I’ve used “meta-campaign” to talk about the collective history of a number of GMs with connected settings, which can span years; the games I was playing over last weekend are still in the same meta-campaign as ones that were played in 1977, although a good deal has changed.

Several people use “Arc”, lifted from television series nomenclature, with much the same meaning, for a long series of sessions that has an overarching plot or theme. The thing that provides a arc boundary generally the GM wanting to take a break and let someone else run a regular session.

Internal game times are measured in normal calendar units, while spells are measured in moons, suns (sunrise to sunset, 2 per day), and diameters (the time it takes for the sun to move one solar diameter across the sky, about 2 minutes). Combat rounds are a necessary evil at the bottom level to keep the sword-swingers straight.

So far, we’ve been going for 16 game years over 3 player years, and we tend to “pulse” – one session may cover a year with only 5-6 roleplayed scenes, while on other occasions a single day’s events may take one or more full sessions.

In games, time is very much what you make it.

I never really bothered breaking our amorphous evolving beast we called roleplaying down into names.

Don’t get me wrong… when we started characters we always said we were starting a new “campaign”. But said “campaign” didn’t really have a clear set of parameters or rules of ending.

So we just played every night we could, which was 90% of them… until we got bored or everyone died. Heh. And then we’d start a new campaign.

I think our longest campaign lasted 3 years. And our shorted like 3 minutes.

Oh to be 20 and sitting in a cinderblock chicken house turned illegal still turned roleplaying den with 4 of your best mates eating pizza and laughing again…

The open source turn-based strategy game (with a fantasy RPG veneer) Battle for Wesnoth has “campaigns” divided into “scenarios”. However, I would reverse the terms, since each “campaign” is a story arc, and each “scenario” has a military objective (survive X turns or kill enemy leader).

campaign = series
adventure = episode
encounter = scene
major NPCs = guest stars
players = cast or crew

And so on…

Quest – Complete set of tasks associated with completing an objective.
Task – Specific actions to be completed.
Objectives – same as task.

Also, in at least one game I play, Turns are subdivided into both segments and phases. (the first being a time unit, the second being an action unit…)

I’ve also played at least one game in which combat was measured in real-time units. ie, minutes and seconds so that a spell caster, for instance, may actually need to keep track of the fact that they can cast a type 1 spell in 1.45 seconds…

TORG did a good job of cinematic roleplaying, and it had scenes and acts. The scenes were divided into standard and dramatic – in a dramatic scene, the odds were stacked against the players.

Choosing your metaphor and structure is a way of narrowing down the kind of story you want to tell, I think.

But that’s freeform roleplay without dice or dungeons, so it may not be what you’re talking about.