2023-11-12 About Our Game

I’m sure that I’ll provide more in depth posts in the future about all the stuff I discuss below but here’s a quick overview of our game.

Goal

My primary goal has been to create a very long running campaign and by long I mean long, a decade or more! A campaign where generations of characters go from zero to max level. A campaign that involves a large number of players all contributing to build a giant shared world through actual play.

All subsequent decisions were made to support this goal.

Sandbox

Our game is a sandbox game. That means there are no story arcs. Instead there are a NPCs that have individual goals that they work towards over time. It’s assumed that many of these goals will conflict with the characters plans. Players can choose to get involved with these conflicts, or not, it’s always their chocie. I’ve chosen this style of game based on previous experiences trying to run long running campaigns with story arcs. I personally found that didn’t work well for me. After 65+ sessions I’m convinced the sandbox style game was the correct choice.

Rules

I’ve elected to use Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy rules. I made this choice after a lot of research prior to starting the game. I became convinced that classic TSR era D&D lends itself to long running sandbox campaigns much better than modern rules and I found OSE:AF to be the best, readily available, retro clone at the time. I’m extremely happy with this choice and intend to continue using OSE:AF but will be extending the game a bit with additional rules.

Schedule

We play weekly, on Saturday nights, with a relatively large group. My goals is to maintain 7 regular players. This helps to insulate the game from absences. It is assumed that over time players will come and go. I don’t expect anyone to commit to a 10 year campaign.