How many campaigns have you finished?

[delericho]

I count eight, although there may be others.

The earliest one I'm aware of was a rather poor Dragonlance/Spelljammer 2nd Ed game that run from 1st to 15th level (with widly hacked XP awards, so not exactly 'fair') and ended with the PCs becoming gods. Not a great, or even good, campaign, but it came to it's end, so...

A year or so after that, I ran the first of my four 'great' campaigns, which was largely a sub-Tolkien rip-off. The storyline wasn't great, but the group was, and it was the first campaign I ran with a real story and real role-play. I'm pretty proud of that one. And, yes, it came to a very satisfying end.

The second of my 'great' campaigns was a 5-year real-time/2300 year game-time Vampire game. Although it was something of a slog near the end, there was a lot of fantastic play in that one. It was particularly satisfying when seeds I'd lain in session 2 finally bore fruit in year 5. (And thank you, JMS, for showing how that could be done in "Babylon 5". Still, I don't recommend it!) Probably the most involved campaign I will ever run.

My first ever 3e campaign ran from beginning to end. Not much more to say about it, really.

I ran through the "Shackled City" Adventure Path (magazine version) a few years ago. That's the third of my 'great' campaigns, and ran start to finish.

And the other Adventure Path I've run start to finish was the "Paths of the Damned" trilogy for WFRP 2e. Again, not a great campaign, but it ran start to finish...

The other WFRP campaign I ran was "Company of the Black Hand", which was based heavily on the Black Company novels by Glen Cook. This one came to its planned end, but was heavily abridged in the middle. This campaign was a slight disappointment - there were hints of some great play coming about, but getting the group together was a nightmare, and led to huge amounts getting cut.

My first Eberron campaign, "On Tracks of Lightning" was also the first campaign I ran with my current group. It's another one that was heavily abridged in the middle, but which came to the planned end. Again, not a great campaign, largely because it was the first one with a new group. Still, there were hints of good things in there.

I have two other campaigns that came to planned stopping points before going on hiatus.

"The First Rebellion" was a Star Wars Saga Edition campaign set immediately after Order-66 was issued. It ran for some months, then went on hiatus. The plan was to return to it after "Black Hand", but sadly it's never going to come back. Plenty of good play in there, though.

And my most recent campaign, "The Eberron Code" is currently on hiatus while I get married. The plan is for it to resume in May. As things stand, this is the best campaign I have run in years, and if all goes well it will become my fourth 'great' campaign. It's also the main reason why 2011 is my best year in gaming for years.

On the other hand, there have been dozens, perhaps scores, of campaigns that never really worked. Most lasted just a few sessions and then collapsed for one reason or another. TPKs have actually been fairly rare causes for campaigns ending; more commonly, we weren't really feeling it.

 

[Jhaelen]

The only campaign I ever finished so far was my 3e D&D homebrew campaign which took us about six years to finish.

All others fizzled out (a lot) earlier.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

In over 35 years of playing D&D, of all the campaigns I've run and all those I've played in only ONE has ever been started with the intended goal of having a definite end. It was a campaign I ran for 3.5, lasted less than a year of real time (2001), covered definitely less than a year of game time and the PC's went from 1st to about 18th level. It was actually quite a strange feeling to formally END a campaign. Having no experience whatever at that I think it went well. I know I had fun and the players had fun despite some bumps and lagging along the way. Experienced many of the pitfalls of 3E as a system but managed to overcome or at least ignore most of them.

Although I learned that it's better to PLAN OUT a decent plot arc for a campaign while still allowing for player influence of events, I really would rather prefer that campaigns and the characters in them always be left wanting more, left OPEN for more rather than brought to a finite end for any reason. At the "conclusion" of any particular story arc I could then suggest that the game be shelved and we could start over with a new world, new PC's, but if the players want to keep going that the milieu would support it and not feel as if we were simply milking it dry.