Tuesday, February 25, 2014

D&D 40th Anniversary, Day 25

Longest-running campaign/gaming group you've been in.

I never really did keep track, and I'm terrible remembering dates (even years!) but I'm pretty sure that would be the "second wave" of siblings and cousins.  We had just rebooted our Known World campaign, but a few of the original players were starting to lose interest in the game and drift away.  This was probably 1990-ish.  Also around that time, some of the younger ones were strongly agitating to be allowed to play, and I eventually allowed them in.  This changing of the guard didn't happen all at once, but I'd consider the campaign itself to have lasted from 1990 to the early 2000s, though the cast of characters changed and grew.  Nobody really wanted to retire their experienced PCs, but we still liked low-level play, so new characters were rolled up frequently, and adventured in the same world with their more powerful counterparts.  We'd often start an adventure, end a session in the middle of it, and then the next time when one or more players couldn't make it, we'd just start a new adventure with a different party of characters.  It was fun, but a hell of a time trying to keep track of what happened when, and whether that "paused" adventure would or would not have an impact on the current one, which technically was taking place after it in the chronology of the campaign world.  Even so, it must have been rife with temporal paradoxes and continuity snarls, which were summarily hand-waved, or if they were egregious enough, retconned. 

One of the nice things about this pattern was that no characters ever got much above name level, so we stayed in the "sweet spot" despite the long-running nature of the campaign. 

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