Last night we played the last of a 2 sessions Nostaligia-ride that is the re-visiting of an old campaign. About 5 or so years ago, we started our second vanilla D&D campaign with level 1 PCs. Now I don’t exactly remember what players and what characters were there when we started. It started out as a 3.0 game and was morphed into a 3.5 game as the new version was released.
We played a lot of published adventures with that game and we went from level one to the lofty and seldom-reached 18th level. It was a great campaign. Not perfect mind you, we had boring stretches, long arguments and I even managed to lose a good friend somewhere in there. But it was a good campaign. The players beat the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which was such a massive adventure that it covered level 4 to 14 by itself.
We left the campaign about 2 years ago. For various reasons, chief among them the desire for newness and because some characters (not players mind you) had evolved to a point in their stories that the party’s integrity could not be maintained. It happens pretty often in long games, and I would not want it otherwise. It’s a role playing game, the players are free to choses where the character goes and to push the character’s psyche in the direction they need. I’m not that much of a failed novelist that I wish to impose party unity. (Although to be perfectly honest, I did try to shake things up at the end bring the characters back together). Regardless, the campaign had run it’s course and we all agreed to leave it and start anew, with a side agreement that characters would be kept and we could return to it someday.
We did just that this summer. We played one last adventure with these old characters. It was really fun for me and I think the players liked it too. It was nice to see the mix of fond memories and wonder when each players were looking at their character sheets to review their capacities and items. On top of it all, the adventure was a classic effort-to-frustration-to-satisfaction arc. The characters were apparently severely outmatched and limited in their resources to address the problems at hand : negotiate with interplannar masters of deceit and bargaining. They spent a lot of mental energies to resolve the numerous non-combat challenges of this adventure.
As an unexpected bonus, the 3 fights seen in these 2 sessions were short, if somewhat anticlimatic. Thanks to Save or Die effects (or vastly superior tactical advantage in one case) all fights were very short. I say bonus because returning to a high level game after 2 years of low-to-mid level gaming (our recently abandoned campaign), there is a high risk of stalling the game while reading spells and rules and playing out the fights, and this breaks the fun. (I’ll have a rant one day against save or die effects, but this time I’m glad we had them).
Bottom line, the players ‘won’, the characters are off to new adventures in far off realms and the players are letting them go, apparently happy and satisfied. I know I am.
Thanks for the great game guys. Let’s hope the next one is even better!
Cheers, see you all in 2 weeks.
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