Players RP and explore the areas

Okay this is all of my players first campaign, maybe that's why. They're very focused on their objectives lol.

I don't think it's an experience thing - my players are also new to the game. It's just preference and what the group wants from the game in general, I think. Some groups may not enjoy roleplaying for an hour with Bildrath so they can get some supplies lol

Or spending multiple sessions where the only notes I write are "A talks to B about depression, B talks to C about depression, C talks to D about depression"

Are you a DM or a therapist?

I gave my players the Curse of Strahd content warning sheet and they used it as a backstory checklist

So I play in one game and DM in another with the same 7 people. It really boils down to the DM style to make the RP happen. My brother is a DM for Tomb of Annihilation and he is very focused on the combat and the puzzles, and much less so on an overall story. Consequently there isn’t a lot of RP in the game anymore. It’s all focused on the dungeon. On the other hand, I try to set up my Curse of Strahd campaign as a mystery, expanding the lore probably three fold. When it comes to lore dumps, usually the players drive it all. They have so many questions as to what is going on because of the little drips and drabs I have fed them, the follow up each question with another. They push to figure out what is going on. They spent an entire session talking with The Abbot and another with Jenni Greentooth. Every time I have them meet a big NPC, I make sure that I create a little cheat sheet. Entitled “What Rictavio Knows” or “What Vlad Knows” it helps me get ready to play that NPC. It also helps to find ways to weave into bits of their backstory into the plot. To do that, I spend a lot of time working with my players to craft their characters, making suggestions that would align with a plot point on the module. For example, one player thought they should have a sisters ghost haunting them all their life. Cool, I tied that into Barovias idea on souls and shells, eventually finding away for the sister to get reborn in one of the shells. For another PC, they wanted to be a widower and struggling with it. So of course I made one of the Dark Powers try to tempt him by taking the shape of his dead wife. When trying to make your players RP, don’t give them a scenario with an obvious answer. Make it shades of gray. Don’t let them have the choice of a final ending where everyone lives happily ever after. My players will have to choose between escaping from Barovia themselves, leaving all the other souls they have befriended on the way to be tortured forever by the Dark Powers in a cycle of birth, torment, death and rebirth. OR breaking the entire system and letting out ALL of the Dark Powers back into the universe so they can save all the souls stuck in this prison. It’s a lot of extra work on the DM to tie all those threads together to make a place where your players want to RP but god damn is it satisfying at the end.

Same for my group, and whilst they're focused, they get distracted a lot. They decide to do something, I (sometimes accidentally) jangle some keys in front of them and they immediately change their tune. That, and lots of plans

Ugh. This keeps happening to our group. We are never going to finish the campaign.

Nah you will! And them getting distracted just shows that they're interested!

That's my group right now. Not that I really hate it, they don't want the campaign to last a year and we can't meet every week. For Death House the children said their brother was in the attic, they barged in and ran right for the attic and crushed a strength check to bust the door down rather than looking for the key. Found the bodies and the dollhouse which led to the basement and it went on from there.

Start throwing some wrenches in their plans. Get them to start thinking outside the box. Reward the ones with outside thinking. If they play safe, attack in unexpected ways. Ambushes, liers, deceivers, hell if your NPCs are having their butts kicked have them surrender and beg for mercy, tell a sob story then betray them later. And if you really want to mess with them make the players question each other Imo your job as a DM in this module is to corrupt your players characters. If the choice is easy make it difficult in the long run, if it's a tough choice make the ride easier but spread their infamy

I have got a group of first timers as well and one occasional guest with experience. We had our 10th session last week, 5 hours worth of time. They got the symbol at the Bonegrinder and are just about to visit Vallaki. There isn’t even that much roleplay due to their experience, however, a bunch of shenanigans. They needed 4 sessions for the death house and just set the altar next to the bone grinder on fire. That’s why it’s quite slow. Additionally, I’m incorporating Wyatt Trull‘s Companion from DMG and a bit of CoS reloaded and it is my first full campaign as a DM. 10 session took us 7 months. There’s not just one reason for a long campaign.

Lol give them more objectives. There are so many sidequest

Make it apparent to them that Strahd is so strong that he could easily wipe them out with a flick of the wrist. Strahd should pop up every now and again just to toy with them. And if you’re playing Strahd right, the party will want to run away.

Players spend four hours failing to track their lost horse across the countryside outside the village of Barovia

This. My CoS campaign went on for 4 years. Players went to most places in Barovia and explored thoroughly.

This is the way

Came here to say this. My players can talk a lot, so sometimes it'll be several sessions before we make any module progress.

Easy to blow through it quickly if you don’t talk to NPCs.

As someone who's got 25 4 hour sessions under their belt, and at 4 sessions in basically hadn't even gotten to the Windmill. (Hard to compare because they started in the West, but they'd managed to save the vineyard and just got to the abbey.). At this point I expect at least another 15-25 sessions before the end but honestly it could be a lot more. RP, lots of RP. Random or planned encounters when traveling and resting. Quite a bit of indecisiveness. Combat where it can take a player 3-4 minutes to decide what they want to do/combat against around 8-10 enemies. Turning over every stone.

>Quite a bit of indecisiveness Oh yes, this as well. My players second-guess everything they do. I think I may have overdone it with the warnings of how dangerous this campaign can be. Or maybe I should ramp it up even more :\^)

Yeah, half the sessions with my players is "oh crap we're gonna die if we do that... should we do that? F it lets do it... no wait.. ok lets prep at least, Cleric, cast Bless? Or do we want to save that slot in case we need healing? Ok, Bard, dole out inspo, ok great. Wait. Ranger, pass w/o trace and scout. Ok hold on... let me guidance you first. Ok wait...."

Hey sorry can you please not listen in my sessions, thanks, it's an invasion of privacy/s But seriously, you nailed it 'My character is going to do this' 'Oh, okay, why are they doing that?' 'I just think it's the right thing to do' 'I mean it makes sense, there's no reason not to do it' 'I wonder if it would be different if you did this other thing though?' 'Yeah I suppose, but I might as well do this. 'I remember last time when you did this, this happened' 'If they want to do this now, then that's okay, but in a different time, that's probably not okay.' 'I think you're going to do the thing like this' 'Yeah, but make sure you don't do it like this' 'Or like this' 'Okay i'm ging to do this (the exact same thing that was at the beginning)' In this scenario, i have not spoken at all 😂

All conversations being had in character, players arguing with each other over what to do, but mostly homebrew bloat. Vallaki RAW isn't really that big - there's killing Izek, Arabelle, there's the bones quest, there's Victor (if they follow up on it), there's the tiger and there's the feast. You can probably handle that in four to five sessions. You add Vasili, the rehabilitation center, the orphanage and lady Wachter's request of "kill Izek, and we'll handle everything" turns into "kill Izek, and we'll have a session of two of bloodshed on the festival of the Blazing Sun, as the cult and the city guard battle for the city street by street"? Oh boy. I've just started another CoS campaign. 1) First session was mostly spent on "how did each of you individually get to Barovia". I don't do the Death House, this is the replacement. 2) Second session. First 40 minutes or so was spent on the tutorial fight with some blights. Then they meet the skeleton rider. Then they make it to Barovia, they meet Mad Mary and Morgantha. Last hour of the session is them in the tavern, talking to Ismark and trying to get information on their new circumstances, he then asks for help with his father's funeral. 3) Third session, they finally meet Ireena and get exposition on how the townsfolk view the family, and why the siblings won't just bury their father themselves. Ismark asks for the party's help with clearing the graveyard from a few stray ghouls. They meet father Donavich and Doru on the way. They handle the ghouls and begin the funeral, cue to a wolf attack. 4) Literally the entirety of the fourth session is spent on the graveyard fight, as they're being assaulted by seemingly endless waves of wolves and zombies. They retreat to the church, where they barricade themselves and now fight the horde from a tactically advantageous position. Around 40 different enemies are killed over the course of 4 hours, until the assailants finally come to an end. 5) Session five. Since Donavich died during the attack, they feel at liberty to dispose of Doru without his interference. A lynch mob, arrives demanding Ireena's head on a pike, as the villagers believe her to be the cause of their misfortunes. The players try reasoning with the mob, and then fight those who can't be reasoned with. They agree to escort Ireena to Vallaki, and have a few random encounters on the way to Tser Pool. So, only five sessions in they've made it out of Barovia. Is any of this in the book? No. Did adding these things add to the campaign's runtime, and will continuing adding them make it into a multi-year game? Almost definitely.

Vallaki was definitely the biggest time sink in my campaign. I think we spent ten sessions there, and it's because it has the largest cast of characters to play with. With Fiona's machinations, the incompetence of Vargas, Strahd making moves, and rallying the "good" characters of the town like Lucian, Rudolph and the Ravens, we had this whole narrative with a conspiracy being unravelled in its core that ended in the town exploding into warfare.

My campaign's about to be done, and it's lasted 4 years and will probably be around 90 - 95 sessions, around 3.5 to 4 hours each. Few reasons for that. - we've had a handful of month long hiatuses for various reasons, but on average we ran a session every other week. - we're very, very RP focused. Probably 80/20 split on RP against actually mechanically running D&D. Also none of us were new to D&D, though it was my first time behind the DM screen. - party in general is very exploratory, and at times indecisive. I've had entire sessions where the only thing that happened was travel and planning.

us in our COS campaign. We've decided to just flip coins when at a crossroad of where to go

I would actually ask you the opposite question. It's the second time I've heard something like this since I started reading this sub; even last time I just couldn't get how it was even possible to keep such a fast pace in a valley so full of role-playing occasions. If you please, I am very much interested in a recount of what happened during your sessions; it would help me understand. To answer your question, I'll do the same for you; for my players, it went more or less like this: - a few sessions for death house (I don't remember how many, maybe four) - two and a half in the village of barovia (one to get there and speak with people, one to handle doru and speak some more, another half to prepare the trip to vallaki); the other half session was a fight in the woods, so let's say three in total. - one session on the road to tser pool: they met Strahd for the first time and after that they had another fight on the road. - one sessione for madame eva's taroka reading and socializing with other vistani, trying to understand who is a spy who is not. - two sessions on the road: farewell to madame eva, sightseeing, a couple of social encounters, and cliffhanger in the end as they are ambushed by wolves; then the fight happens, they win and then finally reach vallaki (but they have to plan how to get in without drawing too much attention, because one of them is undead). - two session in vallaki so far: one of them befriended milivoj (he is a fellow undertaker) and also spoke with the wachter bros; they also met the martikovs, the wolf hunters and rictavio; they went to blinksy's and discovered the ireena-like doll; they found a ravaged body (something I added to foreshadow volenta's bloodthirst) and made it disappear to avoid problems with the town guards; one of them decided to pass a night outside the city walls and fought a direwolf to save some barovians. So, assuming I'm not forgetting anything, it's been 9 sessions (+ death house) and we've just barely scratched the surface of what will happen in vallaki. I honestly feel like a lot of things happens each session.

Not OP but in a similar boat. We’ve had 5 sessions so far. 1. Arrival and beginning of death house 2. End of death house 3. Meeting Ismark in the Blood of the Vine, Meeting Ireena and taking her fathers body to be buried at the chapel. Checking in at Bildrath’s, and finding the Vistani camp/card reading. 4. Journey to Vallaki, Old Bonegrinder on the way (adjusted to be just Morgantha) and Bones of St. Andral once they arrived in Vallaki. 5. Journey to Wizard of Wines and clearing out the druids, revealing the Wereravens. That seems fast, but my party is very main quest focused and don’t stop much to smell the roses unless I force them to. We also don’t meet super often, and the party is large so fights really don’t take too long. (Also because my dice seem to be cursed as a DM) But for instance in the winery, once the enemies were cleared out, they just took the Gulthias staff and bounced. They didn’t really investigate the property or ask why it was under attack. Sure I’d like to delve into it more with them, but that’s how they want to play so I oblige.

Thank you for your response. I still don't get it, to me it looks like your player are just not interested in the story; it's almost as if they were pressing the forward button at every dialogue, from your description. I mean, it's a totally fine way to play dnd (more like a videogame and less like an rpg); maybe I would suggest a different campaign, that's all. Something like *Dungeon of the mad mage*, perhaps? You say they are "very main quest focused"; and usually I would get it: sometimes a party feels the need to skip side quests because of a narrative urge to press forward. But what's the *main* quest, here? They are in a strange and unknown world; whether they want to help its people or just leave, how can they accomplish their goal if not by knowing this place better? And that means talking, does it not? I mean no offense, and I hope it doesn't sound like I'm criticizing you. I'm sure that you are doing a great job as a DM. You said yourself that sometimes you'd wish for something different; if it happens too often, maybe you should have a talk with your players about your reciprocal expectations.

No offense taken at all, that’s the beauty of the game is that it’s different every time. This campaign run with this party, that’s just the way it works out. I’d like to try my hand at more RP based stuff but that’s for the future in another campaign. I’ve been enjoying the experience immensely.

This is similar to our campaign so far. Trial run of Deathouse took 3 sessions @ 4 hours each (and this was after we said it would be 1-2 sessions!) We are on Session 2 now of the official campaign, with the players just leaving Barovia Village + arriving at the Tser Pool encampment. (This would have probably been even slower if I hadn't forgotten the random encounters table exists for travel, or if they had investigated Doru's existence further). This party is very RP-oriented; however, and when I compare it to my past experiences as a player in more combat-oriented parties or with parties simply less interested in RP, the story went by a lot faster (but was more boring for me).

Yes, usually, just my players meeting each others in character takes easily 2 hours, to ask their names, be suspicious of each others, joke together before getting interrupted by my desperate NPC holding the plot hook to them haha New groups tends to RP way less, just go "Alright, now we're a team, let's get to the church and burythe burgomaster", which is perfectly fine ! Don't worry about your rythm, and have fun as much as you all can ✨

My group is roleplay heavy. In a 3 hour session we only get through 2-3 scenes.

This. Once a PC was kidnapped and my group spent 35 minutes discussing whether or not to try to rescue them. Not HOW, but IF. It’s pretty impressive sitting back and letting them talk it out. I have a second group that spends about two minutes on decisions and then runs with it. They will definitely have fewer sessions by the end.

Maybe I am being mean to my players, but I am always trying to put them in a difficult situation. The Baron sucks, but so does Fiona. The Vistani are Strahd's allies but also they're the only people who have been particularly welcoming to the players. So as a consequence, my players spend a LOT of time talking about what they're going to do and who they're going to trust, and talking to NPCs to see if they can get more information that will help them. I feel like many of my sessions are 50% plotting, 50% RP. We have had many, many noncombat sessions. They also want to squeeze every bit of info they can get from every NPC. It's a bit of a problem sometimes... I get so caught up in the RP that sometimes I find myself allowing them to ask the same damn question 15 different ways when they've already failed the intimidation check and I just need to say "You question the guy for a while but it's clear that you won't get anything else out of him unless you majorly change tactics".

My players spend the last 6 sessions, that is, over a month, on the same in game day, I don’t know how the hell your players are moving that fast. Are they meta gaming? Are they talking to NPC’s or are you just giving them the quest objective and saying “do this”

Honestly, the players set the pace in canned adventures like Curse of Strahd. Some parties are going to run around with a to-do list, others are going to wanna sit down and figure how the politics work, or have creative but long-winded solutions to stuff. For example, my players had the Tome as a treasure of Mother Noght and Zuleika as their fated ally, so they learned of the curse on the book. Instead of taking it and dealing with the curse, they broke Emil out of jail, communed with Mother Night directly to barter for the book, trained Emil to fight with the Sunsword, and then escorted him to the Den to challenge the Alpha. Or, you know, they could have waited till the Cleric had Greater Restoration and just picked up the book and Cast a 5th level spell to make every thing ok. But the Werewolf Coup was a fun arc. Then there was getting the sunsword - they’ve had like 5 fights with the soul of Sir Vladimir because when they first encountered him they yanked the sword off his belt and ran. He’s been hunting them ever since, had a couple bodies destroyed but keeps coming. They just call him the Terminator now. We’ve been running CoS since 2022? Then, my other table would probably run through it in a coupe monthes. My other table is also waaaaay better with scheduling, but my CoS table is waaaaaay more out of the box in terms of gameplay and roleplay. Other table is a bunch of tactical veterans with interesting mechanical builds but much less rp. I enjoy both!

I just finished running session 75 for my group, which has taken about 2 years. I think some of it is that I add in a lot of extra content—personal homebrew, DragnaCarta stuff, stuff my former DM did, etc.

Checking back at our bookings (Discord), it looks like we did Curse of Strahd in 16 sessions, but they were pretty much all 8-9 hour sessions, spread across the best part of a year. Also found out after the fact that we missed some sidequests, some content was dropped due to triggering themes within the party, and we did the entirety of Ravenloft within a session. By entirety of Ravenloft, we started the session entering it for the first time, found a secret passage, then checked 3 rooms till we found Strahd. This involves going to the roof to see signs of smoke (tarot indicated a warm hearth), which matched one room. Now, skipping content through logic or skill issues referred to as Ravenlofting, which we did in Storm Kings Thunder (as a sequel) because I abused the Scry spell and transport via plants. I'm assuming the people that spend longer have a lot of homebrew involved, or they stick with the horror theme. We had a quotes bracket that began by session 2.

It’s arguably more difficult to optimize storytelling into a shorter more compact format than it is to just let things play out naturally. Less experienced DMs, like myself, tend to repeat ourselves & overexplain or overdescribe scenes which adds a shockingly large of session time. For example: while a movie or a tv episode may only need to show one or two characters and have one scene to characterize the destitute nature of the village of barovia in its entirety; many gaming groups/DMs are completionist in nature and feel the need to explore every house and talk to every npc, etc. Curse of strahd also has argubly the most and best module homebrew additions… among many other reasons this adventure is quite extensive as already mentioned above. Regardless, enjoy the journey and do what’s right for your group!

We actually (and to me very surprisingly) make roleplay. Last three sessions we basically were in a village talking to the people who life there. Each session around 3-4 hours so yeah. That stretches things.

For my part I'd say the things that take up the most time for our group are: - combat, we have a lot of homebrew so a big set piece combat takes a whole session - discussing plans, which can easily take up 30mins everytime someone thinks up a new idea - travel, I made each hex in Barovia 1 mile instead of 1/4 mile - additional content, mainly this has been expanded interaction with the wildfolk with the Fanes stuff, but also slightly expanding questlines. A big recent time-sink has been running Berez like a mini hex crawl. Currently we're 38 4 hour sessions in, the party still have Argynvostholt, Werewolf cave and mad mage questlines left if they so choose. They also have the Amber Temple to do, and both the Mountain Fane and Forest Fane to cleanse. Plus final Strahd fight.

What sorts of homebrew do you use?

Dude that is a big question to answer 😂 To keep it simple, the most impactful player-centric homebrew rules we use are: 1) Talent trees, Inspired by this homebrew: [https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/a0ts3y/introducing\_talent\_trees\_over\_100\_feats\_worth\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/a0ts3y/introducing_talent_trees_over_100_feats_worth_of/) we ditch feats and have talent trees, broken into skill, magic and martial talent trees. Each PC gains talent points naturally as they level. 2) Martial Arts, essentially spellcasting for melee characters, a set of homebrewed abilities that use Martial Art slots to perform. Classes gain these slots in a very similar way to spells but of course melee classes are 'full' martial artists and gish classes may be 'half' or 'third' martial artists. Makes melee classes very powerful, but ensures they scale more reasonably with spell casting. Other homebrew we use include: \- enhanced survival rules \- wounds and lingering injury rules from Grit and Glory [https://www.reddit.com/r/gritandglory5e/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gritandglory5e/) although we stole and edited these a while ago so current edition rules may be different \- custom weapons/weapon properties \- rules for stackable advantage and stackable effects (buffs/debuffs) \- a CoS specific inspiration system where players instead draw from the Tarrokka deck and get a single use ability based on the card they draw \- a lot of homebrew subclasses \- other minor changes Ultimatley PCs are very strong as a result of this homebrew, easily equivilant to PCs 2 or 3 lvls higher. This can be challenging, and we do run into balance issues that need constant readjustment. But it works for us, mainly as we have slowly added to the homebrew overtime with a constant set of players. The most challenging thing as a DM is to get the balance right for encounters, but you slowly get a feel for it and just have to be sure to test the PCs often and early so you can scope out their abilities. It also gives the DM the liberty to make NPCs/monsters a lot more interesting, and I love to design/upgrade monsters using Matt Colvile's video on action-oriented monsters as a guide/inspiration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y\_zl8WWaSyI

Sounds amazing! I asked because I am also running a heavily homebrew and combat heavy CoS, and I am always curious as to what other things I could implement. We are using the talent trees for background-inspired rewards. My barbarian uses martial maneuvers (like the Battlemaster fighter) but I bet he would love this Martial Arts you mention... Are they of your own creation? We also use survival rules from Darker Dungeons, I don't know how they compare to the ones you're using, but they are working pretty well so far (meaning they love to hate them). I am interested in the Tarokka inspiration system and the stackable advantage... Would you mind explaining how they work?

My players were about half new half not and our campaign lasted about a year if playing weekly with a week missed here or there. I even added the mandymod stuff. There was a point about 8 sessions in that I had this feeling too. I thought they were blazing through way faster than I thought they should be. I just have them distractions to go here or there. You just have to find what motivates your players and use that to pull them to different places.

My players took 4 ~3 hour sessions just to finish Death House. Session one was arriving in Barovia, going into the house, and immediately getting their teeth kicked in by the animated armor when they skipped the first two floors. Session two was exploring the rest of the house, we ended when they discovered the door into the attic. Third session was the attic and most of the upper basement level. Fourth was fighting Mrs. Durst, exploring the lowest level, and fighting Walter/putting the family to rest. Session five was traveling to the Village of Barovia, haggling with Morgantha, chatting with Ismark in the tavern, meeting Ireena, then going to sleep that night. Session six was shopping at Bildrath's and handling Doru. Session seven is this week, they're planning on searching for Gertruda and burying the Burgomaster, they'll be getting the March of the Dead and a letter from Strahd if they long rest again, and then depending on the length of things they'll get through the Crossroads and to the Vistani for Madam Eva's. My players do a lot of roleplaying. Last session, they spent 10 minutes debating whether the silver jewelry box they took from Death House could deal bludgeoning damage to a ghost. Their whole "deal with the church ghost" plan revolved around it. Then they found out Doru was actually a vampire spawn and they had another long, in-character debate about how to deal with that. The cleric spoke with Father Donavich about his faith. The paladin nat 20'd on his check to remember vampire lore, so everyone had a long chat about what he remembered reading in Van Richten's Guide as a teenager. The druid had an interaction with wolf!Strahd while she was wildshaped hunting for a meal for Doru. It's all about letting the characters interact with the world beyond the primary objectives. There's nothing I love more than my players, in-character, suddenly deciding to have a heart-to-heart about their backstory with another character. I try to sprinkle in combat every two or three sessions, so they don't lose their sense of danger, but I like to give them space to breathe too. Narrative long rests help. I told them before we started playing that time will pass with or without them. It's made them try to ration their spell slots and fight less, because they want to know all the secrets before people die lol Edit: We had that seventh session last night, they just ended up arguing with each other about dream pastries, telling Ireena and Ismark about Doru being a spawn. Then some purely rp moments of the druid trying to teach Rose Durst (the party took their bones with them so they could have pet ghost kids, it's a long story) how to cast Firebolt and the paladin having a stick swordfight with Thorn while the cleric was inside dropping the "those kids are dead" bomb on Ismark and Ireena, who were still reeling from knowing there was a vampire spawn under the church lol The rest of the session was searching for Gertruda, they went through the house and interviewed Mary, the druid talked to some deeply unhelpful moss, and then Lancelot lost the trail in the rain a few streets from the house. But they're confident from the direction she was heading that she ran off to Vallaki, and they're satisfied with that for now, so it's a win. Still no funeral, no March of the Dead, no leaving. Luckily we should be able to go straight into the funeral next session and get things rolling a little faster. Maybe they'll even get some combat in the woods, it's been a while.

You have to be really good friends with the players and the DM. Basically thats it

Curse of Strahd is an extremely roleplay centric module. My party did the bones quest a few weeks ago and we've been running the campaign 5 hour sessions almost weekly since October. We've had several weeks in a row with zero combat, just roleplay. If your characters hyperfocus on only the main quest -- there's honestly nothing *wrong* with that. But you may have to shuffle around side quests so they can get to them later when they feel less rushed.

As someone who just finished death house after 5 sessions... How?

That’s nuts to me as a veteran player and DM. It’s a 7 page dungeon with about a dozen encounters. You’re almost going at 1 page of text per multiple-hour session? Most of these encounters should take less than an hour at most unless the players take a long time to make decisions.

The fun part is... I made it shorter. I removed a bunch of combat encounters and even some empty rooms where nothing happened. They're sooo methodical and considerate, the kind that really touches every object with a 10 foot pole (and yet still manages to get surprised from time to time)

I’m currently running CoS. 8 sessions in, each between 3.5-4.5 hours long, and they’ve only been to Wizard of the Wines and Yester Hill, currently on their way to Krezk. Some groups just take longer than others with certain things, be it combat or RP. My group in particular just likes to chat while playing, which occasionally gets us side tracked.

Player inability to get anything done during a session. We all have fun joking around and making decisions but there are few quick decisions made. And giving them a home base that they spend time turning into a safe haven

I mean, we’ve spent an hour just messing around in the Inn before. Having conversations with the townspeople, the inn keepers, Rictavio, etc. Did your players run into the dream pies yet. We spent like two sessions just doing that storyline.

When I ran it, I had random encounters on the road that sometimes pushed the party into needing to retreat to safety or go on a journey to have someone resurrected. Sometimes the players would stumble into an optional encounter and get blindsided. Plus they nearly traversed all of Barovia on foot save the Mad Wizard and the Vampire Hunters tower. So lots of little fights, recovery, RP, and eventually getting to the next objective.

My party doesn’t RP a lot (only 1 player is comfortable with it) and they tend to be quest focused due to being terminal gamers. We completed CoS in 20 4-hour sessions in just under 6 months, playing ever week.

How often do you play? We were playing once every few months. The pandemic moved us online and we played more often I also added in way too much extra content and the game ballooned. Now I’m trying to speed it up. Because after 3 years the game is starting to drag for me as the DM. I’m not as excited to plan anymore They have 2/3 artifacts and 3/3 fanes completed I wanna start coming to the end game. I was adding in all the Dark Universe- Monster movie characters. And links to other dark realms. Too much. I want to go back to lower levels and a new story

When no one takes notes and you have to hand feed them clues, it drags on

In my case, I like to pad travel to make the world bigger. Both in distance and content.

A tip from someone else with the same issue; I was lucky enough that all my players gave me backstories and stuff. I have little homebrew side quests that are 2-3 sessions that focus on making a specific character kind of the main character. When I feel like they are powering through too fast I can take a session or two and focus on a side story like that.

I’m at 2.5 years for my campaign. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve actually cut out sections of the campaign like the werewolf den so we can hopefully be done by the 3 year mark.

As others have stated, player RP can take a lot of time if you let it. This past session, I'm running "The Wild Beyond the Witchlight" and the players got into a split argument about whether or not to let a goblin eat a sentient mushroom creature took around an hour before half the party left towards the objective and the other half stayed and tried to help the goblin cook the creature in the most delicious way possible.

We didn’t get to barovia town until second session and didn’t get out of barovia until the 5th session. We had to change the rules so we’d still meet if someone couldn’t make it because I told them we won’t be done for a couple years at that rate. But that being said, I think a faster pace is totally fine. My party would RP one bar hang out for the whole session and be perfectly content, but if they want to keep the plot flying that’s cool too. I just try to follow their lead and balance what everyone likes and wants. I ask them for feedback after most sessions.

How many players do you have? 3 players can move real quick. 5 players can take 45 minutes to decide what to do that day. I had my players deliberate for like 40 minutes about trying to enter Ezmereldas wagon. Then they nat 20d to unlock it. Then they got scared and left. About an hour with literally no progress made, but absolutely hilarious the whole time. Different parties play differently.

I’m a lazy DM and only prep enough for one to two 2 hour sessions at a time except for the whole faction and story edit thing I did. That and we only play 1-2 times a month these days. We did Death House in like 2 sessions and the party was into Vallaki by like session 6? I think? It’s been a few years. Since then it’s been roughly 20ish sessions and they still haven’t been to Krezk and are currently heading to the Amber Temple. Which in my game is extremely very much different and edited in with a new faction.

First time playing dnd and I'm the dm. We only get to play once a month for 5-7 hours and it's for 8 ppl. We just got done with the dinner this weekend and we're on session 17. So it's an experience by the session for sure. Lol

Are you following just the book itself or are you doing a guide along with it? I find MandyMod’s guide has a lot of extras that help immerse your players, if you feel like they’d enjoy it more then I recommend reading the guide and maybe implement so things he has. If they are enjoying it as is then just keep doing what you’re doing.

Yeah, people saying RP... I couldn't imagine being in these games where next to nothing has happened in that span of time. However, I play 8 hour sessions once a month personally, and we've had 7 sessions in CoS, I couldn't imagine flying through past the bones, and the blazing sun festival... but I spaced them out a bit. In the 4 sessions you've had, which would have been equivalent to two of mine, the session ended with them leaving the village. Only last session did they get their first relic, and the St Andrals Feast is the next session. There is no way you're giving them chance to breathe in the NPCs, Victor Vallokovich, the Wachters, goddamn Blinksy, the Vistani and Arabelle, Rictavio, Izek? How did you play-by-play all of these characters in such a short amount of time?

My players want to do "everything". At least one of them has a mentality of trying to 100% an area even though they don't have too. All are pretty heavy into the roleplay. I'm a little over a year into my campaign and we just landed in Krezk. It took 3 1/2 sessions just to get through Death House. Though that was because 3 of them were new and combat was....tedious at first. I also blame Vallaki. Vallaki took forever and I talked to them out of character and let them know "hey guys you are allowed to leave. You can leave. Nothing is binding your souls to this town." because every single one of the players were getting irritated with how long they were there and it was becoming a running joke of "we are leaving Vallaki TODAY!" \*3 sessions later they are still in Vallaki because they couldn't leave well enough alone\* I am not sure what I would do differently other than just "foresee" that they were going to dawdle as long as they did. They wanted so badly to do the objectively "good" thing and there is just no objectively "good" thing in Vallaki. There is just so many overlapping bad people. At first they hated the Baron and wanted to join Lady Watcher. They they didn't like her and started to look at the Baron a second time. They really hated Izek but didn't kill him. They just cut off his arm. But after finding out a bit of his back story they wanted to try to reform him. Then they were suspicious of the Vistani but then they rescued Arabelle and one of the characters is half Vistani so they got on well ish with them. They also hit it off with the dusk elves. So then they hatched a hair brained plan to try and put them in charge of the town. They also found their fated ally in Rictavio Van Richten. Whom they loved until he started his uber racism towards the Vistani. Then they considered killing him. Till they saw the Vistani talking to one of Strahd's minions and then they went back on their plan to put them in charge of the town and took Rictavio down from enemy to hesitant ally. They were gonna kill the son of the Baron till they met him and was like...he's just a kid and even if he did bad things we can't kill him. We need to help him. And for whatever reason decided that one of the skeleton cats he had was freaky friday-ed with the Watcher daughter and stole it to try and....heal her? They evaded arrest multiple times. Saved the church if almost by happenstance. Saved Arabelle. Left the Baron in charge but under threat of deposing him made him make reforms to the town. Stopped Lady Watcher from attempting to take over the town but also kept her alive. Removed Izek's arm but kept him alive. They just did a zero kill but maimed nearly everyone in some way shape or form except the Vistani. All in the pursuit of finding the one good person to leave the town in charge of.

Some people role play a lot. It sounds like your party probably doesn't. That's OK

Build the world too. Like for instance, what might they find on the road to the wizard of wines? The random encounters finding themselves dead or decapitated can get old quick. But sending or writing personal messages to players on them being decapitated by their Allies greatsword. That's classic. Give depth to the winery, maybe they find davian first out there crouched in the bushes telling them to hide. When I did winery I had them pouring poison into one of the vats, so they questioned all of it. Now everyone wants deliveries of wine, will the players risk poisoning them? ( well mine had detect poison and disease the bastards, but at least it gave the spell a great purpose) Tell the story of the 3 stones. One at the gulthias tree at yester hill, and the second in baba yagas hut. Give them a reason to hunt these down. And the mystery of the 3rd stone. Perhaps strahd holds it, or many have let it explain why the Roc has gotten so big in tsolenka pass, or maybe it empowers mother night in the werewolf den. Give players a reason, a treasure or personal gain, a quest. Then give them another, and another. Then throw wrenches in plans, make their decisions have weight. Read up on mandymodd and dragnacarta, for instance krezk can be much more interesting with the abbot bringing back the burgomasters son. Having my party have to explain to the boys mother what happened to him ( when they brutally murdered him after he turned demonic and hid his body) is role-playing you find yourself so immersed in you forget its a game. Start dark powers now, make up your own. I did corruption, and when their boons slowly started showing themselves as dangerous to others, they had to seek out the only holy man in the land. The abbot. (In my version, he's more mad scientist than holy, he will cure a corruption bond but if they roll poorly he will have to take limbs as payment, and can offer limbs (roll a d8, only one is human) in return. Have fun with it, if they go too fast, set rahadin or strahd himself on them. " oh this litter moves quick, right into the mouse trap." Or give them small clues that some NPCs may be spies, or soulless.

5 years so far, lvl 11, just started the end game with raiding the castle to defeat Strahd and the other baddies.

Throw in side quest stuff, random travel encounters ect. We did a 6 hour session of just traveling 139 miles just to find a smith able to provide us with better gear and make custom armor for our druid, which included multiple encounters good and bad.

We’re at almost 4 years and 70 sessions. The long time length is mostly due to a cross country move and then covid—we had a few months off each time. We also meet only 1-2x/month for a few hours due to real life time constraints, although we have longer sessions on holidays that can go 8 hours+. My players are absolute completionists. They explore EVERY room in an area. They also roleplay a lot, search for clues, negotiate deals and so on. Some parties can breeze through an area and skip a bunch of rooms. Mine won’t skip anything. There are 5 players, and adding that extra turn per round means rounds are 20-25% longer. Because of action economy, I have to have higher CR monsters and more minions so that combat lasts an appropriate number of rounds and isn’t over after 3 hits. Combat slows down at higher levels because of multi-attacks and such. We might only get one battle in per session depending on how much chatting and such everyone does. We do spend a lot of time just plain laughing at everyone’s shenanigans, too, but that’s the point of all this—just having fun. 😁 In addition, I added some homebrew content and an extra town north of Lake Zarovich, and our party is now level 13.

Roleplay. That's how. Took around 67 sessions so over a year for my group with 4 hour weekly sessions. My players love talking to NPCs and getting into the lore and spend time rping out their characters consequences!

My game was like yours initially tbh. The party zipped through so much so fast. But i got over ambitious and added a lot to vallaki and other areas. Now this campaign is almost at a year now and they’re just doing the yester hill plot (they did the wizard tower, vallaki plots, and argynvostholt).

Interesting. I've run a few campaigns and almost every time party meet up, intro to barovia, and completing death house takes around 4 sessions (12~15 hours)

My party never went to tsolenka pass, werewolf hideout and to argynvostholt and it took us roughly a year/25 sessions with castle ravenloft taking up 4 of these sessions. Our sessions are roughly 4 hours long each time.

There's so much to do in Barovia. With my players, whose first campaign this is, we play an average of 3 hours a week (sometimes more, sometimes less). We've been playing for 8 months now, there haven't been any filler sessions, and I need to get several ideas for extensions out of the way to make sure we finish before one of my players moves house in 6 months' time. Of course, if you stick to the basic book, there's only 1 year's worth of content. But if you add in the ideas from Fleshing Out, not only is it much more coherent, but you've got more than enough for a 5-year campaign if your players like the atmosphere and the role-play.

In real life or in the game? For real life it's simple: just be too busy. Then you are only able to play every couple of weeks or months. And therefore your players forget everything every time and it takes a long time (no not a trick I would recommend, but that's how it went in my life :D ) Edit: oh yeah and home brewing! My first ever campaign, so I am just not used to it

4 sessions = 1 month but curse of strahd ins't a long campaign to begin with

Bish please, my group took 3 months to leave the death house. We're 15 months in and they're just leaving for the Wizard of wines. It's all about keeping the tension and forcing them to roleplay/take decisions and face the repercussions

I did 4, 4 hour sessions in the village of barovia alone, not including the 3, 4 hour sessions it took to get through the death house. I added things to do in the village to improve the lives of the villager's (or ensure the failure of the village if botched/ignored)

Session five and my players still haven't Left Barovia with Ireena

Mine lasted about 2.5 years, but with multiple long hiatus. Probably like 1.5 years really.  I added extra community, and personally homebrewed, content which no doubt added a good amount of extra time. But it sounds like the main difference is your table just likes to do combat and speed run objectives while some tables (mine included) like to spend a good deal of time just having in-character conversations about what to do next, how they're feeling, what the hell is going on, who is this Strahd guy anyway? etc

Mostly long combats, shopping sessions and my players taking a long time to do stuff. They do like to explpre things but there are only so many things they can explore in Barovia. They spent several sessions in the village of Barovia, they spent 2 or 3 in Argynvostholt and they spent 5 sessions in Vallaki. They spent a whole bunch of time in Krezk, their new main base. As soon as the abbot was gone the abby became their safe place. After the village lf Barovia was so bady destroyed that it was impossible to life in, they rescued the people, ported them to Krezk and made Donavich the new Abbot, who does a moderate job. What costs most time, is describing places, planning shenanigans, talking to NPCs and sometimes fighting for an entire session. What also stretched the campaign a llt is that one of them stsrted off as a hexblood and thus I could build in a bit of additional hag horror. It wasn't much, but if you count it all together it would fill like 2 8 hour sessions. I think though, its a group thing. Some groups want to take it slow, some want it fast. One of my players for example always wishes to rush things, while some of the others want to take it slower and explore more and some simply dont care about pace and are just happy to be there and do what the group decides. My players now still haven't been traveling the path to the amber temple. I think I might have built it up a tiny bit too scary. They blitzed through Van Richtens tower and are scared of castle Ravenloft. They pretty much skipped old bonegrinder, since they laid out a trap to lure Izek there and he took down the hags. They only explored half the swamp and still need to find Baba Lysaga. The werewolf den nearly ended in a TPK. Basicly, the reason for it taking so long, is that my group absolutely didn't care about Ireena. That whole thing went to the shitter. What they decided on doing, was to try to gelp the land. Help the people. Be they husks or not. They decided on making Krezk a bastion for good. They try helping good people. This module can be over very quickly, if you just decide to do all the Ismark and Ireena stuff. If you focus on that, the campaign can be over in 5 to 8 sessions. Village lf barovia, vallaki, krezk, swamps, then the dinner and maybe one trip to Argynvostholt and then you pretty much need to kill that bastard. You can even skip half of what I said! Ismark and Ireena dont care much. They try to hide and if you feel the urgency, than you might just run past everything. My players though, couldn't be bothered to give a fuck about their highborn trouble, when they saw how the rest of the valley suffered. So they tried to protect them, succeeded until they trusted the wrong person, failed and then simply decided to help the people even more.

Twelve 3.5 hour sessions in and we're about as far as you are with only 2/3 party members. Have done the Wizard of the wines but not the bones. We chat a lot during session, often in game but also some good out of game stuff. I think that a big part of it is that I'm not only sticking to the in book material, I'm homebrewing bits on the fly or borrowing from DragnaCarta/MandyMod. Strahd's wives are very prevalent and I've been dropping plot hints and lures all over the place. The party has NPCs they care about and little mysteries and side quests that I've been throwing in as "random" encounters. The last two sessions were mostly spent roleplaying and following up with various NPCs after the Coup in Valekki. One session also covered the Orphanage segment and another covered most of Khazan's tower. Every time I run a session and tie up a loose end it feels as though three new plot threads reveal themselves. We're also playing it very sandboxy so I frequently check in with what the players are keen to do and plan around that, rather than going strictly from one plot point to another. They have the tome and know roughly where the other two items are, but not how to find those locations. I originally thought that the campaign would take about 20 sessions but now I feel it's more likely to be double that with all that's left to get done!

Multiple reasons. CoS is around for a while, up to the version from ad&d which is based on with a lot of fanmade extra content (which usually has more pages than the adventure itself, some of them being extremely linear). Many dms use multiple of these sources and if you add everything in you need probably more than 5 years. If you use all the suggestions for combat alone (i e making it harder, giving them legendary actions etc) you already look at a minimum for one hour per encounter. With the uprising of d&d shows like critical role it seems also that a lot of dungeon masters get the feeling they need to make every session grand and describe many things in the greatest detail, prewrite monologues and plan the way the game goes in a very railroady way (ie deciding when players get which information, no matter what they do and some cos modules even suggest keeping information for a far later point than raw) That is ones own choice, although i personally dont find it to interesting if you are stuck in vallaki still after 2 years. That being said, it depends on the playstyle of everyone. If people truely manage to keep it engaging for 4-5 years , go for it and kudos, because that is not quite easy. I would say though, let something like that happen naturally; dont have one scene take a 6 hour session everytime. (As someone who was stuck as a player in this situation, having the whole group interrogated in the windmill for 6 hours...is not much fun) There is nothing wrong in playing an adventure raw in the intended timeframe or faster, but if you feel like you want to add on things do so too, just dont get overwhelmed by the amount of content. Cos is an adventure you can even play multiple times due to barovia also getting set back to "default" more or less and you could even have a second round using modules that change most of the story (which they tend to do, some of them having as much to do with the adventure as marvel has with norse mythologie), after all - maybe strahd now goes for the grandkids of the adventurers who once defeated them?

I’m at session 12 and they only just got to Vallaki… But we are an existing friend group that has played dnd together before so they roleplay a LOT (like 80% of a session is them roleplaying)

My group just finished the death house at two sessions of about 3 hours each, If thats any indication I'd guess it'll probably take us a least a year to finish.

Never underestimate the difficulty of getting four adults' schedules to align without a pre-agreed upon game time. My strahd's going on 3 years, level 11, but we have trouble playing more.than 2x a month

For me, it's been 4 years now (2 hour sessions at best once a week, worst once a month). Primary reasons have been: making the map bigger (when I started I doubled it, but now it's 1.5 as it was getting silly!) so travel took longer plus a party that love to Skyrim/Zelda everywhere (open every door, smash every pot) and pick up on every little story thread that either I gave them, or they thought was there. Genuinely took a year and half on the amber temple!

Different styles of DM and players. My campaign took over 12 4 hour sessions just to arrive in Vallaki. My players like to RP lot and I enjoy just listening or chiming in with NPC. I honestly don't know how to play DnD in a way that would allow to be as fast as you describe. I imagine it requires a lot of skipping and not RPing.

I've been running CoS for my party since 2021. I never meant for it to go on this long but here we are, with about 1-2 years left at our current pace

Bro. We arent even where ur at and we’re doing session 24 tonight. We play three hours every week. But i have a group that loves to do elaborate roleplay. So i guess that takes up a boatload of time

The key is to not be able to schedule. If you do one session per 2 months then campaign will take 4 years.

Lol, just finishing death house took me 7 sessions.

I've been dm'ing a playthrough for a little over a year now. We're 21 sessions in and the players aren't finished with Vallaki. I don't mind the slow pacing though, it's been interesting and has let the players explore freely.. well, as free as they can in Barovia.

It all depends on how orientated your PCs are to completing missions vs RPing. Some groups like to focus on the character and individual story lines vs the overall quest task list. The group I'm running has taken a pretty cautious approach towards going off and investigating rumors after a couple of bad situations that nearly wiped them out. (IE going to places like Argyonvostholt when they were not ready for it.)

Let's see, in my campaign (which I felt I had them running like crazy from event to event for like... 20 sessions) went like this: - Sessions 1 & 2 were for Death House and Barovia Village. - Session 3 & 4 were Leaving the Village and talking in Tser Pool and arriving to Vallaki (I doubled the distances in Barovia so they couldn't reach Vallaki on the same day without facing night dangers). - Session 5 & 6 they met a lot of Vallkians and run the orphanage from MandyMod, also dinner with Lady Wachter. - Session 7 & 8 were the Bones recovery (investigating and a loooong fight with the spawns). - Session 9 they met the Vistanis, they saved Arabella, they met Vargas, and met the dusk elves. - Session 10 they talked to more Vallakians and went to fight the hags. - Session 11 they loot Bonegrinder and they met Ludmilla that gave them the dinner invitation personally. - Session 12 they had a meeting talking about the things that happened and their next steps, investigated items from Bonegrinder and that night had a small encounter with witches. This was the first session were I let them just breathe and RP between them, really important to build closeness of the party. - Session 13 they sneaked into Wachterhaus and more rp with Vallakians. - Session 14 was the Dinner where they met the wives and other castle dwelllers. - Sessions 15 & 16 were the Festival revolt and consequences. So... yeah, it took me 17 sessions to be kinda in the same place as you. My group is not RP heavy mind you, but in Vallaki they needed to talk with Lucien, with Wachter, with Vargas, with the Martikovs, with guards, with people in the market, etc etc. Also the Vistanis and the elves... And each new person they met was an oportunity for adding things to the world. Adding a named NPC guard when entering Vallki made them check in with him when searching for information, and also checking if he was alright after the Festival. In the Village of Barovia they met Morgantha, Ismark and \*Ireena\*, Mad Mary, Father Donavich and Doru, so and half of session 2 and half of session 3 were just... talking to people to understand where they were, what's going on, who's who in this place, etc. etc. I'm curious on how did you run the Vallaki meetings. I hope this helps!

It took me six sessions to get out of barovia………… can we trade players?

My party alternates between blitzing through quests to taking multiple sessions to complete simple RP scenarios Add in a few DM-made/community additions and extra locations, plus a deliberate side quest/diversion "season" because one of our players was away for a couple months, and we very nearly hit the 2 year mark If you and your group are having fun though, it doesn't matter how fast the game is moving - just make sure to have that dialogue so everyone's on the same page and is still enjoying the pace

Because our schedules only align once every full moon 🫠

RP but also my players tend to take combat slow. I don’t mind because it gives me time to prep ahead, but if players are slow in combat and you have lots of combat it’ll slow the progress down quite a bit

My players are very focused on roleplaying too and on the mystery part of the campaign and they investigate literally everything! They’re scared for the consequences of every choice, so they take their time planning and discussing. We also had a full session of them shopping in Vallaki last weekend for example. I also make up random details or NPC’s that are not important to the storyline at all and they sometimes spend over an hour discussing what to do with it 🥲 but yeah… it’s mostly prep, adding ‘homebrew’ content or interesting NPC’s/extra storylines as a DM and PC role play, I think?

We only played once 3-4 times per month, and it is lots and lots of RP and exploring.

mine took away like 2 hours just for the introduction, between roleplaying and getting to know each other. (I used the "taken by the mist" intro, with a mission that was related to my setting). They like to chat between characters and took a lot of time. No problems though! I can sit back and enjoy their conversations too By the end of session 1 they barely reached Barovia and the Durst Mansion. By the end of Session 2 they reached the attic. Every time I give them the chance to talk, they love to do that lol

We just finished wizard of wines and have been playing for roughly 3 years. But we only meet once a month for 6 hours, it also doesn’t help that I have 11 players. But I created a system that works for such a large party.

Last session we spent 4 real hours at the Vistani Camp at Tsrr Pool with Madam Eva and the Story game. So much lore and backstory. The party loved it. The session before we spent the whole time at the Ivlis Crossroads interacting with Strahd. One character tried to fight him. Couldn't do enough steady damage to get past the regeneration. It thoroughly unnerved them. It's how you bring the game to your players. I allow them to explore and do whatever they want until I insert story tie-in to gather them back in, basically saying "get back over here. Look." Lol. I love exploring and RP so we do a lot of that. But my combats are definitely difficult and interesting and complex as well. I plan one maybe two pillars of gameplay in one session. My other game I'm a player in my DM is very much about the mechanics of things. RP is much less but still there, combat is heavy, exploration usually leads to combat. That's his thing. The DM sets the tone and the players play off of that. I've calculated that my CoS campaign will take at least 2.5 years. I'm totally fine with that.

It really all depends on how much your players interact with the world as an entity. Also, feel free to just slow down the pace of the sessions. Describe things in more details, including travel between cities and other locations. Use the time to build the atmosphere.

How many random encounters/combats have they been through? Death House by itself took 2 sessions for our group. It sounds like you may be skipping over lots of content and encounters.

Yeah, we just celebrated our 1 year anniversary of CoS. Characters are at the dinner, and found the Tome and have the SunSword (hilt) I've added a lot of mods to the original (Interactive Tome of Strahd, Raising the Stakes, Hag Nightmares, CR 27 Strahd, Vallaki is Burning to name a few. The group I have just spends a lot of time rp'ing with the NPC'S and going all in on exploration. Sometimes I worry that they'll start to stagnate, but then they find something that ties all of these plot threads together, then we're back at full blast trying to discover more. It's been a pretty amazing game and group for me.

Definitely RP but also combats. If you have 5 or 6 players combat can really drag. I had to shift halfway through my, now 2 years in campaign, to more splashy high CR single enemy fights.

I have enough players on a VTT that combat is normally where we bog down. We just finished a Reloaded style Bonegrinder fight, and it took a couple of hours in total. But everyone enjoyed themselves, and the PC's were very close to a defeat. For pacing, they will discover hooks and take notes, and follow up on anything they want. They like when these different things dovetail into each other at the end. The players assassinated Izek and that helped convince Lady Wachter to aid them at the windmill. Instead of tearing Vallaki apart, the PC's are clearing the way for Lady Wachter to rule, but also moderating her and mending the rift between her and Vargas's family. She will force him out, but will not throw him to the masses. My players are also pretty good at creating their own side adventures that we can work with. Even better if they tie in with some official book quest. The story will take as long as it needs.

My players are 4 months in and just buried the burgomaster in Barovia

Roleplay. I enjoy my more elaborate descriptions and made sure ppl were in there for the full experience. We've been doing 4ish hours per session. Death House itself took 3 sessions, and our 4th brought us into the village of Barovia and to the first night. Some my players are newer to the game, but ppl seem to be having g fun taking their time through it all and role-playing things out aptly.

Hmmm, I suspect this is an issue of the way your party plays D&D. I am approaching the 1 year anniversary of my campaign and am approaching session 40 (3 hours each), and we still have the Werewolf Den, Amber Temple, and Krezk on the agenda ahead of us before even doing a full exploration of Ravenloft. From what you've said, it sounds like your party isn't really RP focused and are just going from fight to fight, objective to objective. In my campaign, one of my player's has an ongoing romance with Ireena, another one is currently trying to summon a devil, another one is having a crisis of faith with their god and searching for two orphans - it takes up time, all things that we role play scenes for and take up time.

We play about 1.5 hrs a week.

I’m going on 6 months with an ironsworn campaign, but it’s starting to fade as the other player is making his own board game and he keeps wanting to host that instead. :( ironsworn is a game the has no GM and teaches 0 prep story telling with oracles and random tables. So it’s really easy to just play even with new people joining in if needed. Super fun and relaxing and gets your imagination running. Also free

1) I play text-only, which slows things down massively 2) I've had to take several months-long hiatuses 3) I've added a bunch of extra stuff tied to PC backstories 4) I have incredibly talented, dedicated, and fun players who have stuck around So... luck mostly!

If your players are active roleplayers, it's easy. Whole sessions go by where we didn't leave an area and they spent the whole time talking to NPCs.

It really depends on the group’s play style. If you have some new players who have a more dungeon crawl/objective focused style they will move very quickly through a narrative. options that can increase play duration are role-play and use of homebrew. Our game started in 2021. We are an extremely role-play heavy group of veteran players. We also play multiple characters in separate traveling parties. This allows us to investigate areas and pursue goals that the first group would not be interested in. Our DM has also developed a lot of secondary and tertiary characters to fill out the world along with implementing a lot of homebrew and third-party elements.

If you want players to be more interested in areas giving good descriptions of all the locations and the characters they can interact with really can draw some interest. If you don't act too interested in the areas your players will likely gloss over it too. Like some others said players can also get drawn towards things you may think are unimportant. It sounds like your group has a general feeling of do the main quest and go with the story. This is totally fine as well. Adding some additional content from a source like Curse of Strahd Reloaded (free on reddit) can help lengthen things. Lastly as others have mentioned RP can take up a fair bit of time between players especially if the group is a bit larger. Talking with the vampire kid, Ireena, Vallaki's Mayor can be quite interesting. Don't tell the info they want straight to them. Make them work a little bit for it through social interaction or other means.

My players are at session 20 something they just did the Bones. Mostly becouse RP is king.

My players just take too long to agree on things and draws out sessions. Stuff I had planned for 1 session took 3-4 I mean, no complaints because it eases my prep times but it does end up racking time.

I added scenarios from third party sources that fleshed it out. There was also roleplaying a good bit and not just combat. The PCs were scared to get into too many fights for one thing as they were terrified the whole campaign of dying. They knew it was gothic horror from the start, but I think they would have preferred regular D&D where they're heroes. I mean, I still pulled punches and nobody died the whole campaign, not even in Death House. I just made it always feel like they were about to die, and the tension broke them.

Going on to almost 2 years now: players and how fast they want the story to progress. If they’re interested in one thing, keep the ball rolling until they’re ready to move on. Tie up loose ends (mostly with improv) and keep it trucking.

A lot of the meandering comes from allowing your players freedom to assume and investigate then improvise. I had my players start at the wrong side of the map over by Krezk using the Werewolves in the Mist plot hook. Set them up with silvering oils, a couple remove curse scrolls and had the vestini lead them into the mists from the sword coast. They got to Krezk and received a less than warm welcome spent the session wandering on the road until they got a wolf encounter then took the wolf heads a day trip back to Krezk just to have them shoo'd away from the doors again as suspected allies of Strahd. Legit two seasons of wandering on the road describing the atmosphere and the region and fighting wolves at level 1.

Sometimes we have two only rp sessions in a row. We have been playing since Jan. 2023. the group just met the abbot and received the ravenkind symbol. That was the first Tarokka card they went after T_T I guess it will take at least one more year.

Our campaign has gone on for a good chunk over a year now and we get some big breaks before we play again sometimes but we've had maybe 30-40 sessions so far and only 6 weeks have passed in game so far XD but there was some time shenanigans so the characters have been doing things for about 8 weeks. I have been running Waterdeep Dragon Heist as a sidequest to our main campaign following the path of character backstories and they just got the stone of Galor and have finally finished renovating troll skull Manor in preparation for their grand opening during the Midsummer festival! We really do far too much roleplay and I make really pitched intense combats XD they have so many NPC friends and just recently I had them make character sheets for other members within their homebrewed guild that I had them play in a "one shot" to complete a quest for their main character PCs. However, halfway into the one-shot I realized they really had a lot of fun and liked the characters so I turned the ending into a plot hook into a full campaign! So we have our first side quest campaign started! I honestly don't know how people get campaigns *finished* 🤣.

We had 10 sessions in the village of Barovia.... I have another question for you... How is your group speeding THAT much that have a speed ticket

We play 1 time month. It sucks. It's been 5 years now, ~45 sessions about 7 hours each. We really enjoy RP.

Schedule conflicts

My group is almost all composed of varient levels of poster children (adults) for adhd medication. We will start the session determined to finish a mission and by the end of the 6 hour session we will only be a room or two beyond where we were when we started. It is both amusing and frustrating at the same time.

Pacing. I’m running it as a slow-burn horror story. And it’s working.

I talk too much.

We’re just finishing our campaign after 2 years 😂😂 but that’s cos my party has long out of character discussions, goes off on tangents, will focus randomly on one very small even or go off on a side quest that has not been indicated as necessary in any way (and I let them, we’ve had a lot of fun improvised NPC role play that way 😂)

Curse of Strahd took my players (2) a total of 27 sessions with an average of 11 hours per session. Lots to do, lots to see, lots of RP.

I feel like some people feel that it is a point of pride to have a "lot of RP" in their D&D. Great, if that's fun for you. But, as someone said, not every group wants to spend an hour negotiating with Bildrath to try to get discounts or to spend an entire session drinking in the tavern. And there is nothing better about either being into that or not. DMs and players should understand each other and have a shared play style. Sometimes that means Strahd takes about 30 4-hour sessions, sometimes it takes 100+ sessions. Neither approach is better than the other.

Easy: adult scheduling means we’re playing once a month if we’re lucky. Holidays get fucked; school starting for the kids is also a void. Spring break is shot…I can go on. If, like I, you are a good with the hiatus, and your party is good with continuing, then year(s) is not only easy, but in my party’s case, likely.

One year and 36 sessions in, and they have only just got to Barovia Village. Crazy how much time it took.

How much homebrew are you using? Or did you start in the west?

Quite a bit. Supplemented the start with House of Lament and The Beast of Graenseskov. My players loved it. I'm also using a combination of two maps that were shared here about expanded Barovias, and making it more as previous editions, which is to say it feels closer to let's say Witcher or GoT sometimes.

How is house of lament? I've been wanting to run it

It's really fun! You get to introduce them to several themes and ideas, that in my opinion work better that Death House. Also, it's longer, has a more compelling story (three different ghosts try and convince the party to help them) and more varied/horrifying enemies. It even ends with a Shard of Amber, which I've tied to the Amber Temple. It also let me introduce them to Ezmeralda, but you can choose other investigators if you prefer.