I have been playing D&D for about a year now, and a few months ago I decided to pick up being the DM, and I really enjoy it, but sometimes my campaigns are way too short. On average, they can be finished in two to three sessions, but I kinda want them to last more. (In-between five to ten, of not longer). I do not use premade campaigns, I always create my own, due to the fact that it's much better, in my opinion, than using premade campaigns.
I have allot of different plot ideas, here are some rough examples:
You're in a dungeon when you enter a room with a weirdly colored body of water in it. You jump in it. It drops you on a road in modern day New York. Almost gets run over. Gets mugged then hunts down and kills the mugger. Gets arrested for murderer. Gets busted out by a wizard you used to know. The wizard is actually a really evil necromancer who is trying to take over New York, but you don't know that yet. He tries to recruit you for his cause, if you agree, he sends you on some quests to get some necromancer spell component things. You Then realize that he is evil and have to track him down and kill him.
Asmodeus had a son and the son is planning on claiming hell's throne/bringing his father back. You discover this because he shows himself after years of hiding and running, but then he kills hundreds of innocents, and you realize you must stop the son before he can revive Asmodeus, Or you can help him and be greatly rewarded when Asmodeus is revived, but you also have to help him take over the world. To awaken him, you must find a made up mystical artifact and bathe it in the sacrificed blood of a mortal. The body of the sacrificed mortal will be used as a vessel for the limited power Asmodeus has during his awakening, but he will eventually need a better one, then you must find his soul and perform a ritual to bring him into the body until he had enough power to use his true form again.
Again, these campaign ideas are just rough drafts, and aren't even close to being finished. So of I could could get some help on how to make them longer/better, that would be very helpful.
I would be happy to help, but I think it would be useful if you could provide a bit more information first. Here are a few questions that might help folks get started on helping you:
1. Are you homebrewing or running a premade campaign?
2. How many sessions did your campaign last and how high of a level did your characters get to, and why do you consider this too short?
3. In one paragraph, describe each of your campaigns that you considered "too short", including the main objectives and overall plot.
4. How long do you want the campaign to last?
5. What specifically do you feel is causing you to make the campaigns too short (if you know)?
That should help provide a framework for people trying to help you--I am sure plenty of folks can give you general platitudes about making the campaigns too long, but it will be more helpful if you can provide information allowing responses that target the specific issues you appear to be having.
Looking at your two campaign ideas, here is my analysis of the relative ease for sustaining the proposal into a long campaign, along with a few general pointers.
New York Campaign:
Campaigns set in the real world are rather hard to sustain for a long period of time. Players already generally know New York, so there is not much to explore and discover other than real-world things--this causes the novelty of the setting to wear off rather quickly. Additionally, the events and encounters tend to get stale. After all, if you are in a world where magic is relatively rare--like New York--you are probably mostly going to run into regular human beings with mundane, non-fantasy weapons. Perhaps you will run into some magical things--like whatever the necromancer creates--but that is also going to be relatively limited and/or grow repetitive if you are trying to keep the "Real New York" setting.
You also have a secondary problem with this proposal that might betray why you are having difficulty running a campaign. In designing this, you have the campaign be very scripted--there is not much room for the players to go off and do side quests or just generally engage in tomfoolery. Your campaign goes from point A to point B to point C to the final quest of killing the necromancer, and that is about it. Combined with the setting and you have a campaign that is likely going to move through objectives fairly quickly and end in relatively short order.
Asmodeus' Son Campaign:
Again, you are running into a bit of an issue where you have scripted your campaign, which can cause the campaign to move in a fairly linear fashion, ultimately causing it to end quickly. You have two branching options in the proposal--a good or an evil option, but you still have set objectives. Still, this has the better framework for a campaign--it sticks within a fantasy world they can explore and lends itself to multiple paths to complete the objectives.
The key is going to be allowing the party to go off the rails sometimes, engaging in side quests, exploring towns they find interesting, etc. If you force players to always stay on your script, the campaign is going to always end faster--you will run out of ways to say "and now you have to do this before reaching the main objective" if you never distract players with side quests or allow them to just do things they want to do.
To that end, the best thing you can do is be willing to adjust your campaign on the fly. Suppose some evil cult is trying to revive Asmodeus, but the party is really interested in the rumors about the squid monster hiding in a lake. Let them ignore your plot and investigate the lake. Your plot can then move on without the party--perhaps the cultists will complete an objective that makes the party's work harder while they are having their lake vacation. You now have stretched out your campaign by a few sessions--the session with the lake monster and a few sessions where the party has to mitigate the damage done because they ignored the primary threat.
Or, perhaps they do go to stop the cult, ignoring the rumors of the squid monster. You could have the cult mostly be stopped, but have one of the members escape with an amulet the party needs to destroy/take. Now you have a session or two where the party has to trace rumors of the cultist, travel to their new location, and find them.
Another thing you can do is distract party members with quests related to their backstory. Your outlines are very focused on the primary campaign, but each player has their own, individual objective. The goal should be to have a number of little quests throughout the campaign that help individual characters develop and grow. These individual quests should be focused on that character--but should also have elements of the main quest and other character's goals as well, otherwise the other players in your party will not be engaged in someone else's story.
For example, maybe one of your characters is a deposed prince and he wants his throne back. You could go on an entire late-game side quest to claim his throne... while at the same time making it so the other party members need the prince's army in order to stop an army of devils. That way the prince character gets his objective done, but the other characters also advance the main plot by getting an army under their command.
The best and simplest advice I can give - if you want a longer campaign - is don’t write the story in advance. Let the players write the story as they play.
I don’t mean wing it completely… have a setting and an idea of who the important NPCs in the story will be, and perhaps an outline of what the sinister plot and BBEG will be… but then drop the players into the world and see what happens. They may suspect an entirely different threat than the one you intended… and you might like it a lot better that the one you came up with. Or maybe they can’t find a direction on your own, so you can start feeding them crumbs of the plot you had in mind and see how they like it.
In any case, don’t reveal the BBEG right away. Let them chase some other problem, but pick up a thread along the way, and that leads to another seemingly unrelated problem but then here is another thread… and another… let them figure out on their own that all these threads lead back to a singular threat that was behind the scenes all along. Then once they put it all togther, think about whether it is time to end the campaign by letting them chase down BBEG, or if everyone is still enjoying the grind and then maybe you can work in a few “steps” that have to happen before they can challenge the boss. Before you know it… boom. 6 month plus campaign.
I probably made it sound simpler than it is. Let me back up to one critical piece of advice. DMs should treat plot like salt. Sprinkle a little into each game and it makes everything better. Dump a pile of it all at once and you ruin the dish. Avoid the urge to narrate plot or dump big piles of revelatory exposition on players. Let them find the plot at their own pace and try to let it reveal itself naturally through the story. It is so rewarding when the players figure out the plot without you telling them… when they have that “Oh $)6@! These guys are working with those other guys from before!” moment all on their own.
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PC - Ethel - Human - Lvl 4 Necromancer - Undying Dragons * Serge Marshblade - Human - Lvl 5 Eldritch Knight - Hoard of the Dragon Queen
DM -(Homebrew) Heroes of Bardstown *Red Dead Annihilation: ToA *Where the Cold Winds Blow : DoIP * Covetous, Dragonish Thoughts: HotDQ * Red Wine, Black Rose: CoS * Greyhawk: Tides of War
Buy older campaigns and review how they were set up and learn. Typically set up a sand box with a few towns, various areas of interest. Set up a reason for the player to interact. Lets look at the Red Hand of Doom.
1st) Players come to area and are ambushed by the Red Hand (shows bandits are killing locals)
2nd) Players come to Drellin's Ferry and they beg for help and give the players a few areas to help.
3rd) Players go to an area, kill them and get details on next area to go to.
4th) There are enemy agents that will try to derail the party to go to the wrong area or go somewhere more dangerous.
5th) At the end of each session ask the players where they are going to and build out the next area.
6th) Allow players to move out of the area, but the consequences will be that area is now under enemy control and shops and vendors are gone. Perhaps they hunt them down in the next area.
Here's a couple things I've tried to do to make my campaigns longer: 1. don't reveal too much about the finale early. Maybe have the players encounter a big bad general or two, who speak proudly of the REAL BBEG they serve before the party actually faces the BBEG.
2. mandatory side-quests. Before facing Asmodeus's son, maybe the party needs a way to get to hell so they gotta do a fetch quest or two. And on the way to that they might need to defend a town from undead. The key here is MAKE THE SIDEQUESTS MEANINGFUL! Backstories of characters are PERFECT for this!
3. "random" encounters. I say random in quotations because my random encounters have meaning. After being ambushed by some bandits, the party realizes a caravan of goods they had been escorting has been stolen from and they gotta retrieve it or suffer a payment penalty upon delivery (kinda like the mandatory side-quest, but more sudden). Just make sure the random encounters aren't too hard compared to the rest of the campaign and the ACTUAL battles.... I once ran an encounter where a player got turned to stone by cockatrices and then dropped off a cliff for an instant-death by harpies as part of a "random encounter" (would not recommend).
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I have been playing D&D for about a year now, and a few months ago I decided to pick up being the DM, and I really enjoy it, but sometimes my campaigns are way too short. On average, they can be finished in two to three sessions, but I kinda want them to last more. (In-between five to ten, of not longer). I do not use premade campaigns, I always create my own, due to the fact that it's much better, in my opinion, than using premade campaigns.
I have allot of different plot ideas, here are some rough examples:
You're in a dungeon when you enter a room with a weirdly colored body of water in it. You jump in it. It drops you on a road in modern day New York. Almost gets run over. Gets mugged then hunts down and kills the mugger. Gets arrested for murderer. Gets busted out by a wizard you used to know. The wizard is actually a really evil necromancer who is trying to take over New York, but you don't know that yet. He tries to recruit you for his cause, if you agree, he sends you on some quests to get some necromancer spell component things. You Then realize that he is evil and have to track him down and kill him.
Asmodeus had a son and the son is planning on claiming hell's throne/bringing his father back. You discover this because he shows himself after years of hiding and running, but then he kills hundreds of innocents, and you realize you must stop the son before he can revive Asmodeus, Or you can help him and be greatly rewarded when Asmodeus is revived, but you also have to help him take over the world. To awaken him, you must find a made up mystical artifact and bathe it in the sacrificed blood of a mortal. The body of the sacrificed mortal will be used as a vessel for the limited power Asmodeus has during his awakening, but he will eventually need a better one, then you must find his soul and perform a ritual to bring him into the body until he had enough power to use his true form again.
Again, these campaign ideas are just rough drafts, and aren't even close to being finished. So of I could could get some help on how to make them longer/better, that would be very helpful.
I would be happy to help, but I think it would be useful if you could provide a bit more information first. Here are a few questions that might help folks get started on helping you:
1. Are you homebrewing or running a premade campaign?
2. How many sessions did your campaign last and how high of a level did your characters get to, and why do you consider this too short?
3. In one paragraph, describe each of your campaigns that you considered "too short", including the main objectives and overall plot.
4. How long do you want the campaign to last?
5. What specifically do you feel is causing you to make the campaigns too short (if you know)?
That should help provide a framework for people trying to help you--I am sure plenty of folks can give you general platitudes about making the campaigns too long, but it will be more helpful if you can provide information allowing responses that target the specific issues you appear to be having.
There.
Looking at your two campaign ideas, here is my analysis of the relative ease for sustaining the proposal into a long campaign, along with a few general pointers.
New York Campaign:
Campaigns set in the real world are rather hard to sustain for a long period of time. Players already generally know New York, so there is not much to explore and discover other than real-world things--this causes the novelty of the setting to wear off rather quickly. Additionally, the events and encounters tend to get stale. After all, if you are in a world where magic is relatively rare--like New York--you are probably mostly going to run into regular human beings with mundane, non-fantasy weapons. Perhaps you will run into some magical things--like whatever the necromancer creates--but that is also going to be relatively limited and/or grow repetitive if you are trying to keep the "Real New York" setting.
You also have a secondary problem with this proposal that might betray why you are having difficulty running a campaign. In designing this, you have the campaign be very scripted--there is not much room for the players to go off and do side quests or just generally engage in tomfoolery. Your campaign goes from point A to point B to point C to the final quest of killing the necromancer, and that is about it. Combined with the setting and you have a campaign that is likely going to move through objectives fairly quickly and end in relatively short order.
Asmodeus' Son Campaign:
Again, you are running into a bit of an issue where you have scripted your campaign, which can cause the campaign to move in a fairly linear fashion, ultimately causing it to end quickly. You have two branching options in the proposal--a good or an evil option, but you still have set objectives. Still, this has the better framework for a campaign--it sticks within a fantasy world they can explore and lends itself to multiple paths to complete the objectives.
The key is going to be allowing the party to go off the rails sometimes, engaging in side quests, exploring towns they find interesting, etc. If you force players to always stay on your script, the campaign is going to always end faster--you will run out of ways to say "and now you have to do this before reaching the main objective" if you never distract players with side quests or allow them to just do things they want to do.
To that end, the best thing you can do is be willing to adjust your campaign on the fly. Suppose some evil cult is trying to revive Asmodeus, but the party is really interested in the rumors about the squid monster hiding in a lake. Let them ignore your plot and investigate the lake. Your plot can then move on without the party--perhaps the cultists will complete an objective that makes the party's work harder while they are having their lake vacation. You now have stretched out your campaign by a few sessions--the session with the lake monster and a few sessions where the party has to mitigate the damage done because they ignored the primary threat.
Or, perhaps they do go to stop the cult, ignoring the rumors of the squid monster. You could have the cult mostly be stopped, but have one of the members escape with an amulet the party needs to destroy/take. Now you have a session or two where the party has to trace rumors of the cultist, travel to their new location, and find them.
Another thing you can do is distract party members with quests related to their backstory. Your outlines are very focused on the primary campaign, but each player has their own, individual objective. The goal should be to have a number of little quests throughout the campaign that help individual characters develop and grow. These individual quests should be focused on that character--but should also have elements of the main quest and other character's goals as well, otherwise the other players in your party will not be engaged in someone else's story.
For example, maybe one of your characters is a deposed prince and he wants his throne back. You could go on an entire late-game side quest to claim his throne... while at the same time making it so the other party members need the prince's army in order to stop an army of devils. That way the prince character gets his objective done, but the other characters also advance the main plot by getting an army under their command.
Hope some of that helps.
The best and simplest advice I can give - if you want a longer campaign - is don’t write the story in advance. Let the players write the story as they play.
I don’t mean wing it completely… have a setting and an idea of who the important NPCs in the story will be, and perhaps an outline of what the sinister plot and BBEG will be… but then drop the players into the world and see what happens. They may suspect an entirely different threat than the one you intended… and you might like it a lot better that the one you came up with. Or maybe they can’t find a direction on your own, so you can start feeding them crumbs of the plot you had in mind and see how they like it.
In any case, don’t reveal the BBEG right away. Let them chase some other problem, but pick up a thread along the way, and that leads to another seemingly unrelated problem but then here is another thread… and another… let them figure out on their own that all these threads lead back to a singular threat that was behind the scenes all along. Then once they put it all togther, think about whether it is time to end the campaign by letting them chase down BBEG, or if everyone is still enjoying the grind and then maybe you can work in a few “steps” that have to happen before they can challenge the boss. Before you know it… boom. 6 month plus campaign.
I probably made it sound simpler than it is. Let me back up to one critical piece of advice. DMs should treat plot like salt. Sprinkle a little into each game and it makes everything better. Dump a pile of it all at once and you ruin the dish. Avoid the urge to narrate plot or dump big piles of revelatory exposition on players. Let them find the plot at their own pace and try to let it reveal itself naturally through the story. It is so rewarding when the players figure out the plot without you telling them… when they have that “Oh $)6@! These guys are working with those other guys from before!” moment all on their own.
PC - Ethel - Human - Lvl 4 Necromancer - Undying Dragons * Serge Marshblade - Human - Lvl 5 Eldritch Knight - Hoard of the Dragon Queen
DM - (Homebrew) Heroes of Bardstown * Red Dead Annihilation: ToA * Where the Cold Winds Blow : DoIP * Covetous, Dragonish Thoughts: HotDQ * Red Wine, Black Rose: CoS * Greyhawk: Tides of War
Thank you both. Those are extremely helpful tips.
Buy older campaigns and review how they were set up and learn. Typically set up a sand box with a few towns, various areas of interest. Set up a reason for the player to interact. Lets look at the Red Hand of Doom.
1st) Players come to area and are ambushed by the Red Hand (shows bandits are killing locals)
2nd) Players come to Drellin's Ferry and they beg for help and give the players a few areas to help.
3rd) Players go to an area, kill them and get details on next area to go to.
4th) There are enemy agents that will try to derail the party to go to the wrong area or go somewhere more dangerous.
5th) At the end of each session ask the players where they are going to and build out the next area.
6th) Allow players to move out of the area, but the consequences will be that area is now under enemy control and shops and vendors are gone. Perhaps they hunt them down in the next area.
Here's a couple things I've tried to do to make my campaigns longer:
1. don't reveal too much about the finale early. Maybe have the players encounter a big bad general or two, who speak proudly of the REAL BBEG they serve before the party actually faces the BBEG.
2. mandatory side-quests. Before facing Asmodeus's son, maybe the party needs a way to get to hell so they gotta do a fetch quest or two. And on the way to that they might need to defend a town from undead. The key here is MAKE THE SIDEQUESTS MEANINGFUL! Backstories of characters are PERFECT for this!
3. "random" encounters. I say random in quotations because my random encounters have meaning. After being ambushed by some bandits, the party realizes a caravan of goods they had been escorting has been stolen from and they gotta retrieve it or suffer a payment penalty upon delivery (kinda like the mandatory side-quest, but more sudden). Just make sure the random encounters aren't too hard compared to the rest of the campaign and the ACTUAL battles.... I once ran an encounter where a player got turned to stone by cockatrices and then dropped off a cliff for an instant-death by harpies as part of a "random encounter" (would not recommend).