Chasing the endless campaign

I had a fun conversation last night with my Friday RPG group about campaign length.

I’ve been chasing what I think of as the platonic ideal for campaigns for almost 40 years: the ongoing game that doesn’t end, or at least runs for a good long time.

I’ve never even come close. If memory serves, my record is 3 years.

And yet to this day, when I start a campaign, 90% of the time it’s structured in such a way that I could run it forever.

…So why am I still trying achieve this thus-far-unachievable dream?

Edmund Hillary’s famous quote is widely misunderstood, BTW

Partly because I just want to keep trying. I’m a stubborn person. Sheer cussedness is definitely a component of this choice.

But it’s largely because when I came up, this was The Way, enshrined in the anecdotal teaching of How to Play. Even though I don’t think anyone in my groups had ever pulled it off.

It’s not that I only want to play one RPG. I’ve played 200+ different RPGs; I love variety. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy one-shots or campaigns with a known endpoint; I love both, and have run and played them often.

There’s something special about a game that runs for a chunk of time. Things in the campaign take on a new life. Allies become rivals, enemies sometimes become friends. Locations are revisited. Highs and lows change the texture of the game.

Long-running games are special and fascinating in their own ways, and I haven’t seen all of those ways yet. What happens when players leave and join the group? Or characters die, maybe even the whole original party? What do the changes the PCs make to the setting itself look like when the timeline is measured in years, not months?

I want to see a campaign play out over a truly long period of time, just to see what it’s like. At the end of the day, I guess that’s why I keep at it.