The Appropriate Amount of Time

For the longest time, our little group of role players suffered from severe short attention spans.  Quickly distracted by shiny stuff, spending more time on YouTube than on the game, and setting ourselves up for failure every week.  We'd build characters, start a campaign - sometimes from module, sometimes off the cuff - and it would barely last a month before we were itching to give it up and try something else.  This was by no fault of the storytellers or the players, but rather this strange unspoken consent.  Nothing felt right.  It was very much like flipping through your Netflix queue and not being able to find anything to watch, trying a pilot episode of something new, and deciding "nah" and moving on before really giving it a fighting chance to prove itself to you.

So then along comes our current campaign - Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance.  It's big, it's Star Wars, and it's going to carry characters from level 1 to the cap at level 20 - which is a pretty bold statement considering we haven't leveled anything in any game for the past few years.  Lo and behold, it's a huge success.  I've not seen this kind of teamwork out of my players in a long while.  14 levels of advancement through waves of story and adventure means players can become emotionally invested with their characters, develop quirks with other player's characters, and grow from a mere mercenary-style annoyance to the Galactic Empire to becoming an honest-to-goodness powerful Rebellion Army.  We have paved our way through the galaxy, gaining renown and glory, making it through 7 out of 10 books in the campaign module, and we are rounding the corner towards the third and final chapter in this big, epic trilogy.  There's just one tiny, ever so problematic little thing wrong...

Yeah, I'm gettin' bout sick of this genre, buddy-boy!

We're over a year into this campaign, and I'm starting to reach this point where, even though there's more to do, and we're so near the end of the story, I kinda want to move on to something else.  Those D&D 5th Edition books are calling out to me, and Hoard of the Dragon Queen looks like it'll be amazing.  Not to mention switching from science fiction to high fantasy will be like a refreshing glass of Hell-Yeah Ice Water.  Let me put it like this: imagine if you were only allowed to watch one television show, ever, for years.  Just the one.  Even if you picked a really cool one - it's still just the one, in that one genre you picked, with that same batch of characters, in that same world, week after week, as other shows came and went.  I'm not saying I dislike the game - far from it.  But at what point do you stop, take a step back, and say "okay, television shows get to take a season off, and maybe it's for this very reason."  I think it's time for a break, but I have two fears with this.  Fear One: we'll switch games but fall back into old bad habits, which believe me no one wants.  It's the less likely of the two, but experience forces me to consider this as a possibility.  Fear Two: we'll stick with this game to finish it, but a lack of enthusiasm will make for rushed story and half-assed game sessions resulting in a less-than-spectacular ending.  Oh I think we all know what that feels like...

You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

I'll let you know what we decide.  So tell me how YOUR group handles campaigns that feel like they're starting to slow down or have maybe stretched on past their expiration dates.  How often does your group change games or genres?  And how does it feel to go back to complete a campaign after taking an extended break in a different game?  Comment - subscribe - all that...