Our group plays once a month, for 7 to 8 hours a night (not all of it focused, trust me), and what I'm reading is, I might be running this until I'm 90 (certainly 60). Is it worth it?
Probably you will get one floor done in 3 months if you go with everything as written. You can always cut out content. You are looking at 4 floors a year at 6 years of total play. You will most likely not have your initial group there towards the end, but some drop outs and adds. Ask your party how long they want to run. If they want less than a year, run Phandalin.
If you don't want to create your own or update better starting modules from prior editions of D&D, I'd suggest running the Pathfinder Kingmaker and buy the Kingmaker Bestiary (5E) to help with the conversion so you could run it for 5E. It's a very good campaign and unless your players did Pathfinder, they won't know what it is.
Our group plays once a month, for 7 to 8 hours a night (not all of it focused, trust me), and what I'm reading is, I might be running this until I'm 90 (certainly 60). Is it worth it?
To be honest, this sounds ideal.
The major problem with the module is that it's narrative is threadbare. By only doing it monthly, that is less of an issue. It means that you only have to buy one module and it will last you years.
Bargain, so long as you enjoy dungeon crawls.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Ok, I really hate that so many people on this thread are completely guessing at how long it will take with zero actual experience. Obviously if you're in the middle of playing, I'm not referring to you.
If you're looking for a real answer from someone who has actually played through the entire campaign, take it from someone who played it start to finish, took 341 pages of notes, plus made over a dozen spreadsheets to track things like gates, downtime, player attendance, and various other things.
We started this campaign with 6 players and scheduled our sessions for 3 hours every Saturday evening, playing online using Fantasy Grounds. The first week, one person dropped and we picked up another. So still at 6. By the 6th session, we got to the second level of the dungeon. Two other players dropped after the 7th week. For the next 6 weeks, it was just 4 of us. We added 2 players for a bit, but both dropped after 6-7 sessions, so back down to 4.
On average, each level took roughly 6 sessions of 3 hours each. The shortest amount of time to explore a level was 3 sessions, and that was basically because we got captured or chased out of the level. The longest time between levels was 20 sessions and that was Level 16. This was due to two different things. First, level 16 is a bear. It's got over half a dozen dragons, one of which is an adult red dragon. Also, we did a bunch of downtime activities as we had introduced the Acquisitions, Inc rules and ended up using Stardock as our home base.
At the end of it all, we played for a total of 162, 3-hour sessions over the course of just under four years. If we had at least 3 players available, we played. Otherwise, we would skip that week. As you can imagine over that time period, there were various holidays so we didn't play every single week but fairly close to it. For exact context, the first session was on 2019-01-05, and the last session was 2022-12-10. Ballpark, that's 486 hours. Sometimes we'd go over 3 hours by a bit, but never by much. Occasionally we'd stop short because something big was about to happen, but I think it evened out.
We skipped over Skullport entirely, so that would probably have added another 4-6 sessions, which would have made it around 500 hours right at the 4 year mark.
Could it be done in less time? Yea, for sure. If your players are just looking for the exit to the next level in an effort to level up and get on with it, then sure. I talked to someone whose group played 8 hour games on Saturdays and after 6 weeks, were halfway through the 3rd level of the dungeon. Then they got bored and bailed. But they definitely skipped a lot of content and were specifically looking to find the exit to each level and move on.
If you're playing with a group of completionists who will leave no stone unturned, you're looking at 450-500+ hours of gameplay, easy. As much as we played and as much as we explored, we only found 29 of the 32 gates and of those, there ended up being 9 gates we never really found out where they went.
You're probably asking yourself... was it worth it?
For our group? Yes. Absolutely. We had four hard-core players who consistently showed up to play and our party makeup complimented each other pretty well. Two people had played in a previous campaign together, but the other two of us (myself included) had never met any of the others. Over a year after that campaign finished, we're still playing online in the Dragonlance campaign. It's really hard to not feel like you're good friends with people you've played through 500 hours of RPG's with, despite having never met any of them in person before.
Beyond the inter-player aspect of it, the campaign itself is pretty well put together. Each level has at least one, if not two major adversaries and you have to navigate various choices along the way. The DM has a huge impact on how this plays out and they have the ability to make it better or worse than as-written. And don't forget that this is one of the only official campaigns where characters can get to Level 20. So you really get to exercise your character options by the end of the game... assuming the DM cooperates, of course. In our case, we were level 19 when we faced Halaster, which was a bit of a disappointment.
Are there things that I wish had gone differently? Sure. But that's the nature of playing D&D. The fact is that I wouldn't trade that experience I had for anything. The biggest downside of this campaign is that it takes so long to finish because there's so much to do and so many stories that can be told.
Our group plays once a month, for 7 to 8 hours a night (not all of it focused, trust me), and what I'm reading is, I might be running this until I'm 90 (certainly 60). Is it worth it?
Probably you will get one floor done in 3 months if you go with everything as written. You can always cut out content. You are looking at 4 floors a year at 6 years of total play. You will most likely not have your initial group there towards the end, but some drop outs and adds. Ask your party how long they want to run. If they want less than a year, run Phandalin.
If you don't want to create your own or update better starting modules from prior editions of D&D, I'd suggest running the Pathfinder Kingmaker and buy the Kingmaker Bestiary (5E) to help with the conversion so you could run it for 5E. It's a very good campaign and unless your players did Pathfinder, they won't know what it is.
is one night a month with your friends worth it seems like a no brainer to me!
https://youtu.be/OoJMNkgEqKA
I think it will help
To be honest, this sounds ideal.
The major problem with the module is that it's narrative is threadbare. By only doing it monthly, that is less of an issue. It means that you only have to buy one module and it will last you years.
Bargain, so long as you enjoy dungeon crawls.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Ok, I really hate that so many people on this thread are completely guessing at how long it will take with zero actual experience. Obviously if you're in the middle of playing, I'm not referring to you.
If you're looking for a real answer from someone who has actually played through the entire campaign, take it from someone who played it start to finish, took 341 pages of notes, plus made over a dozen spreadsheets to track things like gates, downtime, player attendance, and various other things.
We started this campaign with 6 players and scheduled our sessions for 3 hours every Saturday evening, playing online using Fantasy Grounds. The first week, one person dropped and we picked up another. So still at 6. By the 6th session, we got to the second level of the dungeon. Two other players dropped after the 7th week. For the next 6 weeks, it was just 4 of us. We added 2 players for a bit, but both dropped after 6-7 sessions, so back down to 4.
On average, each level took roughly 6 sessions of 3 hours each. The shortest amount of time to explore a level was 3 sessions, and that was basically because we got captured or chased out of the level. The longest time between levels was 20 sessions and that was Level 16. This was due to two different things. First, level 16 is a bear. It's got over half a dozen dragons, one of which is an adult red dragon. Also, we did a bunch of downtime activities as we had introduced the Acquisitions, Inc rules and ended up using Stardock as our home base.
At the end of it all, we played for a total of 162, 3-hour sessions over the course of just under four years. If we had at least 3 players available, we played. Otherwise, we would skip that week. As you can imagine over that time period, there were various holidays so we didn't play every single week but fairly close to it. For exact context, the first session was on 2019-01-05, and the last session was 2022-12-10. Ballpark, that's 486 hours. Sometimes we'd go over 3 hours by a bit, but never by much. Occasionally we'd stop short because something big was about to happen, but I think it evened out.
We skipped over Skullport entirely, so that would probably have added another 4-6 sessions, which would have made it around 500 hours right at the 4 year mark.
Could it be done in less time? Yea, for sure. If your players are just looking for the exit to the next level in an effort to level up and get on with it, then sure. I talked to someone whose group played 8 hour games on Saturdays and after 6 weeks, were halfway through the 3rd level of the dungeon. Then they got bored and bailed. But they definitely skipped a lot of content and were specifically looking to find the exit to each level and move on.
If you're playing with a group of completionists who will leave no stone unturned, you're looking at 450-500+ hours of gameplay, easy. As much as we played and as much as we explored, we only found 29 of the 32 gates and of those, there ended up being 9 gates we never really found out where they went.
You're probably asking yourself... was it worth it?
For our group? Yes. Absolutely. We had four hard-core players who consistently showed up to play and our party makeup complimented each other pretty well. Two people had played in a previous campaign together, but the other two of us (myself included) had never met any of the others. Over a year after that campaign finished, we're still playing online in the Dragonlance campaign. It's really hard to not feel like you're good friends with people you've played through 500 hours of RPG's with, despite having never met any of them in person before.
Beyond the inter-player aspect of it, the campaign itself is pretty well put together. Each level has at least one, if not two major adversaries and you have to navigate various choices along the way. The DM has a huge impact on how this plays out and they have the ability to make it better or worse than as-written. And don't forget that this is one of the only official campaigns where characters can get to Level 20. So you really get to exercise your character options by the end of the game... assuming the DM cooperates, of course. In our case, we were level 19 when we faced Halaster, which was a bit of a disappointment.
Are there things that I wish had gone differently? Sure. But that's the nature of playing D&D. The fact is that I wouldn't trade that experience I had for anything. The biggest downside of this campaign is that it takes so long to finish because there's so much to do and so many stories that can be told.