Reflections on ending a campaign

[Lord Zardoz]

As a long time DM who has never had the chance to formally end a campaign, nor had the chance to run a game that lasted more than 1 year, I envy you, Pirate Cat. Please die in a fire.

Now, aside from that, I do have some advice for you, unqualified as it may be. The advice has nothing to do with how to run the game. After 14 years of it, I will grant that you probably have some idea of what your doing and how you want to do it.

First, do not be afraid or uneasy about inconsitencies. Your campaign has ran 14 years. There are TV shows that have had half that long a run that ended up with some glaring inconsistencies. As long as you dont intentionally make the ending suck, I am betting that the players will enjoy it. You should be crapping your pants with glee that all these ideas you have had rolling around in your head will finally have an audience.

The second bit of advice is for what you should do after. You have been the DM for 14 years. I say, its time to sit at the other end of the table, and let someone else have a go at running a game. Even if you end up joining a different gaming group to do it. Being a DM can kick ass, but being a player can be great fun too.

The third bit of advice is to not rule out a return to this world you have created. Save the players character sheets, and a few years from now, run a one shot where someone summoned the great legendary heroes to fend off some apocalyptic threat. Or be a total geek, and have them framed and give them to your players as christmas geeks. (Or if you want to be ceremonial and subversive about it, have a BBQ and make each player burn their character sheet and flush the ashes down the toilet. This is just a game after all).

Good luck on whatever comes after this.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Rel]

I've also promised a session where folks come over for dinner and I answer any question they might have about the campaign.

I think this is a grand idea. I always end campaigns with a little Q&A where the players can ask me about stuff going on behind the scenes and I give them the straight dope. But since my campaigns usually only last 9-12 months then this doesn't often take more than say half an hour or so. I could easily see yours going on all night.

As for the "What will I do next?" question, I say you just wait until inspiration strikes. I'm the "on deck" GM for our group right now, due to take up the mantle probably after the holidays. I had no idea what I was going to run for several months. Then, in the middle of watching Dead Man's Chest I suddenly knew that I could only run a fantasy Pirates of the Caribbean game and since then I've been writing down the TONS of ideas that have flooded in for things to do with that game. Once you're inspired, it seems almost effortless, so don't try and force it.

 

[Cheiromancer]

Kept us talking about it for a couple of years before the real truth came out

Are you going to leave us hanging, too?

 

[Prism]

We knew that the BBEG had an artifact, a rod, that stole the souls of those it hit. It would then bestow some of the powers of the soul on the bearer. He'd used this successfully to impersonate another wizard which was why he was so hard to track down. To be honest, we were pretty nervous about this aspect of the fight. When we got to the final battle he didn't seem to have the item with him but that didn't stop it being a hard fight

Also in those days there was no such thing as cohorts, but my character had a hireling who was a low level cleric - pretty nasty piece of work as it happened - who was basically ignored since she was so much lower in level and power (6th vs 17th). I was fully in control of the character as well as my own but used her more for roleplaying than anything else. So since my main character was temporarily made of stone (not really so temporary - still stone to this day), i was playing the cleric hireling - making search checks, casting detect magics etc. And she happened to find the artifact first.

Now this really was the end of the campaign. We all fully expected to wrap up at the end of the following week (not the beginning as it turned out). Would we have played the campaign again? I'm not sure - maybe we would. Would I have done what I did in the middle of the campaign - to be honest probably not.

So she walked back to the rogue and wizard (who was asleep already), told the rogue there was a chest she couldn't get into and said she'd stay on watch. Thats where we left it. I spent a week wondering if she really was evil enough to do this - decided yes - and so killed the wizard, smashed up my own main character and with an invisibility took out the rogue. It was certainly a bit strange killing your own character off with your own cohort. At first the DM wasn't so sure about all this, and to be honest neither was I, not generally being into killing off other party members. But basically the entire party had ignored this cleric as being insignificant for ages and she was out for revenge - and treasure.

I guess the DM left it to me to admit what had happened, but I never did so he kind of took the blame for it all. He seemed to quite enjoy the 'its not what you think' line followed by 'no really, you're all dead'. I told the others in the end after too much beer one night

Party due to the feeling we never completed (although we technically we did), 6 years later the characters are all converted to 3.5 and ready to go. Some are in play, recovered although seriously weakened - some are still stone

Ending a long term campaign where the characters may well have multiple facets gives the players a lot of freedom in those last couple of sessions to possibly do things you never expected. A conclusion can bring out the best (or worst in my case) in the players

 

[loki44]

For those of you who have concluded mega-campaigns.....do you tell your players when it's going to happen, i.e. "This is going to be the last session fellas", or do you spring it on them out of the blue? If you've opted for the sudden surprise ending to a long standing campaign, how did your players react?

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Anyone have lessons to share from ending a long campaign? Good stuff, bad stuff, things you wish you had handled differently? What really worked well?

Every campaign I've ever run or played in has simply faded away - save one. The first campaign I ran using the 3rd Edition rules lasted probably 18 months, and it was the first ever campaign that I decided right at the outset would come to a definitive conclusion at or before the PC's reached 20th level. It was the best game of D&D I've ever run. Both myself and the players looked forward eagerly to every session.

Looking back at it, I have every confidence that one of the biggest reasons for its success is that the commitment on my part to ensuring a definitive end to it all gave it a momementum and a driving PURPOSE to sustain it when the fairly rapid pacing of in-game events started to slacken. The game events were partially guided by the contents of the original Adventure Path modules but the bulk of it wound up being created on the fly.

There were only two real difficulties involved in it. One was that I had developed a very "X-Files" sort of approach to exposition. Every question answered would only lead to two more questions. Were it not for the consistent efforts of one particular player in keeping notes I'd have gotten lost in the ever-deepening layers of my fascinating onion of plot. When the campaign started to get noticeably closer to the end than it was to the beginning I had problems keeping track of all the loose ends I'd provided the players with; problems in both remembering what they were in the first place and then in selecting the ones that need to be tied off in some fashion (and then further deciding just HOW that would be done.) The second was in not maintaining full control of the game all the way through. One of the players was especially enamored of what I'd been unravelling. When I had begun to express a certain amount of intimidation at making it all come back together for a satsifying end he offered to take over for a while. In particular, he'd been reading an entirely different world setting; a commmercial setting. But so much of its details seemed to fit PERFECTLY with where my own campaign was headed. He then offered to take over some DM duties, move the adventuring to this campaign world of his (which DID fit excellently with what I needed) and thus allow me to take a bit of a breather as a player while he moved game events for a while.

The problem was that he really didn't seem to be moving events much of anywhere. Our DMing styles are, I eventually realized, just too different and he'd failed to maintain the same pacing. It might have worked out okay if it could have played out for another 6 months of real-time but the campaign neeeded to be moving toward a conclusion, or at least a good initial climax of events. But we wound up feeling more like the game had lost direction. It had in fact, simply lost some of its focus for which you simply NEED to have one person in charge with a singular vision. It was too late in the game to start trying to merge visions of where to go and how to get there.

The game did ultimately conclude, but it was something of an unsatisfactory conclusion and that was partly due to my having let it get a little sloppy towards the end.

I would do it again in a heartbeat but with a few changes:

1. I'd take MUCH better personal notes
2. I'd be a little more constrained in the onion-layer plotting. Once it gets going it's quite compelling but like the X-Files some questions DO need to be answered at the end.
3. If I ever think that my own plots might be getting too big for me to handle I will NOT try to solve the problem by surrendering creative control. The time for co-DM's and collabaration is right at the outset, not the third act (as long as things are still going well from the players perspective.)

 

[Crust]

I just finished a four-year campaign last March. The party level was 28. I think the main reason I don't necessarily miss it is because we played that campaign until we were, really, sick of it. We were all ready to move on by the end of the last session. It was like a collective sigh of relief. It was some incredible gaming, don't get me wrong! The epic campaign is a VERY rewarding thing to experience, and we were sad to see that go, but the idea of building toward that all over again excited us. We're now into the third module of the Age of Worms Dungeon campaign arc ("Encounter at Blackwall Keep"), and it's been fantastic. We'll get to epic levels again, and we'll enjoy it for as long as we can. I suspect the cycle will continue.