Campaign Length: A Different Kind of Mercer Effect

For people who are new to TTRPGs (especially d20 games like D&D, Pathfinder, or Tales of the Valiant), it’s hard to know how long a story, or campaign, should be. Newbies only have two examples: Actual Plays on YouTube and Twitch or the campaign books published by Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Kobold Press. Campaigns published for 5e tend to be (in my experience) 8-12 adventures long. The time required for any given tale to finish a campaign depends on how long each session is. (At the fastest - one session per adventure you’re looking at about a year to finish the campaign) Alternatively, looking to Critical Role as an example finds the gang playing campaigns (Vox Machina, Mighty Nein, Bells Hells) that are years long each. This is why I subtitled the post “A Different Kind of Mercer Effect” (in reference to the original Mercer effect - where inexperienced GMs try to mimic his voices, accents, and GM style) I do know that there are other campaigns that go for a long time - including the GRRM campaign that led to Wild Cards, but most new TTRPG players and GMs will have more of a chance of having come to the game after having seen Critical Role vs those other examples.

Because I came to the hobby recently I didn’t have any historical context to how long campaigns should be. Then I came across this video by Matt Coleville:

In the video Coleville talks about how early D&D was more like a series of unconnected adventures - more like sitcoms and less like today’s serialized dramas. (I also learned that the term “campaign” as used in TTRPGs comes from the idea of the military campaign season!) Just like some other videos I’ve seen recently, Matt argues that it’s better for the table to play smaller stories they can actually finish.

The reason I wrote this blog post is because as a newbie I had definitely fallen for the Mercer effect. I thought the way to get my table to really enjoy the story and feel strongly about what happened to their characters was to have a long campaign. But I’ve noticed that trying to make things last too long risks adding in filler sessions (like in Dragon Ball Z where they just powered up for an episode) that risk getting boring for the players and increases the chance of not finishing the campaign. And what’s more frustrating than a TPK (which could lead to fun stories) is never getting to the end of the story.

So if you’re planing out your next TTRPG campaign, think about keeping things shorter. Make sure the players get to have conclusions to their storylines. You can always string things together into a larger story, but at least this way if things have to end for any reason, the players got to have a conclusion to the story. This is more akin to what shows like Buffy: the Vampire Slayer did, and I think the show was pretty satisfying for having each episode be a story with a conclusion even if it was part of a larger season-long story.

• DnD
• Tales-of-the-Valiant
• Pathfinder