Why do so many campaigns never finish? Genuinely curious what others think

[GrimCo]

It's not like having closed campaigns with a beginning, middle and end point was some rare thing that never appeared until 2000 when Paizo started doing Adventure Paths.

Closed campaigns like that was default way we played over 20 years ago in HS. It just made sense. And we played homebrew settings and adventures since published adventures were hard to come by and expensive and we really had no ideas that magazines like Dungeon or Dragon even existed. I saw few times White Dwarf magazine in bookstore that had some foreign magazines but price was ridiculous ( 3-4x times original retail price). When fast internet came around in 2005/6, we mostly relied on scanned pdf and those were for most part books with player options or occasional setting book.

Published adventures were more USA/UK thing. In eastern/south eastern Europe, make your own adventure and setting was usually only option.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, but at this point you seem more into characterizing positions nobody explicitly took than actually discussing the matter.

I never said anything like, "it was all random sandboxes", and I don't expect anyone else did either.

I don't see any reason to discuss with you if that's going to be your approach.

Have a good one.

When someone suggests something is a relatively new phenomenon and I very much saw it otherwise, I'm going to say that. If that offends you, so be it.

 

[Umbran]

When someone suggests something is a relatively new phenomenon and I very much saw it otherwise, I'm going to say that. If that offends you, so be it.

1) The question isn't when the first event happened, but how common it was in published form.

2) I am not offended by you claiming to haver seen it. I am offended by you strawmanning me to my face.