How long can a PbP last?

I was just wondering what the longest-running game on the site is and how far the characters have progressed. I would really love to take a D&D5E character all the way from 1st to 20th level, but I figure that could take several years even with regular posting. How far has anyone else got?

I think also you'd probably want to know if it was continuous posting (weekly) or with breaks (Only plays in the summer or weekends but multiple posts a day)?

That makes sense. Possibly number of posts is the way to go then.

I can write up some code to figure this out, but do bare in mind. The site is about two and a half years old but didn't get much of any activity for the first 8 months, and didn't get consistent activity till about a year.

The most posts I saw was 2585, The Secret of Bload. Started March 19, 2015 and is still active as of today. Keep in mind this is only for the public forums that I can see, so there may be some more active games on here.

Don't worry about writing code for it, Keleth, it was just idle speculation!
Yeah, I saw that one too. I was wondering if anyone has a private game with more. I was also going to try to skim through the 2585 posts of Bload to see how much levelling had gone on, but I'll save that for when I have some more time.

We're at third level now in Bload.

Wow, 1 year and 2500 posts for third level. Extrapolating that out it would take almost seven years to go all the way to level 20 (assuming no breaks and XP scaling correct with level).

Or something around ~16,667 posts!

That's a big forum.

I suppose it is more realistic to progress all of the way with one character over a series of smaller games, assuming your GM(s) cater to it.

In my Out of the Abyss campaign I have 5 players that are at level 4. There are 1342 posts, 766 of those are in the gameplay forum. We've been running since November 2, 2015

I guess it really depends on whether the game is a one-shot adventure, several adventures, or a full-blown campaign...

Leveling up your characters is also highly dependent on the DM. Characters in Bload are 3rd level and have done a lot of RP, investigative work, and exposition, and the DM awards levels based on the completion of objectives. Meanwhile, characters in an Out of the Abyss game have already reached 4th level due to the massive amounts of combat. There's even a hybrid type of game where the characters do long stretches of RP with an above-average combat encounter rate, and the DM awards levels for objectives met.

For what it's worth, I like all three methods. All three have DMs that are very cognizant of player levels and set up encounters accordingly, with just the right amount of difficulty to make things tense.

Interesting.

I suppose going into it with the mindset "got to get this character to be a god" is the wrong way of doing it. Better to just enjoy the ride and not worry about the destination, so to speak.

Yup i have been playing some games for months and haven't even leveled yet... And not cared. It's more of a creating a story here then playing a game.


One game we spent days just posting character chats before the DM even got involved.

I've had a couple that lasted years.