I just wanted to take an informal poll as well as hear opinions on pros and cons.
Who routinely plays short (1-3 hour, single session) standalone adventures vs long campaigns (3+ sessions of 3+ hours each).
What advantages and disadvantages can you see with either style of play?
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I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
For myself, I run both. Overall, I prefer the short adventures.
The positives of short adventures are they are independent of previous adventures (I run mine like a spiral world, with a central home base and the adventures happen away from it but the characters return to base before the next), you can mix and match player groups, and you see the whole story unfold in an evening. Drawbacks are that the story is rarely epic and can each adventure can feel disjointed from the previous. I also find them tough to write. You need to be a good editor to keep the ideas from ballooning into a campaign.
For long campaigns, the greatest appeal is unfolding an epic story with twists and turns. Somewhat paradoxically, I find this easier to write. By far the biggest negative is you and the players can feel like you are not making any progress and if games are infrequent, it can be very hard to remember what happened last time, which may have been months ago.
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I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
You should have options between "one shot" and "grand campaign" - there's a big difference between running a story over the course of say, 6-12 sessions as opposed to a multiple years long proper campaign.
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I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
I agree with VanZoeren on this. I'm not sure I agree with your definition of 'campaign'. My idea of a campaign is minimum 50 sessions. Minimum 3 sessions is just an adventure.
Semantics aside, I love them all. I love returning to the world I created and formed with my friends as they discover a new plot involving familiar faces. I love DMing a party of weird characters that are never going to be seen or heard from again. I also love the (majority of) published adventures and seeing how different groups react to the same situations.
It's hard to pick a favorite but I chose the campaign option just because I love world building so much.
I prefer to run long campaign but had lots of fun running short single shot adventures in the past. I would advertise on D&D forums to recruit, but it wasn't really two-hour sessions thought, more like 3 or 4 hours at least.
I like running both and I run short 2-2:30 hour sessions. The advantage of shorter campaigns/one-shots is the brisk nature of them and just the graitification of finishing and moving onto something else. Long campaigns can hit flat spots and it gets tougher to replace players in a more advanced campaign-difficult to catch them up the lore, plot developments etc..
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I just wanted to take an informal poll as well as hear opinions on pros and cons.
Who routinely plays short (1-3 hour, single session) standalone adventures vs long campaigns (3+ sessions of 3+ hours each).
What advantages and disadvantages can you see with either style of play?
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
For myself, I run both. Overall, I prefer the short adventures.
The positives of short adventures are they are independent of previous adventures (I run mine like a spiral world, with a central home base and the adventures happen away from it but the characters return to base before the next), you can mix and match player groups, and you see the whole story unfold in an evening. Drawbacks are that the story is rarely epic and can each adventure can feel disjointed from the previous. I also find them tough to write. You need to be a good editor to keep the ideas from ballooning into a campaign.
For long campaigns, the greatest appeal is unfolding an epic story with twists and turns. Somewhat paradoxically, I find this easier to write. By far the biggest negative is you and the players can feel like you are not making any progress and if games are infrequent, it can be very hard to remember what happened last time, which may have been months ago.
Velstitzen
I am a 40 something year old physician who DMs for a group of 40 something year old doctors. We play a hybrid game, mostly based on 2nd edition rules with some homebrew and 5E components.
You should have options between "one shot" and "grand campaign" - there's a big difference between running a story over the course of say, 6-12 sessions as opposed to a multiple years long proper campaign.
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
I agree with VanZoeren on this. I'm not sure I agree with your definition of 'campaign'. My idea of a campaign is minimum 50 sessions. Minimum 3 sessions is just an adventure.
Semantics aside, I love them all. I love returning to the world I created and formed with my friends as they discover a new plot involving familiar faces. I love DMing a party of weird characters that are never going to be seen or heard from again. I also love the (majority of) published adventures and seeing how different groups react to the same situations.
It's hard to pick a favorite but I chose the campaign option just because I love world building so much.
I prefer to run long campaign but had lots of fun running short single shot adventures in the past. I would advertise on D&D forums to recruit, but it wasn't really two-hour sessions thought, more like 3 or 4 hours at least.
I like running both and I run short 2-2:30 hour sessions. The advantage of shorter campaigns/one-shots is the brisk nature of them and just the graitification of finishing and moving onto something else. Long campaigns can hit flat spots and it gets tougher to replace players in a more advanced campaign-difficult to catch them up the lore, plot developments etc..