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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099210" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's a good point.  Generally speaking, I find it hard to 'complete' campaigns because people move away or have other life changing experiences.   Continuity is a huge problem.  But even in the campaigns I was in that went 5 years or more, they never had 'a' satisfactory conclusion.  They were satisfying campaigns so no one wanted them to end.  You might could say that they had had several satisfactory conclusions, multiple places where we could have ended having said "There we did what we set out to do.", and like a popular story the author never wanted to put them down so they became serialized into a seemingly never ending series of novels.  As I said, D&D was concieved as an open ended game.  It's all about the journey.   If you ever do get to a destination, you'll find its just a stop in your longer journey.   To a certain extent, the campaigns that came to 'a satisfactory conclusion' were satisfactory because no one was having enough fun to want to keep playing them.My current campaign as it was concieved was nested in three major increasingly ambitious story arcs.  However, if the main story arc is completely - thwarting the Esoteric Order of the Golden Globe - the campaign is by no means over nor will the stories be over.  There are already huge lose ends - like the undesired triumph of the Nautians in Amalteen.  And there are likely to be personal stories and missions that aren't going to be fully tied up.   Moreover, I also know that there really never needs to be an end of nesting.   There is always some greater evil behind the lesser.   There are several story lines that would allow this campaign to open up into a full planescape style campaign should we reach the projected end of the current story line.  The longest campaign I was ever in went on to the point that the players were starting families, raising children, running empires and had generally reached the point that we were more often adventuring with our original NPC's former retainers than with the now uber-powerful semi-retired original NPCs.For a story as simplistic as the New Hope story, there isn't really any reason you couldn't finish it in ~12 hours of game play.   Arguably, I've already done a story that is about seven times as long as the story of a New Hope.  Consider my aborted attempt to turn it into a story hour, which died when I realized that in a simplified narrative form the first session of play was still going to be 20 pages or more, and I'm currently out at around 50 sessions.  Just a brief summary of the campaign in story form would be a 1000 page novel.   Even just a summary of the major events would run probably 20 or 30 pages.  And, we are roughly half done with my conception.   'A New Hope' is like 90 pages of story.   My goal is of course to hit 'A New Hope' like highs ever 100 to 200 'pages' or so.  It doesn't always work that way, but we've gotten a couple.   However, 'A New Hope' isn't a campaign.   It's just the first module.  If you did 'Star Wars' as a campaign, you'd probably want at least 80 hours of play.   And even the original trilogy isn't the whole story, because like any good campaign the participants don't want it to be over.I'm not sure what is going to address your need for epiphinany, closure, etc. in a game.   My sense is that you need to stop playing campaigns or lengthy adventure paths and settle on a more episodic format - television rather than movies.   A television series like 'Babylon 5' or 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' with this fully concieved multiseason grand story arcs aren't going to work for you.  Intead, you need to be looking to a campaign done more like 'Star Trek' - 45 pages of script and then wrap up the story.  Repeat as long as you can keep interest in the format.  You can't rush the telling of a story and expect it to work.  You need that time to develop the story.   I'd be seriously worried that by going 'full thortle' through stories you wrap up campaigns without actually achieving the emotional satisfaction you were searching for at the destination.</blockquote>

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