Dungeons & Dragons offers the potential for long-term campaigns where the story continues over multiple sessions, just like a series. MeinMMO editor Alex has been regularly playing his favorite campaign for years, with a lot of passion. How his group manages this and how you can do it too, he tells you here.
Dungeons & Dragons is a group game that requires a lot of creativity but also people skills and aims for collaborative storytelling. It is highly social and, correspondingly, prone to conflicts and differing expectations. This often makes it hard to play long-term campaigns truly long-term without the group losing interest for various reasons or breaking apart—especially when those campaigns extend over several years.
I have also had numerous groups and attempts behind me and have been playing for several years in a stable group of 6 people, with whom I indulge in the passion for our favorite tabletop role-playing game at least twice a month for a whole day. We usually play 11 – 14 hours and primarily move within the setting of the Forgotten Realms and the Feywild. While we use (multiple) official campaign books, we weave them into a framework created by our game master.
And this is really done on a regular basis with very few exceptions, playing the same campaign without major drama, serious disputes, or stretches of boredom, and with the same characters. But it hasn’t always been this easy, and getting to this point was a process that took some time.
The reason this works so well now is due to some unwritten rules and behaviors that I want to share with you so that you too can find the perfect group for yourselves and create long, epic campaigns together. I have also been able to carry these rules over and successfully implement them in other groups and systems. Therefore, I present our success concept, with which we have been writing the same story for years.
In this sense, I would also like to dedicate this contribution to my group, which has accompanied me through my adventures in Faerûn and the Crystal Spheres for so long: My dear Selûnatics – this contribution is also for you, because without you, I could not fully embrace this incredibly enriching hobby as it is now possible. Thank you for being there!
In the title image, you see the characters from his long-standing group, drawn by his lovely—uhm, mysterious favorite rogue (@kiriiartworks).
Questioning Expectations and Player Types
One of the biggest reasons our campaign started off so well was that we established specific focal points from the beginning, which we did not perceive as set in stone. The start of a long-term campaign lays one of the cornerstones for how it can develop over time.
For this purpose, our game master (who, mind you, is doing this for the first time – he had only played 2 sessions of Dungeons & Dragons as a player before) held a so-called Session 0 with each of our 5 players, where he discussed our character ideas and our expectations for the campaign.
Did we prefer a greater focus on combat? Exploring complex dungeons? Or a high role-playing component? All of this he gathered as orientation for the start. By doing this, you also ensure that the group members generally fit together and avoid many potential conflicts within the group.
He also ensured that the strengths and weaknesses of our characters complemented each other well, but we did not find out who or what we were playing before the first session. This way, we could authentically get to know each other in-game during the first session and showed genuine interest in each other.
But that was not enough, as expectations can change based on experience, and what one wishes for might not be what one really enjoys in practice. Which brings us to point 2.
