Thinking about 6 Years of This D&D Campaign

12 Aug, 2026

I've been a player in a particular campaign DM'd by my friend for 6 years now, the anniversary just passed (August 6th). Today I'm talking mostly numbers, and my own personal experience. I won't talk about the actual plot in depth because that's my DM's business, I don't wanna just throw something so personal they've been working on for several years out there!

Stats

This campaign is D&D 5e mechanics, in an original world created by our DM! We have 6 players:

1. The DM
2. The Gnome Wizard
3. The gold Dragonborn Monk (that's me!)
4. The Air Genasi Rogue
5. The Shifter Paladin
6. The white Dragonborn Cleric (is kind of a homebrewed axolotl. He's just short and fleshy.)

We started in 2020, which was just in time to have Session 0 in person (I remember our poor DM being really excited because they wanted us to have an emphasis on props and physicality originally...), wonder what we were going to do for several months, and then since then we've played almost entirely online. I think we average about 1 in-person session a year.

• 2020: 4 sessions
• 2021: 13 sessions
• 2022: 20 sessions
• 2023: 15 sessions
• 2024: 9 sessions
• 2025: 11 sessions
• 2026: 9 sessions (so far)

This is a total of 81 Sessions. One session in 2021 I called a .5, but I regret that now and will change it to a whole number eventually. These sessions have ended up split over the months as:

• JAN: 6
• FEB: 11
• MAR: 11
• APR: 6
• MAY: 5
• JUN: 7
• JUL: 6
• AUG: 9
• SEP: 7
• OCT: 4
• NOV: 4
• DEC: 5

I'm surprised at how frequent February is, while we're not up to much then, its the shortest month! I'm not surprised how sparse the last quarter of the year is. On top of the usual American holidays, that time of year is hell at my DM's job. I'm a little surprised at how August jumps back up. Maybe we subconsciously have a bias because we know it's the anniversary month?

We started aiming for 1 session a month, and I think sometime in late 21 or early 22 we started to really commit to what is our current schedule: Every other Thursday, from 8-10PM. Which is actually really short/infrequent from what I've seen from others online. Depending on what we're up to, 10 can be our warning call and 10:30 is our definite cut off. SO assuming 2.25 hours per session, that makes a total of 182.25 hours over the last 6 years. Or, 7.6 days. Which means a little over 1 day a year is entirely (this campaign) D&D!

Our DM has sectioned the story off into 4 arcs, we're approaching the end now! The story arcs have split off into:

• Arc 1: 26 sessions
• Arc 2: 25 sessions
• Arc 3: 24 sessions
• Arc 4: 6 sessions (so far)

That's a pretty awesome split 🤯. Arc 4 is, I believe, meant to be much shorter; we're basically just setting plans into motion for the final boss(es). It feels like we're on schedule to finish early 2027. (I say this as just a player who doesn't know exactly how things are gonna go beyond our party's in-game plans.)

By the way, I have all of this information on hand because I am the note taker. I don't know how I ended up doing this? The notes exist in a weird limbo where they're for everybody but nobody asked for them. I'm pretty sure at least half of the players take their own notes. It's a GIANT google doc that is needlessly long. I have it divided into tabs so its hard to tell quickly, but napkin math from the print preview is it's about 235 pages long. It's borderline a transcript of most conversations. It's so long winded and thorough for no good reason. The best excuse I can say is that it gives better context to the jokes. An example of what my session notes look like:

Session 10: 8/12/2026

The team finishes fighting the slime, then we convince the evil bard to stop being evil. {This section is a 1 sentence summary I write after the fact to make browsing a bit more simple}

[important meta note goes here, like if a player was absent]

Winter 6th Hole underneath Villagetown's tavern

• Monk punches slime1, it explodes on him but we tank those

• Rogue shoots slime2

• Slime2 attacks Cleric

• EvilBard vicious mockery-es Rogue. Hey man :(

• Wizard casts shocking grasp on EvilBard. Oh he was vulnerable to lightning... we probably should have noticed that earlier. Whoops.

• WE DID IT!!!

• The EvilBard falls 99% dead onto the floor. Slime runs away.

• • EvilBard: OK OK OK sorry, please don't kill me.
• • Cleric: We just wanna be friends but maybe don't kill all the people in the tavern?
• • EvilBard: Sure.

• In the meantime, Monk gets his foot stuck in the wall and Rogue is refusing to help him because it's funny. {extend this to be about 2 pages worth of stuff}

So, you can see how it's helpful for when we end a session mid-combat, but it can be kind of overwhelming in the moment. And otherwise needlessly long. Regardless, I do it because I love it. (I probably will not take notes like this next campaign.)

My Personal Reflections

My gold dragonborn monk (Calogero) has taught me a lot about myself. Namely that I am a horrible D&D player oh my god DM I'm so sorry. My terrible feats include but are not limited to:

• Not thinking at all about my guy's backstory. It barely slots into the plot of the world and basically has just been handwaved and retconned a thousand times.
• • By extension, his age is somewhere between 28 and 56. idk.
• No committed personality. I've tried playing him goofy, obnoxious, frat bro, flirt, sensitive, cowardly, chivalrous, emotional, deadpan. I've confirmed I'm not a roleplayer at all. I'm just the player who shows up every week to see what the DM has cooked, and to hit things with my big stick.
• • On the other hand, I'm still an active player. I interact with the world and other players, and ask questions and try things. I'm just not in the weeds, if that makes sense. It doesn't matter how I ended up here, I simply am here now. I genuinely love this world that my DM has built.
• While cycling through 1000 personalities, Calo was poorly built for the sake of fun/ his non-existant backstory. I was an active hindrance to the party, just out of sheer ineptitude. High charisma monk is all I'll say 💀.
• • Eventually I caved and asked the DM if I could rearrange his stats, which they agreed to in half a second. The wizard looked at his sheet next session and was like "I could cry, he's a real monk now"
• Shout out to a fantastic moment of main character syndrome in session 2. (I thought the literal warning from the gods for the greater world was FOR ME.) I died immediately, super hard, and assumed the DM just bent reality to keep me alive because it was so fast. Turns out non-permanent death is a key part of the story of this campaign 💀. I guess that would explain why we were fighting multiple hags at level 1 or 2.
• You know what the martial character that almost never hits anything (in part because of his bad build) should take? The chef feat.
• • You know what this party that never takes short rests and already has a couple of healers needs? A chef. (I still am one, for the bit, also the muffins have come in clutch. I'm a mage slayer too!)
• Early on I forgot/ignored my ki points so much AND was generally such a Dude™ that for many months, the wizard thought I was a human fighter and my flavor was unarmed combat.
• We believe this was DNDBeyond being a Very Good Website (we're not using it next campaign); but for a very long time, probably over a year, I had a blood spear with a +4 to hit. What we're guessing happened is the +2 it should have had wasn't working, so we added it manually, DnDBeyond eventually fixed it and gave me the +2, but the manual override was still there.
• • Part of the reason we never noticed, to be fair, is I'm very obviously the weakest character of the whole party, especially before I redid my stats. Everybody is bending reality around me, we're lucky if I even make physical contact with the bad guy.
• • I have never gotten to use the vampiric effect of this spear and will lose my mind the second it happens. One day.

To give myself some grace, I think I have some strengths as a player 🥲. The counterpart to my horrible non-backstories¹ is the DM can do anything they want. I like control over my guy directly in the moment and that's it. Split the world into pieces, blow up my parents, get tricked by the evil bad guy? Sure man, all in. (Also it's not like I've added literally nothing 😭. I designed a handful of locations, Calogero's brother ended up being somewhat important because he basically figured out the plot of the campaign, and has a direct tie to our enemies. Calo's friends have become allies.)

I don't care about dice rolls anymore, I've ascended. I can kind of feel bad not being helpful if it's a particularly bad streak, but otherwise ehh. You miss the attack when you roll low, oh well. The game will continue regardless of number. I think this is a consequence of being a martial character. That shit will humble you. Especially with spellcasters with big AOE things all around. Also I don't believe in dice jail, I love all my children equally.

To have a conclusion: what have I learned from 6+ years of playing in 1 D&D campaign? That I am really lucky LOL. There's an entire booming genre of online content revolving around bad TTRPG experiences. I have good friends and have fun :) Thank your DM today!!

#Rambles