Ducal House Year 6 - DM Challenges

We just kicked off the 6th year of our home campaign, Ducal House, and the players asked me how I was finding it, how it compared to previous campaigns I've done and so on. I needed to check and confirm that it is indeed the longest campaign by sessions, hours and years I have run - and later this year will be longer than the next two campaign I ran stacked together. Two questions came up at the end of the session:
1. What (if anything) am I seeing as an issue?
2. What would I change if I could?

Background: We are DM+3 players and everyone is present or we don't run. We've managed to consistently punch out, on average, 2 sessions a month for the five years now. We just completed 125. It has moved from phase to phase, from very urban RP and problem-solving, juggling all of the problems of being rulers of the realm, to the out-in-the-field questing mode where the party has less resources and more risk, to some truly epic and dangerous stuff like venturing into a lost temple of Amman or venturing onto the Astral Plane, places where even very high-powered characters end up paddling hard to stay afloat. I am pretty happy with the variety that has kept it interesting.

Mechanically we have been running it with 3.5e, but it has been a very politics, RP, and problem-solving heavy campaign, so has not always engaged the colossal spell potential of now 11th level characters.

The main issue with a campaign this long has become lore management, particularly where it is not a one-and-done campaign. We return to previously trod ground, meeting people they already knew, or turning up in places where there ought to be people they know already. This makes recalling NPC names and so on necessary and while I have the great good luck of having mostly written down the names of all of those NPCs, I now have the issue of they're squirreled away in my chronological notes not by location. This has been relatively manageable within the sub-phases of the campaign but as we return to the home city I am finding this is not a fit for purpose way to do things.

I guess what this means is I should be kicking off a great work to location tag all my NPCs and have people referenced by location. This is a task to write myself a gazetteer of the places they go and tag everyone into those. There is a scrappy file of mixed notes I already have that exists and is good for tracking locations within regions - or sites within the home city - but it does not have the residents at the moment. I guess I can slot the NPC roster into that side of things. I do have an NPC index but it is just a list of names, more or less in chronological order. It's not useless, but it ain't useful.

On the one hand, it is going to be a big chunky block of work but on the other hand, it is almost certainly work that will pay back because we are going to continue playing in here. I am going to basically get the return from this effort invested so yeah okay fine I guess I ought to go ahead and do it. Technical debt at it's finest.

The change I contemplate is accelerating the clock. I am intrigued at the alternate possibility of the clock moving faster and factions and events evolving more session-on-session. At the moment, due to RP focus and relatively tight time control from the players because of their to-do list, not a lot of time passes per session. They don't want to just say oh right we go to eat and we go to bed - any spare time gets tasks wedged into them.

Over the course of these five years, even with tight time control, we have moved the clock along. Things have happened, and events have come to pass, which have been like the falling dominoes of previous actions. The only problem is even relatively minor things take a bunch of sessions to come to fruition, which I guess is the accepted nature of the campaign. It seems to be working pretty well but I am intrigued by the possibility of how would things be playing out at a slightly faster tick of events, more downtime, more dominoes falling and so on.

The players themselves recognize this as:
- We are higher up the food chain now and have more responsibilities.
- More problems are landing on our desk, and we need to triage those better.
- We should not be chasing after every minor quest and taking on every minor problem.
- We need to build an entourage and delegate the minor stuff

So the shift towards a domain-level game is happening in an organic way, but we are in that shift. It is a realistic in-world thing so I think that will be a piece to try, to test, is to see what if we some time as taking care of administrative tasks. They shepherd their flock, they deal with their duties as part of a noble family, etc. And that takes up some days and the clock moves along.

All in all good problems to have - both of these are pointing towards wanting to get more out of the game - getting the established details of the world right (better indexing) and getting to experience more of the world (faster clock).