that point, we had all liked what we were doing, and aside from minor issues here and there, we worked out any problems at the start of each new adventure.