Long campaigns?

[the-croupier]

When you hit that certain age: My regular gaming circle has had a Champions campaign going off-and-on since 1987 (still gets talked about over on the Hero boards now and then), and a Legend of the Five Rings campaign that kicked off in 1999 and is still going strong.

That got me thinking that some of the you posting here must have long-running games of your own (actually, maybe more than some of you). So I thought I'd ask: does anyone have (or had) a GURPS-based game that went on, lets say 20+ years? Maybe something that started right with Man-to-Man?

Or maybe even better: a 20+ year game that started pre-GURPS, in TFT or an entirely different system, and then migrated to GURPS at some point and is still going?

And if you do have one, what's it like and what's it about?

[johndallman]

Not yet, but I'm working on it. Roger_BW's GURPS Weird War II game ran monthly with some gaps from 2007 to 2021. I, and one of the other players, then started running separate games in the same continuity. I expect that these will easily pass the 20 years of play mark.

[whswhs]

Not something I've ever done. My longest campaign ever lasted from July 2014 to November 2021. Other than that, since I started keeping records, I never had a campaign last more than three years. I did have one cycle where all three campaigns were doing so well that I extended them from the usual two years; that was an exception.

I've habitually had more ideas for interesting possible campaigns than I've had time to run them, or players to play in them.

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Well, we recently finished our Gurps Perry Rhodan campaign. We startet in 2005/2006 IIRC.

[RGTraynor]

Technically, I have one. I started GMing again in 2003, after a few years' break, and that group called it quits in 2006; all the surviving first-generation players but one wanted to try other things. That one was my wife, who felt her wizard was just getting her foot on the step to becoming a mover and shaker. So she started one-on-one sessions with me, and they're still ongoing. Granted, the wizard's north of 750 pts right now, is a princess who's legitimately one of the world's most powerful mages, and Grand Master of the international mages' guild largest chapter. She's done very little of what any of you would call "adventuring" in a long time ... not that a party of 750 pters would be up for something much short of "kicking Thanos' ass" or "reordering space and time to their liking."

Since I started playing GURPS in 1985, and for most of that stretch running with two or three groups simultaneously, the record for a campaign (with a fair bit of player and character turnover) has been five years. Three is usually the outside.

Often the issue winds up being "we're getting all over 300 pt characters, and it's tough finding new challenges." A couple times the end of a long plot arc has the players feeling that the PCs' stories have come to a happy ending. Sometimes it's that I've relocated, and a fair bit of the time people just want to try out new characters and a new premise.

[Donny Brook]

I'm the second GM of a MH-style campaign that started in 2012, but there have been hiatuses.

[mburr0003]

I always have an "end date" in mind for games, a place where 'that's it, campaign's over". And the other GMs I've played with all have terminal inability to run for more than a handful of sessions before they crash the game into the ditch and abandon it. Well, all but my first DM who ran a handful of multi-year D&D campaigns back in the early 80s.

[Christopher R. Rice]

My urban fantasy game started in 2006 so I guess in 3 years I will.

[Dalin]

I ran a continuous fantasy campaign from 1996 to 2006. Generally weekly sessions with a few longer breaks. It took place in the same world as my prior AD&D campaign which started in 1989. Other than NPCs, though, the characters were all new. We wanted to start with 100 point GURPS characters as we got used to the system. Once they were more competent, we converted some of the old D&D characters but mostly kept them as background NPCs or for side-quests.

Now I’m more inclined toward shorter campaigns, though the old group and I occasionally talk about getting back together to finish the campaign story. It was pretty epic. We’re all in different states (and countries) now, so it would take some planning to make it happen.

[Rupert]

My 'Traveller' game (run using GURPS 4e) is currently on break, and has been since last October. At that point it was up to session 606, nominally with a session per week though in practice we'd skip a few weeks each year due to holidays, sickness, etc. Thus it'd been running for about 13 years, and it's a rough continuation of a previous campaign of 2-3 years, though with only some of the original players and characters.

Where it goes next time I run it, I have no idea.