What's in a campaign?

What is a campaign? In D&D that question can have many answers and I think I'm going to change my approach the next time I start something new.

1) a campaign is a series of adventures that a party undertakes. It starts at low level and proceeds as the players level up. Eventually the PCs become leaders and the party decides if they want to continue or start something over.  If they continue then new adventurers the followers do a lot of the grunt work and the leaders do more nation building and help flesh our parts of the campaign world.  This goes on and on until interest is lost. Then new players are brought in along side some long term players or it is revived with new players but the world is the same the campaign continues.

2) There is a mega adventure that the party will undertake they will start at low level and proceed until the evil is stopped. WotC is making these campaign adventures as books. Almost every one of these is a self contained campaign. Sometimes one campaign book bleeds into another. But that seems to be the exception more than the rule.

3) A campaign is a goal the PCs set out to do. There might be several small adventures or just a large dungeon crawl that takes several attempts to complete. Think of this like a season in a television show. The season is a campaign and the series is a collection of campaigns.

I usually run something closer to option 1 that hybrids into 2 a little bit. I have an end goal the PCs can attain and once the PCs are sufficiently established as leaders they retire. Then I start up a new campaign at low level. The high level PCs are generally NPCs but they can be brought back in.

But I'm really leaning towards making Option 3 my new default even in a sandbox campaign. Give the PCs many options of things to do but once they start dealing with a village or large dungeon that is a campaign. After the campaign is over the PCs have a long period of "down time" as described in 5E and maybe as described by Matt Coleville. I'll take a month off work with the players off line and then start the process over again based on what the PCs want to do.


Also the formatting on my last post was went weird after I published it and made an edit. I've fixed that post if you want to try and read it.

Pax ludi and have fun.