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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9868988" data-attributes="member: 75787">I’ve run maybe 20-30 year+ long campaigns, and only three I abandoned. One was when I found that the material I was using was by an abusive person, and I felt incapable of continuing to read it. One was killed by Covid, and one was a Doctor Who campaign that I found just too hard to keep coming up with plots that felt sufficiently whovian.I don’t run open-ended campaigns. I run ones with clear goals so the players know what they are getting into and have a rough idea of the plot. Like reading a book, if the plot has no direction but is pretty meandering, you are more likely just to give up on it. It may have other good qualities, but the lack of direction is a negative that needs to be overcome. My longest campaigns have had very clear end goals — The Dracula Dossier (kill Dracula), The Great Pendragon Campaign (death of Arthur) — but that doesn’t mean they are time-limited. DD I originally thought of as about a 20 session campaign, but we loved playing it and ended up running about 50 sessions. But if we had tired of it, I’d have wrapped it up in 6 sessions.I also don’t start campaigns without a 6 session trial. I run an arc that can finish comfortably in 6 sessions, and then poll my players to see if they want to continue. That guarantees at least a degree of interest and commitment.If you start a campaign without trialing to see if it’s actually fun, have no direction and don’t plan how it’s going to end, then yes, you are going to have a high chance of failure. You can happily run a sandbox game (I am running a One Ring game sandbox-style), but it still helps to have direction. You can plan endings in sandbox’s games just as easily too — you just do so when the campaign begins to flag or you feel it’s a good ending time.And if people move away or real-life intervenes, you may have to finish in a hurry. But if that happens, why not try and wrap up as much as you can in your last 3-4 sessions? Better a hurried ending than none at all!So I guess my thought as to why a high proportion of campaigns fail is that the GM fails to plan for how to end, or keeps going even when they know they should end. Wrap it up and move on!</blockquote>

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