Campaigns that actually end... eventually

[CharlesRyan]

I've had a few campaigns struggle through lean times lasting two or three months. I've learned to keep things alive in peoples' minds under such circumstances (I'm in the game business, as are many of the people I game or have gamed with, and the summer time with all its con travel can really kill campaigns. If I hadn't learned to cope with this, I would NEVER see a campaign last more than six to nine months.)

Longer than a couple months? Unless it's a reunion game (we play a session of my long-running WotC post-apocalypse campaign at every Gen Con), I've never seen it happen.

Best of luck, Merric! It's definitely possible, I think, but it's a bit of an uphill battle.

 

[pneumatik]

I've been involved in two campaigns that took a long hiatus shortly before the last few sessions, one as a player and one as a DM. In both cases the last few sessions felt weak. The campaign I DMed was Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Fortunately there was a climactic fight before the hiatus that felt like a campaign-ender. That helped make up for the fight to kill the actual main villain was after the hiatus and a bit of a mess. It didn't help that the actual main villain didn't really show up much before the last fight.

The game I played in was a crawl through the Banewarrens. Between the hiatus and that dungeon having a end fight with its own mechanic, it generally felt like a big let-down.

 

[Ktulu]

The game I'm currently running. It was ended by a horrid TPK over a year ago. We started up another game and forgot about it. About six months ago, we were thinking about what to play next, when it was suggested we come back to the Rankan campaign.

I set the timeline 30 years into the future and they built the sons and daughters of the previous characters (they did exist in the previous game). Now, we're 15 sessions in to the sequel, Rise of Zehir, with the players trying to succeed where their parents failed. It's going to continue for a while.


Our group has revived 3 other campaigns in the past. One was a small game set in a port city run by another DM. I picked it up after he was getting burn-out and ran it clear into the teen levels in 3.5. It was a great end with the party gearing up for a civil war.

 

[the Jester]

Twice I've been running campaigns and moved. The first time, when I eventually came back to town, we picked up where we left off, and some of those pcs went on to be in the campaign for many years to come (all the way to the end of 3.5, actually).

Last September, I moved. The campaign I was running was pretty close to a good stopping point but hadn't quite reached it (the pcs are in reach of their current BBEG). We played once when I came to visit and I'm hoping we can do it again this coming weekend- we ought to be able to finish up.

 

[Dark Mistress]

Only had a dead campaign come back once and then finish up. That was a old Spacemaster one. We played it for about 3 years, then for a variety of reasons took a break. We brought it back 2 years later and it ran for almost another 2 years when it finally ended with those left retiring. Including a marriage between a NPC and a PC, who started off hating each other.

The other times they looked dead and we tried to bring them back, they just never went far before collapsing again.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I have had a few campaigns go on hiatus for as much as a month or so when players announced they had plans for upcoming weeks. We would generally agree on a date to resume the game and then picked up where we left off (though usually the first session back became a jawbone fest where everyone just talked about their REAL lives over the previous month and little or no actual gaming ever took place the first night back.) Just a VERY few occasions did this occur.

I very vaguely seem to recall at least one occasion when players wanted to try to resume a game that had died/fizzled out over a year before. It was quite short-lived as the players mistakenly only tried to relive past glories instead of attempting to create new ones. Sort of like a pathetic use of a Star Trek: TNG holodeck. I do recall that because of this any future player who suggested raising an old campaign from the dead was quickly told that it wasn't worth the risk of damage that MIGHT be done to cherished characters and memories.

The most common end is OVERWHELMINGLY that the game died with a whimper. Players just stopped showing up. Usually without ever bothering to say they wanted to make other plans. They just became reliably busy on game night when I called ahead to get their "RSVP". Generally this coincided with Summer months. Accordingly, for many years I did not expect ANY game to last more than 9 months at best. I also made an unwritten table rule that the game would only take place when there was a reasonable expectation of a quorum of at least 4 players. We could do anything else that night - computer games, board games, card games, go to a movie, have dinner... One or two PC's absences might be studiously ignored, but I didn't want to constantly have to "explain" the absence of too many PC's, especially in the middle of an adventure.

I have had one - and only one - campaign that specifically ended. That was a 3E campaign which only ended because as an experiment I started it with the stated intent of ending it at or just about when the PC's reached 20th level. It ended reasonably well. It did not end spectacularly or particularly memorably (the journey was MUCH more fun than the destination) but I was nonetheless pleased. Surprisingly, this campaign ran for a couple of years and the MOST fun was actually during the summer months when we gamed outside 'til midnight or later under the flicker of a half-dozen oil lamps.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

My Shackled City AP campaign is currently on a 6 month hiatus due to my wife and I having our second child. Before the break it had been running for just under 2 years. My wife doesn't actually play but I agreed to take a break from gaming while we settled in to dealing with 2 little ones in the house (I'm the DM so for me the game is more work than just showing up to play 1 night a fortnight).

After the birth of my first child I put the campaign (a different one to the current one) on a 2 1/2 month break and we picked it up again without any trouble. This time around I don't expect there to be any difficulty in picking the campaign up again, despite the gap being a lot longer. About the only thing that will be an issue is that the campaign stopped mid-combat with a dragon!

Obviously I didn't intend on stopping the campaign like that! The dragon fight took a bit longer than expected and it was getting a little late (we play on a weeknight) so we decided to end the session mid-combat and finish the combat the following fortnight. The next session was meant to be the final session before the baby was due and a dragon fight seemed like a good point to put the campaign on hiatus. Unfortunately my wife had to be induced a few weeks early so the next session never happened.

When we start the game again we have agreed to restart from the start of the dragon encounter since trying to start mid-combat will be just too difficult, even though the battlemat still has our positions marked on it. Before the "restart session" I plan to do a recap of the whole campaign to date, just to refresh everyone's memory of what has happened.

I have taken advantage of the break in the campaign to run some one-shots. We played a couple of sessions of XCrawl which everyone really enjoyed and have expressed an interest in playing again. Next session I'm running a Feng Shui one-shot and I'll probably run a Paranoia and/or Call of Cthulhu one-shot before we restart the D&D campaign.

Being only able to game once a fortnight I haven't really had the opportunity to give any other games a go. However this gap in the campaign has allowed me to try the other systems out on my group. If we got straight back into the Shackled City campaign I probably wouldn't have got to give these other systems a go for another year or two at least.

Olaf the Stout

 

[CharlesRyan]

Hey Merric, if you do get your game back up, shoot us a tweet when your session is rolling. It's tough to get a game going again, but that first new session is the biggest hurdle. Best of luck!

 

[MortalPlague]

...and I'll probably run a Paranoia and/or Call of Cthulhu one-shot before we restart the D&D campaign.

After my current campaign escaped the Underdark, we decided to put 4E D&D on the back burner for a few weeks. We played Paranoia the first week (which was a blast to run, and great fun for my players as well). By popular demand, we'll be playing Paranoia next week as well (with the longer, funnier "Mr. Bubbles" adventure). The following week should see my 4E campaign resume as planned.

A two week break isn't really a hiatus, though. I've had more games than I care to count go on hiatus, never to return (though that was before I started running actual campaigns). Still, there are two games which stick out in my mind when I think of a return from hiatus.

The first was my big, grand 3.5 Salamander campaign which ran from first level up to eighth level. It was an excellent game, where I ran a table of seven players, and they managed to complete the first major plot arc. The second involved a nebulous lich in the shadows sending assassins after them, and while they were finding out more about his whereabouts while themselves remaining hidden, the campaign broke down. Out of game tensions spilled over into the game, and ultimately, we had to take a break.

It was a great narrative moment; the characters all decided to go their separate ways for a year, agreeing to meet back at this spot to finish the hunt for the lich. We tried to resume the game several months later, but it was immediately apparent that nothing had changed, in regards to the out of game conflict. Sadly, a few sessions in, the game whimpered and died.

The second campaign was my friend's Epic-level 3.5 game. We were playing characters starting at level 30, and we were venturing through the Plane of the Lost and Forgotten. It was a really epic game, but the combat and the prep was really wearing on everyone. We decided to take a break for a month and return to the game fresh.

The return saw us entering the third layer of the plane. We were 34th level at the time, and immediately we were thrown into a CR36 encounter. Well, suffice to say that a month of not playing epic level D&D had left us a bit rusty as to our characters, and there was a TPK (technically my character plane shifted away, but that's semantics). And when you're dealing with epic, it's hard to roll up a new character to continue the quest.

 

[Evilhalfling]

My Highschool campaign revived 6 years later, with 3 of 5 orginal players and 1 new.
The campaign was a 2nd ed game that ran 11-14th on the rebound.
(about 2 years?)
It included a trip to Kali's lair of the abyss, and both a PC and an NPC sacrificing themselves heroically. It was one of the strongest campaign endings I ever ran, and a satisfying end to long treasured heroes.