RPGaDay2015: Time Keeps on Slippin'

15. Longest campaign played?

This takes me back. If you've read HTHD for any length of time, you know that shorter-arc games are an important part of our style of play. Short length helps to create pressure to get things happening quickly, making stories move fast and characters develop through meaty choices. No time for saving something cool for later.


That said, like a lot of people, I grew up playing long-arc games, including the expected D&D games with no particular end on the horizon. The most recent long-arc game that I ran was SUNSET EMPIRE, a Victorian vampire slayer game that lasted three seasons. Something like twenty sessions, spread over about four years.

The longest game I've ever played would be the D&D 2nd edition game I played in university, ably DMed by my friend Kathryn. Those days exploring the vasty Forgotten Realms are probably the best fantasy gaming I've played, and I often think to myself that I'd love to run a game that lived up to them one day. My own Forgotten Realms 3.0 game petered out without reaching the epic conclusion I'd intended for it, but we did have a lot of fun playing it.

Long-arc games have their own particular pleasures. I wouldn't go back to them, as a regular thing, but I do have a lot of fond memories, and occasionally I still think non-productive thoughts while leafing through my copy of MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP.

A campaign that demands months (years?) of your life... unlikely at this point in my gaming career.

16. Longest game session played?

Again, this would have to be a game back in university. Adult gaming doesn't lend itself to sessions of epic length, most of the time, and when you've got the time you often don't have the energy. Such is life.

I remember there were a few nights we gathered to play D&D in our little Trenholme Avenue apartment and played all through the snowy Montreal night. We would rise, around about dawn, and hike a few blocks to Picasso's Restaurant for a big, greasy breakfast. Spent and full of hash browns, we'd stagger home and sleep the morning away.

Glory days.

Awesome breakfasts 24-7. Sadly, Picasso's is no more. Alas.