How should a campaign end?

[Ylis]

You do realize that there is nothing stopping him from having the character raised and using him any way?

Yes, I know....but my characters always have the "Magical Circlet of DM Resurrection Prevention +2" It's kind of a house rule that I get to roll on an insanity chart if a character of mine is resurrected against my will (it's a modified RIFTS crazy chart). This is due to my deep belief that once my character is dead, she's dead, end of story They go along with it because, hey, it's fun to make me crazy occasionally....

 

[tonym]

...So if you are a player how would you like a campaign to end?

This is what typically happens:

Big fight.
We grab the Great Item or accomplish whatever we were trying to do.

THE END

But it would be nice if....maybe...there was ONE more session, where the party splits up and each PC goes off in their own direction. Or something. With a lot of roleplaying and fastforwarding...so the campiagn ends on a peaceful note, somewhere in the future. Where the fields are full of corn and hay, and the children play in the sun. And that annoying shopkeeper who always overcharged you for supplies is dead.

THE....(sigh).....END


Tony

 

[Chosen01]

There is a good article over at silven.com on ending a campaign - the Last Great Quest article.

 

[Elf Witch]

I suppose the thing is Elf Witch, most DMs don't want to plan a self-contained and terminating campaign. After all, we all as DMs just know that our ideas are boundless and our creative weelspring a ceaseless source of new adventures. Except that, as you've discovered, it just isn't so. Instead we face burnout, boredom and ennui, coupled often with a desire to try out the newest 'thing' on the gaming block. So instead of having a good, memorable ending, the campaign either peters out, out of boredom, or is just sort of forgotten when something else comes along.

I can't say I am much better. All bar one of the campaigns that ended with a definite denouement did so because I was running them in a University games club, so they had a definite start and finish. The other one was a deliberately short campaign run for a couple of friends just so they could game together; since I didn't have a lot of time for this, I planned a short story for them to do, with a distinct ending. All the rest of the campaigns I have run have fallen apart in some way, or been put on indefinite hold. So they've lacked any resolution. And comparing with other GMs I know, I am not alone in this.

Perhaps you need to set up a game with a fixed purview and duration, just so you can get the feeling once more of a resolved campaign.

I do understand DM burnout and it is up the DM facing burnout to open his mouth and say something not just hint but say guys I need a break. Instead of saying well if I just finish this section I can wrap up the game and everyone will be happy. But no it dosen't go as fast so the DM snaps and leaves the party hanging from a rope and three years of campaign left unresolved. It was frustrating for all involved. Espically since before that we were at a perfect ending place. We could have taken a break and then maybe come back to the world.

If you find yourself reaching boredom, burnout whatever talk to your players enlist their aid to wrap things up to a point where stopping works. That should not be to hard.

I am not saying that everything should have a nice neat ending everything reolved but leaving things in the middle of an adventure literally hanging from a rope or stuck in the abyss like we are now is not the way. Have the party end up somewhere safe and then end the game. That way if you later want to come back you can without much diffculty.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I suppose the thing is Elf Witch, most DMs don't want to plan a self-contained and terminating campaign.

Really? I, and every DM I've gamed with since high school, does exactly that.

Sometimes it's a campaign that's a singe long story (albeit with side adventures that have no bearing on the main plot). Sometimes it's a single-story mini-campaign. Sometimes it's a campaign with no particular plot arc, but I/they still know at roughly what point we plan to end it.

I have never (not counting elementary/middle school, which I'm not counting for a variety of reasons) begun a campaign that I didn't specifically plan to end at some point. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone I've gamed with for any length of time. That doesn't mean I end things so thoroughly that can't come back and do another campaign with those characters if we want to. But we very well might not, and if we do--despite being the same world and the same PCs--it really is a different campaign.

 

[Guilt Puppy]

Only campaign I ran to its finish ended after a climactic battle -- there was, of course, some wrap-up, but mostly the rush was an out-of-game sense of accomplishment: That we'd actually played a game to its conclusion.

Since then, I've moved on to a more complicated way of looking at the final conclusion, and I've yet to see how well it pans out... Essentially, it boils down to getting the PCs wrapped up in some many-faceted situation which doesn't have a clear-cut "resolution..." The idea is that, over time, the PCs will develop their own goals, within the context of that/those situations, and then they decide when it feels resolved.

It's difficult to "plan out" this kind of campaign, mind you, because it's fairly non-linear. But it can work, and so far it's playing out pretty well...

 

[Deadguy]

Really? I, and every DM I've gamed with since high school, does exactly that.

Sometimes it's a campaign that's a singe long story (albeit with side adventures that have no bearing on the main plot). Sometimes it's a single-story mini-campaign. Sometimes it's a campaign with no particular plot arc, but I/they still know at roughly what point we plan to end it.

This might be a terminology thing, Ari, rather than a disagreement. I suppose by campaign I mean 'setting' rather than 'story arc'. I might have a definite story arc in mind when I work on a game, but I never assume that the setting is just for that story arc. Consequently I plan stories that won't completely rewrite the setting. Like i say, that's been my experience, from knowing probably two score DMs.

Actually it isn't absolute. I did participate in one long and very intense campaign (homebrew setting based off of Storyteller rules) which was a single story-arc campaign. At the end (which was a bit of a letdown, more of a railroad than a resolution), the campaign wrapped up. However some of the players had grown so attached to their PCs that they pressured the DM into running some more, set 'afterwards'. It collapsed after it turned into a tangled morass, because the setting didn't really allow for a meaningful 'after'.

So that's marked my experience. Now everyone I know has open campaigns, where stories unfold but there's no expectation that the campaign will ever come to an end.

Funny how different our experiences can be!

 

[James McMurray]

I think that every campaign should end with the start of a new campaign. A large portion of the last session, or even the entire last session, should be devote completely to denouement, and wrap up the loose ends. The next time that GM runs should be in a world that has been affected by the previous campaign.

For example, in my current campaign the party is trying to destroy an evil temple to Orcus as part of their quest to be members in the next Pantheon of gods the old one is scheduled to step down soon). Win or lose, my next campaign will be several centuries in the future, and the party will have an entirely new pantheon and world structure to deal with. If the current party succeeds, they'll be able to live in a world where they can actually worship their previous characters. If they fail, they'll b alive in a world where Orcus is quite probably the most powerful deity. Either way looks like it could lead to an exciting "next adventure".

Of course, my last two campaigns ended in TPKs. I said how I think all campaigns ]should end, not how all campaigns do end.

 

[Mouseferatu]

This might be a terminology thing, Ari, rather than a disagreement. I suppose by campaign I mean 'setting' rather than 'story arc'. I might have a definite story arc in mind when I work on a game, but I never assume that the setting is just for that story arc. Consequently I plan stories that won't completely rewrite the setting. Like i say, that's been my experience, from knowing probably two score DMs.

Ah. Yeah, I think it's at least partly terminology, then. I often develop a new world for every campaign, but even if we play again in the same world--with the same characters--I tend to think of campaigns as having set beginnings, middles, and ends. I think of a campaign as a TV series, usually one with a story arc. (My favorite example is Babylon 5.) Even if I run again in the same setting, it's a new show (say, Crusade or Legend of the Rangers, except my sequels aren't normally killed by idiocy on the part of the studio. ;-)

I'll give you the example of Selion, my oldest homebrew world. My first campaign took one group of PCs from 1st to (about) 12th level. Second campaign took the same characters, and raised them to near 20th. Third campaign--"Selion: the Next Generation," my players dubbed it--starred all new PCs, a few of whom were children of the first group. The fourth Selion campaign--"S2K," unofficially--took place 2,000 years after the first campaign. The fifth was the same group of PCs as the fourth. The last, which ended only a few weeks ago, was about 55 years after the fifth.

So, by my definition, that's 6 different campaigns, even if it's all the same world (allowing for two millennia of changes), and even if it was only four separate groups of PCs.

PS: Can we tell that I'm a relatively story-focused DM?

PPS: Which is not the same thing as railroading or depriving the PCs of choice, regardless of what some people might say.

 

[Altalazar]

I once ended a Shadowrun campain - a long one - by actually starting another one in the meanwhile. We did that for a few weeks, then I wrote up narratives to give to each character from the first campaign indicating what has been happening for the past "year" of game time, and basically setting up a "reunion" of sorts between them all (they had drifted a bit after the last run) where they finally faced what had been in the background for a long time in the campaign. It was one, big, finale of an adventure, after a long build up and it had the feel of a blockbuster movie sequel to due to the "reunion" nature of the run after time had passed. Everyone had a blast, it was very satisfying and it wrapped things up nicely after the characters had already (prior) basically ended their runs together.

It is nice to semi-retire characters and keep on playing in the same game world with new characters - perhaps related by blood or by organization to the retired characters. It gives that in-world continuity but allows you to gradually let go of the old characters.