Should I scale down my campaign?
First time dm here, we are a group of 5 friends (21y-24y) that all wanted to start a campaign, so i took inkarnate and went wild with the world map and the worldbuilding (pantheon, civilizations, cultures, also integrating the backstory elements of each one of the characters).
I didn't have a measure in mind, i just went with the flow and stopped when it felt right.
after the first couple sessions, all the players were giving me positive feedbacks, but now someone, me too, is feeling that the campaign is gonna take too much time to finish.
We amount a total of 11 sessions in 5 and a half months, averaging 2 sessions a month. the session usually lasts less than 2 hours, considering the chitchat and the latecomers (we play online on discord/ owlbear rodeo).
me and a player realized it's gonna take about 5 years (100+ sessions) to finish visiting all the worldmap considering this pace (the "main quest" is still pretty blurred so I can kinda modify it as I like).
I had an idea: cut the content of the worldmap, and just focus on the current region they are exploring? there are still tons of things to do and explore, and I could end this adventure (now only a chapter of a bigger campaign) in about 20/25 sessions with no hurry, reaching character lvl 9-10 (we started at 3), ending all four personal questlines with depth and revelations.
I'm having trouble managing backstory stuff, for example when i should place an important npc related to player 1 character? now or in about 15 sessions? the fact that i need to account for the big distances in the map is killing me, because i want to let them explore everything, but the real time passes and it seems like I'm not giving them enough space for personal moments.
I think this reorganization of the campaign is going to encourage the players on focusing more on the ongoing events, as those ones are even more important than they thought.
After the end of this Adventure 1, we'll discuss what to do, with the rest of the world still brand new to explore, with the same characters or new ones
maybe I'm going to refresh the post with new stuff to say, thank you all for the interest shown till now, I'm glad to hear some experienced masters of the game