Drawing towards the close of a campaign... it's tougher than I thought.

[Dr Midnight]

My 1st ---> 20th level current D&D campaign is now beginning to slide down the hill towards the end. The party is 14th level, and it's time to give some serious thought to how to wrap up plot threads and loose ends. I've got to look at a dozen story arcs and start figuring out the correct windows for them to come out of orbit through, if you follow me.

This is hard.

The great thing about starting a campaign is that you can just throw anything into the mix and see where it lands. Some archfoe lived through the last encounter? Hey, great, he'll trouble them again at some point. There's something sinister about a PC's past? No problem, just hint at it now and then.

Now, though, I'm having real difficulty looking at the campaign from far back and trying to figure out what needs closure, and how to do it. I'm finding as I do it, it's tougher and tougher to incorporate into the modules... and besides, there's a great dearth of modules at this level of gameplay. My last choice has been a stinker, and the campaign and story hour has been suffering for it. My readership has dropped by... oh... twenty billion-hundred and three.

I'm trying to juggle several things to bring an end to everything, and I'm realizing that the effort has sterilized gameplay and story hour alike. I'm going to need to put twice the effort into the campaign just to keep it from SUCKING quite as much while I bring a satisfactory ending to the major story arcs.

Plus, I've got six more PC levels to do this through. Man, I need a DM assistant. I need a little guy to stand next to me with a legal pad jotting down things I need done.

Has anyone run into this problem? Can anyone tell me where I saw that breakdown of how to wrap up story arcs... was it in DRAGON, or was it a thread on here?

To my credit, I got Johnathan Richards, module author for DUNGEON, to write the ending module for the campaign. Isn't that just damnably cool? He's planning to submit it, so assuming it's accepted, there'll be a 20th level DUNGEON adventure based upon my campaign.

My pledge: I swear to do better. I promise that just as soon as this module is over, we'll be back to the good stuff. I will pick better modules, and better tailor them to suit the needs of the story arcs.

 

[barsoomcore]

I share your pain, good doctor.

It's easy to spin out plot threads, to pile up schemes and hints and possibilities. That's easy. What's hard is bringing them back together.

Here's a couple of tips:

Don't try to do it all at once. They're 14th level now? Okay, time to quickly bring in a few plot threads. Wrap some stuff up. Each session, solve some issues, tie off a couple of loose ends -- saving, of course, the juiciest, tastiest stuff for last. But if you try and stuff it all into the last couple of episodes you'll go insane. And it won't work. And your players will point and laugh and your reputation will be cast into the mud. So back off, and figure out a way to do it in stages.

Don't be afraid to leave stuff hanging. Who said you had to wrap everything up, anyway? Don't ever explain why those weird elves were all hanging from the treant's head. Leave some mysteries -- they will keep your players thinking about the campaign, and wondering what they might have missed. Real life leaves lots of unfinished tales -- so should your campaign.

Don't be afraid to turn things inside out. I was walking home from work once, in the late stages of my campaign's previous season, trying to solve this very "wrap-up" problem. Suddenly I wondered what would happen if I turned everything on its head. What if the good guy was actually the bad guy and was out to destroy the world (or whatever)? Just for thinking's sake, what would be the outcome of that scenario? It's very helpful, especially in later stages, to at least consider that everything you've been assuming about the way your story is going is wrong. It forces you to reconsider long-held assumptions and frees you to find creative solutions.

One of the problems with late-stage DMing is that you start running out of room to manuver. In the early stages you don't have to worry about much because if you screw up you can always just create some new bad guy or whatever to explain away any inconsistencies. As you head into the home stretch, you'll find that this wiggle room gets to be less and less. Find ways to increase it and your life gets lots easier. Like killing NPCs. Dead NPCs offer more possibilities than live NPCs -- or rather, it's easier to turn complicated explanations into dead NPCs so that you don't have to worry about the party screwing up that part of your plans.

Catastrophe is your friend. Also in the "generating wiggle room" line is mass destruction, chaos unleashed, the end of the world. It also really brings home to the party that things are getting a mite serious. You can overdo it, of course, but I find whenever I'm in doubt, completely wiping out an entire nation always gives me room to breath.

Hope that helps. Post and let us know how things are going...

 

[EOL]

I had a similiar experience and fortunately (actually unfortunately) I got to busy too finish the campaign, but I too had a 15th level party that was getting close to the end and a million seperate threads. Fortunately I had an overiding theme for the whole campaign, but there was still a ton of stuff that had to be reconciled.

So here's what I did, I tried to combine all the threads as much as possible, not in the sense that it becomes all one boring thread which has to be dealt with, in the sense that previously unthought of connections started popping up, mysterious cabals and hidden secrets. Have a a lone assassin who has been dogging the party for the last ten levels and an group of Illithids? Well what if the assassin is an Illithid in disguise. And when you're reconciling the Illithids actions with the assassins suddenly you're forced to be so much more devious.

So not only does this have the effect of simplifying the number of threads that are left hanging out there, but it adds another layer to the campaign which can't help but make it richer and more enjoyable. But as always YMMV...

 

[LGodamus]

Honestly I must have run into this a half a dozen times, and as Barsoomcore already said, I just never really resolve everything.
I feel it makes the story feel artificial if everything ends up wrapped all nice and pretty with a bow on top. I make sure the main stories and overarching themes of the campaign are brought to a satisfactory end and leave some things as unsolved mysteries. If the players want to know those things so bad they should have focused more on them....my players drive my campaign, the things they want the most they focus on and I accomodate them. Other things get left by the wayside. Doc you seem to be a great storyteller, I read your story hour post avidly, and I feel strange giving you advice, But dont sweat the small stuff.....if something sticks out in a players mind as unfinished let them go after it......things that dont matter will go the way of the dodo.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

It sounds that, like me, you use a lot of prewritten modules- or at least adapt them heavily. I'm curious, what was this last module that caused all the problems? For me, it was "Demon God's Fane"- it's a good enough module, but it was totally different from other stuff I'd been running, and it gave the party a lot of problems as a result. Also, I wouldn't reccommend running it with a party that's half wizards....

Anyhow, I'm getting ready to start my "big climax which ties up beaucoup plot threads" this weekend. The group is about 17- 18th level. I've sort of painted myself into a corner where I've got a few minor things that I could use to continue the campaign, and the PCs have some things they'd like to do, but nothing that I can see propelling things forward like the major plots used to. I could let the players go around and work on their dominions/churches/ whatever, but there's only so many day-to-day conflicts you can throw at high-level characters... it's not as if the 18th-level priestess is going to have problems with a neighborhood gang of thugs. Well, not unless the thugs were of an improbably high level.

My plan right now is to wrap up the major stuff, run a backup campaign for a while, and have about a year or so of downtime. I could probably benefit from the introduction of another villain group as well- the whole "you discover yet another conspiracy caused by evil beings from beyond" has worn pretty thin. Plus, the good guys are starting to get the upper hand. Definately can't have that.

 

[F5]

I'm with LGodamus here, Doc. You are a good storyteller, and you'll do fine.
From reading your story hour, I'd say one of the biggest strengths your group has is in character interaction. Even playing from modules, your games always seem very character-driven (and that's not easy to do with mods!), so that's probably the way I would go to wrap up, if I were in your shoes. Find out from the players what their goals are, and what they want to see wrapped up. Bring the characters' stories to a logical finish, let the players wrap up what's important to them, and if that means some old plot threads stay unresolved, that's OK as long as everyone's happy.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to reading about how you decide to handle it!

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think this problem occurs in 3e D&D because characters race through the levels much, much more quickly than ever before - and that gives the time pressure (at 14th level it is only another 70-80 encounters of equivalent CR and bingo! you're done! It used to be that only got you half-way to 15th )

One possibility is to slow down experience acquisition - either use lots of lower CR encounters, but with sufficient numbers to remain challenging, or apply a fudge factor to reduce exp gained across the board (I know that is what Piratecat does).

Probably not what you're looking for, but a couple of off-the-wall suggestions.

Cheers

 

[Zappo]

Easy! Nuke the planet!

 

[Piratecat]

I feel your pain. I just gave out XP, and now my players are from 16th-20th level. We're on the penultimate big adventure, and things are building very nicely.

God help me if this doesn't come off as well as I expect it to!

And I agree with the others; don't sweat all the loose ends. Just play to have fun, instead of feeling like you have to jump through some self-imposed hoop, and you'll be just fine.

 

[drnuncheon]

I feel your pain. I just gave out XP, and now my players are from 16th-20th level. We're on the penultimate big adventure, and things are building very nicely.

ACK! You're going to end it all?

The only thing that stops me from going into a tizzy at that thought is the hope that I will be able to read the next PCat campaign from the beginning.

I'm taking the other route, structuring my game like a series of novels instead of a single epic storyline. Each book ties up the main plot thread but leaves other ones dangling, to be picked up later.

As for how this can help you, Doc: consider not setting an artificial end to the campaign at 20th level. Instead, go until everything you need to wrap up has been wrapped. If that takes until 21st or 25th, so be it.

No need to go out and buy the Epic rules, either - you could use the extensions from the FRCS if you have it, or even make your own based on extrapolating the levels in the Core books. That might give a smoother feel to the power curve than leaping into the realm of epic feats and the like, too.

J