The Merits of the Short Campaign

Nearly every RPG campaign I've played in started with no prearranged endpoint. I'm not referring to a prearranged ending for the story regardless of character actions mind you, but rather a limit to the number of sessions or maybe a conditional ending such as, "This campaign will end when the outcome of the Nightmare War is decided." In my experience, most GMs tend to start a game with the intention of playing off into the distant future, telling grand tale after grand tale perhaps for years with the same characters in the same world.

And why shouldn't people play RPGs that way? Playing the same characters week after week is fun after all, and getting to play around in an ever-growing continuous story is one of the major selling points of a lot of different games. A D&D 4e campaign that goes from level 1 to 30 is structured by design to play for about 75 to 90 sessions lasting three to four hours each. (That comes to a minimum of 225 hours of play. Chew on that for a minute...) After you accommodate for missed sessions, holidays, and the like that's a campaign that will last for over two years even if played weekly. There are a lot of monsters to slay and treasures to find in that span. The game and its supplements have scads of content just waiting to be experienced.

Unfortunately, the real downer is that often it seems that waiting is the only thing that much of the content gets to do. The fact of the matter is that life gets in the way of the grand tales we want to tell, and before you know it a player has to move away or develops a scheduling conflict with the game. Next thing you know, either you can't find a time that everyone can meet, or you find yourself rushing your tale to a dissatisfying close full of loose ends just to ensure that the players all got to see it through.

I've personally grown tired of the sprawling campaign, both as a GM and a player. It's a structure that fails to fulfill its promises more often than not. I encourage you to consider the benefits of shorter campaigns. Until further notice, I've pledged to cap all of my future campaigns at 13 sessions. That's a span that, if played weekly without interruption, will last approximately one season. The most obvious benefit for this in my opinion is that it's a realistic length for people with lives and jobs to commit to, but it has other benefits too.

Deliberate Story Pacing - When you as a GM know that you have a certain number of sessions to tell the characters' stories, you'll have a pretty good idea of when to stop introducing new plot elements and start tying up loose ends.

A Taste of Advancement - Advancement intervals for PCs vary from game to game, but if we use the D&D 4e assumption of character advancement every two to three sessions, a 13 session campaign will certainly have space for at least four advancements. It's nowhere near the total breadth of the advancement available in most games, but it lets you tell a story across a pretty constant power level while still allowing for character growth. A span of 13 sessions also works well for games that have no growth at all like Spirit of the Century, for example.

Excuse to Rotate Games and GMs - Ever wanted to try out a new system, but found your gaming group smack in the middle of a sprawling campaign? If you stick to shorter campaign intervals, you can try new products and GMs more often. It will help keep the games fresh and will curb GM burnout.

The greatest campaign I've ever run (and the only one that I've ever GMed to the story's completion without something falling apart) lasted exactly eight sessions. It was a d20 Modern campaign in which all of the players played themselves on our college's campus overrun with zombies and other undead. At the end, all of the players were excited to have conquered the undead hordes, and they celebrated their victory by playing out a reel of "blooper footage" that they pictured playing during the credits of the imagined movie of their successful campaign. As I sat back and watched them celebrate the end of play, I considered that moment to be the finest "thank you" I've ever received for GMing. Don't rob yourself of the joy of a well-finished story, because there's more to RPGs than the journey.