Thanks to a G+ share by Alex Schroeder, I got a chance to read A bit more about Crimthan The Great’s Game and Group. It’s a blog post by Daithi MacLiam, then 78, about the more than 3,500 sessions of OD&D (paid link) his group has played together since 1974 (after starting with Chainmail in 1971).
I love reading about long-running campaigns. Like the Rythlondar campaign, a D&D game in Michigan begun in 1976, and extensively chronicles by its players, there’s a lot to unpack in here.
Starting with Chainmail Fantasy and continuing with OD&D we played our 1000th games in January of 1982, our 2000th in December 1995 and our 3000th game in September 2008 and this past weekend April 4th and 5th we played our 3687th and 3688th games.
By contrast, I’ve played 304 gaming sessions since 2008 (as of this writing) — roughly half the number Daithi’s group played during the same period. And I’ve never played anything approaching even a thousand sessions of the same system; the closest I’ve come is probably more like a couple hundred (maybe, at the outside, 300), running multiple AD&D 2nd Edition (paid link) campaigns back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I find long-running campaigns fascinating in part because they’re so foreign to my gaming experience. Rob Conley has been running games in the same setting for many years, and I know there are more folks out there doing this. I need system variety in my RPG diet, but I’d love to start a D&D game and keep it going in perpetuity alongside all of my other gaming.
Our typical gaming session used to be about 12 hours in length which works out to about 36 days of game time on the average. […] On the other hand since we passed about 70 years old the length of our games has decreased to about 8 hours split into two – four hour segments with a long break in the middle.
Two 4-hour sessions in the same day is like a mini-con every game day. I hope I can do that when I’m in my 70s! Hell, I wish I could manage that now — and Daithi has 40 years on me.
The original core group of players have had between (I am guessing here) 550-750 characters each. In spite of about 450 TPK’s, each of us have retired about 10-18 characters apiece. But on some game days we have went through 8-10 characters each.
Four hundred and fifty TPKs! Going through 8-10 characters in a session is nothing to sneeze at either: That figure makes the Rythlondar campaign’s top recorded PC death total — six — seem tame.
Looking at wandering monsters in OD&D vs. B/X D&D showed me part of the deadliness of OD&D, but seeing these numbers gives me a whole different perspective.
Daithi’s post was a great read, and I look forward to hearing more war stories from his group’s OD&D campaign.
Too bad this person’s story is almost certainly BS. “Crimthian” is a pretty well known among long-time members of the various old-school D&D messageboards, and isn’t known to be very reliable when it comes to the truth. It is also thought that He/She/It even had several other sockpuppet accounts, for one of which the supposed real person behind it “died”.
Interesting! My first contact with this story was this post. Thank you for providing some context.
Even if untrue, I enjoy the idea of a group of retired folks in their seventies playing OD&D with vigor and dedication. I hope I’m gaming that way when I’m in my seventies.