As regular readers should know, I am an advocate for long campaigns, so much so that I feel that RPGs are best enjoyed when played in that way. Even so, that raises the question: when do you end a campaign?
I think about this often, because my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign is now several months in to its tenth year of weekly play, with a stable group of eight players, four of whom have been playing since March 2015 and one player who's played for almost as long. After nearly a decade of play, House of Worms is a perpetual campaign or very nearly so. There are so many character-driven goals, world events, long-term intrigues, and meddling NPCs to provide us with another decade's worth of play should we desire it. Whether that will actually happen is a separate matter.
More than likely, House of Worms will end much sooner than that, probably for mundane reasons, such as players having to stop playing due to real world obligations, changing schedules, etc. If so, it's quite possible there will be no "end" to it. Instead, it will simply stop in medias res. Would that be a bad thing? Would it be preferable to arrange something more conclusive and, dare I say, more satisfying? I'm honestly not sure. On the one hand, putting a proper cap on the campaign might feel better, in the sense that no one involved will have regrets about things being unresolved. On the other hand, I worry that such an approach borrows too heavily from literature or drama, which are very different kinds of entertainments from roleplaying.
Most of my past campaigns, both recently and in my youth, simply ended, usually due to boredom or distraction. For example, my Riphaeus Sector Traveller campaign, which I ran for three years, ended because I was exhausted and lacked the endurance necessary to run such an open-ended campaign at that particular time. The characters were in the midst of dealing with several different problems within the setting. When I announced I wanted to end the campaign, I didn't make an effort to wrap anything up; we simply ceased playing. No one involved seems to have minded, but I must admit that I occasionally think back with some regret on how abruptly the campaign ended. Of course, I'm not sure how I could have wrapped things up, since it was, as I said, a very open-ended campaign without a single contrived narrative.
I'm curious to hear what others think about this. I'm especially curious about others' experiences of ending campaigns that have run for a lengthy period of time (a couple of years or more). Did they end because they'd reached a natural stepping off point? Boredom? Real world issues? Did they end because there was a decision to end them? If so, how did they end? Did they simply cease or was there some kind of resolution? If there was resolution, was that resolution a consequence of prior events or was it engineered in order to provide a sense of closure?
This is a topic about which I'd really like to know more, so please share your experiences, stories, and insights, if you have them. Thanks!
not with a bang, but a whimper
ReplyDeleteI ended my first when we graduated from college. We resumed with some players a few years later and played in grad school for a few more years. I don't think that my players want the current campaign to end.
ReplyDeleteI've got an opinion on this, but it's not likely to help you at all, because our viewpoints seem to differ too much. Anyway, here goes:
ReplyDeleteI like it when things are simple. A campaign has a single 'Big Bad' - which may or may not threaten to end the world as we know it - and the campaign ends when this 'Big Bad' is defeated. In D&D 5e terms, I guess this translates roughly to levels 1-15 at most. How much real-world wall-clock-time it takes to reach that point largely depends on how often you play and how long your sessions are, on average. But when the 'Big Bad' is defeated the campaign ends (and perhaps the world is saved), and you start a completely new campaign, with newly created characters at level 1, and perhaps even in a new (D&D) setting than the previous campaign.
Rinse, repeat. Your mileage may vary.
This is the way, although I'd advocate ending at an earlier level. Of course, this is particularly relevant to systems with a combat focus and steep power curve like D&D where the game generally gets less fun and overly complicated if you play for too long.
DeleteThanks.
DeleteThe level was chosen sort of arbitrarily; I have never been in a D&D campaign before that reached these kinds of levels, so I have no real experience with level 15 or so.
Now that I think about that some more, if you choose to go down this route, it might be really interesting if the DM would, for bonus points (provided the same players would still be at the same table):
After the players defeat the Big Bad at the end of campaign 'one', chooses to re-introduce the same enemy at the start of a later campaign 'four', where - for example - cultists try to revive campaign 'one' Big Bad from the dead, and now - once more - it is up to the players to send the same enemy back to 'imprisonment' - defeated once more, but not truly dead.
Thoughts like these – probably overdone to death – still make me wish I had it in me to be a DM. Unfortunately, not my skillset. Oh well.
None of my campaigns that have run for more than a few sessions ended with any conclusion. We usually ended because of circumstances like end of school year. Some ended because there was a decline in interest and some ended because I wanted to move on to something else. Pretty much never did we do any kind of closing on the campaigns, they just ended.
ReplyDeleteLike you, my preference is for long form open ended campaigns so switching gears to wrap up the campaign seems counter to the style.
Nothing like a TPK to end things neatly!
ReplyDeleteMy reality has always been one dictated by attention deficit disorder, I guess? So many games to play, so many settings to explore…. I’m notorious for abruptly ending campaigns. My regular players start rolling their eyes as soon as I begin talking about some other game, or worse, purchasing one.
I recently re-started my defunct (by a year or so) B/X campaign. Having brought-up the idea of starting an old school Twilight 2000 campaign, my players protested, said they were tired of bouncing around, they really missed the old D&D campaign, etc.
So I reinvigorated myself, dug-up the teams of notes, setting material, and house rules, and we jumped back in like we had never missed a game session!
Emperor Turhan: How will this end?
ReplyDeleteKosh: In Fire.
As a player, I very much appreciate being able to mentally prepare for the end. I feel like I have tons of characters out there in limbo because we didn’t know we had played out last sitting. Even having something like “the campaign will end after the election is over” (in your game, not in the real world) would be a lot of help. I would know what time frame I had to wrap up as many loose ends as possible and mentally prepare myself for the end.
ReplyDeleteThere’s something to be said for having the time to let go of the past and prepare for the end. Isn’t that why the game show Survivor always has the memory walk before the final tribal council?
Isn’t one of your Tékumel player characters currently in the running to become the next Emperor?
ReplyDeleteThat’d be a heck of a way to wrap thing up.
It would indeed. However, the character in question (presently) has no interest in pursuing this, so it's unlikely to be available as a possible conclusion to the campaign.
DeleteI would think twice about this, James. Simply because, the fact you have a PC ( even if he doesn't want to) pursue the Petal Throne, this could be the start of a really fantastic way of finding the end your campaign.
DeleteI'm very open to the possibility. I simply don't think it's very likely, given the players and their interests. However, they're an unpredictable lot, so who can say for certain?
DeleteHey, if the game leads the character to become Emperor no matter what he tries, he can always declare the kingdom a republic and step down. Viva La Revolution!
Delete@Erick Eckberg:
ReplyDelete" Nothing like a TPK to end things neatly! "
Now that's just mean ! ;)
lol.
I have had several campaigns end in this fashion, most recently when I was a player in a RuneQuest 2e campaign. Damned trolls!
DeleteTPKs aren't really all that neat. There's usually blood everywhere. Or statues. So many statues.
DeleteAlthough there was one time our whole table got petrified and the GM started up next week with us having getting the magic reversed by a bunch of complete strangers after a thousand year time skip. The first problem was convincing them we didn't know anything about the MacGuffin they thought we'd had when we got stoned, which was the same bloody thing we were hunting when everything went gray.
I usually take the approach of most sandbox video games - there are many things for the players to decide to do as in your House of Worms campaign, but there is almost always also a larger overarching plot available should the players choose to pursue it. And, not pursuing it has varying effects on the game world.
ReplyDeleteI've been DMing for the (mostly) same group since 2017. We've had campaigns run anywhere from about 6 months to a little over 2 years of mostly weekly play. Campaigns have ended for a variety of reasons:
1) TPKs occurring at mid and higher levels.
2) The overarching plot reaches it's conclusion, for better or worse.
3) Boredom with a campaign and/or characters.
I am usually looking to end a campaign by the low teen levels, if it hasn't ended earlier for other reasons. We've had one character reach 15th level, and that was the highest. I've found the rules start to break down around that point, or maybe it's just my DMing skills aren't up to handling higher levels...
I've run three properly-long campaigns over the years:
ReplyDeleteCampaign 1: 3 years, AD&D2. Ended because we wanted to play something else. I ran one last massive adventure to wrap everything up, the PCs saved the continent from evil and then retired, becoming high priests, archmagi, etc.
Campaign 2: 3 years, B/X D&D, sandbox. Ended because most of the players graduated. Basically just stopped in mid-story, with the PCs wandering off the edge of the map and never being heard from again, which was a perfect fit with the tone of the campaign as a whole.
Campaign 3: 3 years, B/X D&D. Ended because players wanted to play something else, and anyway they'd basically taken over the entire region and there was nothing much left to threaten them. PCs retired to become regional rulers. (The consequences of their actions then set the stage for the *next* campaign!)
your against wicked city setting is an excellent campaign framework - players create character that want to bring down the wicked city. once that single overreaching relation is resolved in some way for most players you can call it quits.
DeleteI've never really had a campaign end entirely voluntarily, with the closest thing to one with a planned ending being a high school campaign that wrapped up on graduation - but we still dig the characters for that one every few years when enough of us are in town and play another session or three, so it's debatable if it really ended.
ReplyDeleteMost recently I had three separate games (one running, two playing) using the same system all terminate over the holidays when all three groups decided we'd more or less simultaneously broken the game engine. Turns out the superhero game that people complained about not having an advancement system not only had very real advancement, it was so rapid that less than two years of weekly sessions made us so powerful all vestige of balance was gone. Spent the last six months with three tables experimenting with homebrew fixes but we eventually decided to just shelve it and move on, aided by the publisher/designers utter failure to provide real support for the game. Very irritating indeed, and I'm still not counting it as voluntary.
Outside of that it's been the usual stuff - GM burnout, player disinterest, real life catastrophes, graduations and relocations for work/family, and in one case the GM going to jail. I believe he's still in stir, and that was in 2005-ish. Just as well if he never gets out. Never a proper ending to anything.
Probably explains why I've become increasingly fond of short story arc games and one-offs over the years. How many novels can you read where the last five chapters are missing before you get sick of it? Or trilogies where the last book never came out, if you want to talk Stirling Lanier.
I'll never forgive him for not finishing Hiero. But it does leave the end for me to finish it on my own, for myself. (I just wish I had access to some notes).
DeleteI think that he died before he could finish it.
DeleteI, too, wish that I could read that third book.
I mean, yes, he died before writing the third book, but there was a 24 gap between the 2nd volume and him passing away at age 79 in 2007. At that point he hadn't published anything in over 20 years. I think it's fair to say he had enough time to finish it if he'd really wanted to, but he seems to have retired from writing altogether around age 58.
DeleteWhen asked about finishing the trilogy, he supposedly replied with " Never write trilogies."
DeleteAll of my campaigns have a beginning, middle and end. I am of the opinion that you should know the potential endings before you begin. My Tekumel "Zhaigriyal" campaign lasted over five years and the players had a limited amount of time to become familiar with the setting, discover the plot, develop their characters, identify enemies, thwart schemes, gain allies and save the world. I would not be comfortable with a campaign merely meandering around the sandbox.
ReplyDeleteStephen Vossler
My current main campaign has been running since 1986. It will end when the players defeat the Great Enemy or when the Seventh Godwar begins - whichever comes first.
DeleteIn three plus decades of GMing, I have run three campaigns to completion. One finished (3 years? I didn't keep records then) when the Lolth was put down, which seemed suitably epic, but the final showdown was brief. The other two (5.5 and 3 years) involved "battle of three armies" situations--resolved by non-D&D rulesets, in part--where each set of by-then-superhero PCs made their interventions on the postwar order. The ultimate battles seemed logical places to conclude the adventures. Neither was fully satisfying from my perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe others all petered out (or were ended abruptly by the DM) for scheduling difficulties, loss of interest, including *three* different *Dragonlance* campaigns (at DL 9, DL10, and DL 12).
I still prefer campaigns, but shorter ones where the early lore doesn't fade into obscurity.
Just stop in the middle of a session and have them find Bobby Ewing in the shower
ReplyDelete"It was all a dream"
Then break out
https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/06/retrospective-dallas-television-role.html?m=1
And start rolling up new charachters for your next ten year campaign.
Ha!
DeleteThere was an April Fool's issue of Challenge magazine in the MegaTraveller era where they jokingly tried to end the unpopular Rebellion storyline by having interstellar news network reveal that Emperor Strephon was alive and well, had never been assassinated, and had simply been taking a very long shower the whole time.
DeleteI've often wondered if GDW would still be with us if they'd had the guts to go through with it. A lot of people utterly hated the assassination and all the rest of the metaplot that followed from it, and it undeniably hurt sales quite a bit.
Traveller was already languishing well before the Rebellion. Indeed, the Rebellion was concocted in an attempt to revitalize an increasingly moribund game line. Believe it or not, TNE, for all its many, many faults, was largely successful in its goals of increasing interest in Traveller by bringing in new fans. It's funny, because I actually liked the Rebellion (in concept, if not in execution) and had little love for TNE.
DeleteYou're (mostly) right that rpgs are not literature or drama. However, rpgs are entertainment and, so, there purpose is to enrich the people involved. However a campaign ends, it should be as satisfying to the players and GM as possible. Sometimes that means defeating the big bad, sometimes that means having the characters ride off into the sunset even if there are still things to do, and sometimes it means just stopping because no one really wants to (or, maybe, can't) play anymore.
ReplyDeleteYou've allowed the players to drive much of the way the game has gone. Why not let them shape the way it ends?
My experience, as DM, is that things often end when the characters progress beyond what the rules were designed to handle. Whether it's because the magic gets out of hand, yet another layer of challenge just seems ridiculous, or the combats just get too drawn-out and complicated (pathfinder, looking at you here), the game at some point just isn't as satisfying anymore and heads off into the sunset--one way or another. Is this more a comment on my limitations as a DM than the rules themselves? Oh probably. But I don't think it's a unique situation.
ReplyDeleteAlways Leave Room For The Sequel
ReplyDeleteSome end when enough players move, graduate, die (never yet at the table, but left for illness and didn't return).
ReplyDeleteMost of my games have been short campaigns or episodic series, so just having no more episodes.
Planned endings are usually after a major antagonist is defeated, and everyone's characters retire or find some other problem. These campaigns can revive, but only seen it a couple times.
Mike Shea at SlyFlourish has an excellent video about it on YouTube somewhere. To summarize, his idea is to have each player write their own '5 years later' epilogue, with no input from the DM. I'd slightly modify that advice to allow DM's (and the entire group's) advice. Another idea I had involves writing a shared Epic of their characters' time together. Each character gets their own 'Book of...', written from their point of view (the DM gets to write in 3rd person omniscient, of course. And for the party? The truth lies somewhere in between their points of view). Instead of a game session, you have a celebratory dinner party (inviting spouses and family) where the players recite their Books and much Merry is made (and the guests finally get to hear what you've been doing for all these years).
ReplyDeleteMost times, you play a campaign for the last time without even knowing it.
ReplyDeleteWell said. Several of my campaigns ended with words to the effect of 'we'll pick th ius up in the next session.'
DeleteExceptionally well said. There is that last time that you and your group of childhood friends are all around the same fire with cheap rum. Your family at a meal, before the children drift away to university and into new phases of their lives. The last game of chess with your father before he dies. The best thing we can all do in nearly all endeavors is appreciate the magic of those moments, and treat them as if there will be No Next Time. I was really fortunate to learn that lesson early in life.
Delete"The road goes ever on..."
ReplyDelete"And whither then? I cannot say. "
DeleteIn my youth, most of our games ended 'just because'. As you noted, it was for similar reasons to those you mentioned: schedule changes/conflicts, something else grabbing our attention, or other natural causes.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there were always campaigns 'designed to end'. My last long Traveller campaign, which lasted for four years of roughly monthly sessions, revolved around an event in the Sector that we knew early on would happen within a year of in-game time. Eventually we reached that event and everything came to a head. A climax occurred. It was both expected and came about organically. I knew where we started and what the goal was but not how things would go or how it would all end [exactly], just that it would.
Currently I am running a Star Trek Adventures campaign and playing in a homebrewed Harry Potter/Hogwarts game. The former just started its 8th year and the latter is in its 6th (although the PCs are 'Fifth Years').
The Star Trek campaign is a 'perpetual campaign'. It could foreseeably run forever. There is no overarching story, no singular theme, character improvement is a minor concern at best, and the adventures largely episodic. It's set in the Original Series era but no attention is paid to the actual in-game years.
Our Hogwarts campaign is destined to end. Eventually we will get to be Seventh Years and we'll graduate. That is baked in. Now, it's taken us 6 years to go through five years of classes so while we might have two years left to the campaign, we might have more.
Most of my initial campaigns ended because I lost player interest. Then in my Castle Xyntillan game we managed to end satisfactorily after finding the Grayl and the whole place collapsed into hell, having explored most but not all of the dungeon. My Icewind Dale game managed to reach the end, with half the party basically volunteering to TPK and the other half escaping, thus failing to stop the eternal winter.
ReplyDeleteBoth my L5R games also reached an ending at the same point, after some contrivance. Heck, even my AD&D campaign this year managed to reach some conclusion after a climactic moment, though it was lamer than I had hoped. Went to plot-deep there. We could have played a few more sessions but since the group was breaking up I decided to leave it there and try some new systems and playtest instead.
The longest of these was Castle Xyntillan at 36 sessions, the rest less than 30 and sometimes less than 20. For the foreseeable future I ma bound to the rhythm of the academic year, with a multi-month break in the middle and both new blood and someone moving away or getting too busy each fall, unfortunately, making shorter campaigns more feasible.
The D&D campaign my friends and I started in high school 'ended' on a major cliffhanger the summer before we all turned 21. We fully intended to things up after college, but it never happened, for obvious reasons.
ReplyDeleteIn the decades since, this 'unfinished tale' has taken on the mythical allure of a "Firefly" or "Carnival" — a show with so much potential cancelled too soon — that it is more memorable than any campaign that reached its finale.
I´ve had lots of campaigns just fizzle out due to life issues, including some that I really liked and would have loved to see them through to their end.
ReplyDeleteDue to that, I try to reach some conclusion eventually. Our first adventuring party actually had several ends to their campaign, returning from retirement (Usually after time skips) to some big adventure I bought or created.
With that first party (Second edition AD&D) the big problem was finding things that would challenge them, well equipped +16 level characters are pretty tough.
Was this a Marriage Allegory? Guilty: I am responding without reading the 44 prior comments. This appears to be another wonderfully provocative subject. Our campaigns - the very term "campaign" has a widely elastic definition, in the vein of Success, Wealth, Fitness and Faith, words that mean different things to different people - began as open-ended with periods of pause, such as around Turkey Week/Christmas/New Year's when it was difficult to align everyones' schedules. That did not really work, and was not satisfying, as if you remove the last 20 minutes of nearly any movie. Then real life intervened, by way of girls, electric guitars, girls & poverty, girls and the very nature of pursuing girls a la Random Encounters, and then finally you realize that the weight of life makes it very difficult to get 4-5 people in the same room at the same time, in the same positive headspace, to focus on a collective fantasy landscape and make it engaging and fun. I wonder inwardly how the current culture of 18 year-olds with mobile phones and myriad distractions is/are able to row in the same direction, sustainably. Our campaigns, such as they were, thirsted withered and died through lack of affection or interest. More sadly, the thousands of distractions were utterly forgettable. I will never forget "Argyle" (the name we gave the Mad Hermit in B2) plaguing and pranking and creeping those early parties for months. I maintain that a D&D memory lasts forever.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how usual or unusual my experiences are. One key characteristic of my gaming experience is that there are gaps of many years between any gaming. Is that normal?
ReplyDeleteMy current campaign is less than a year old and I want to bring it to some sort of close soon. While I'm the GM of the game, the cafe hosting are its publicists, and invited twice as many players as I feel competent to manage. My aim, then, is to bring things to a point in which my game can pause so that we can divide the group into a few concurrent games and let other locals run different games.
Another reason for my restraint here is that I use a homebrew rule-set based on 80s D&D editions and players drawn from the general public might be better suited to something official.
Anyway, I say 'pause' because, short of TPKs, life goes on, and a satisfying conclusion can involve nothing more than dealing with the current protagonists and finding the PCs in a position to do whatever they wish, after a night of merriment at their favourite inn. Things could resume in the future but, if they end there, it is an end rather than an interruption.
Before the pandemic I ran a game for friends over four years. The exact timing of its conclusion was dictated by one of my four players moving interstate, but we had been drawing close to my intended climax, so I just accelerated that a bit to time with her leaving. Since then, there's been a single-session 'spin-off' involving familiar NPCs and another single-session involving the now-adult children of some of the original characters.
Further back, games tended to peter-out due to all that life stuff, combined possibly with less mature life skills of scheduling and commitment. Even so, I remember as a GM writing short narrative texts saying how I projected things would have ended, to give friends some sense of closure.
My one long-running D&D game set in the FR ended with the characters having finished "Storm King's Thunder" campaign and "retiring" their characters at 16th level. Each player narrated how their character rode off into the sunset. Very cool.
ReplyDeleteI thought my other D&D campaign was done after some player disagreement, but the two remaining players wanted to keep going. Since they are both level 17 there's not much that can touch them, so I have pivoted to having them solve mysteries. We're having a lot of fun.
It depends ... many of the campaigns (if that is word) where I have played had by necessity multiple concurrent parties. The stories went ever on. It was usually real world events that ended things, or at least put them on ice. Single story line campaigns, like the most recent one I've played, are a special case of this, I guess.
ReplyDeleteMore rarely there were campaigns with multiple parties with some ultimate goal a la Lord of the Rings, which best-case ended in a natural fashion (e.g., in the Grey Havens).