This is the third post in our sporadic How to End a Campaign series. Each post covers one approach to ending a long-running game, including pros and cons.
Ending a campaign is rarely going to be easy, and it’s something a lot of GMs struggle with. In fact, it was one of the two most common answers to the question “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do as a GM?,” which was asked as part of our GMing profiles thread.
Today’s approach is like putting on the brakes and getting out of the car: The sudden stop.
A sudden stop is just that: You announce that the campaign is over — no wrap-up, no resolving loose ends, no closure. Just over.
Most often, this is because Real Life™ rears its ugly head. Your hours change at work. That one class turns out to be tougher than you expected. Your campaign notes get wiped out in a flood.
Sometimes, though, campaigns are ended with a sudden stop for in-game reasons. The whole party got wiped out in a TPK and no one has the energy to keep going. The last five sessions sucked, and you’re not sure how to fix them.
This approach is a very mixed bag.
Pros
On the plus side, much like ending a relationship abruptly, at least it’s over. And unlike ending things with a whimper, at least it’s decisive.
No one is wondering whether or not the game might start up again, and as the GM you can put everything aside and focus on other things. Perhaps someone else can run a game for a little while.
When real-life factors intervene and I suspect my game is going to suffer for it, this is the method I generally use. You have to explain to your group why you’re putting on the brakes, but in my experience most groups are pretty understanding.
Cons
On the minus side, much like ending a relationship abruptly, it’s over so fast you don’t get any closure. Because it comes as a surprise, it can be a bit disorienting.
For the players, all of their cool plans get cut off midstream. The plotline you had lovingly crafted — and that they were devouring with gusto every week — just ends. Not happily or unhappily, just done.
As a player, this approach gnaws at me — particularly if I was really excited about the game. On an intellectual level, I know that if the GM can’t keep going, that’s totally understandable. But on an emotional level, I wonder about the possibilities, the might-have-beens and the nifty things I was planning to do.
Other Approaches
The rest of this series looks at different approaches to ending an ongoing campaign.
- With a Bang
- With a Whimper
- (A Sudden Stop)
- On Indefinite Hold
- Fast Forward
- According to Plan
Have you ended campaigns with a sudden stop? How did it go?
I once did to a sudden stop to a campaign, but it was not for any of the reasons stated above. We stopped suddenly because we found something better to play.
The campaign in question was our first 3rd Edition D&D campaign. It was a straightforward, generic series of connected adventures, using the default setting information from the core books. The idea was just to explore the new version and do simple hack ‘n’ slash.
But then they released the Dragonlance Campaign Setting. And for my players, who grew up reading the Chronicles and Legends, this was the world were D&D was meant to be played. So we dropped our current campaign, wished those characters a fond farewell, and dove into a new Dragonlance campaign. And it was a great choice; the campaign is still going strong years later.
This same idea, of stopping a campaign suddenly for something new, obviously can apply to a more radical change: going from D&D to GURPS, going from face-to-face to online, things like that. Obviously, this works well when the players are excited to do something new. Keeping the old campaign can actually be detrimental to the group. Thus it is often best to just cut the old one off, and start something new to capture that enthusiasm.
I’ve always given my players the benefit of sharing the storyline with them when an adventure/campaign stops. I know the reality is that we will never pick it up again, and they deserve to hear everything that would have happened.
I’ve only run one campaign that *stopped*, and it was due to a TPK. We could have continued with new characters, but the players were excited about another campaign we had already talked about.
This reminds me of the Monty Python bit where a guy is in a department store shopping for an ending to the show. The go through a chase, walking off into the sunset, the happy ending, a panel analysis, and a slow fade. Each time they come back to the guy in the department store, as he rejects each one for some reason. Then the salesman says, “how about a sudden ending?” — and the show just ends.
I’ve done it this way a couple of times; the last time was after horrible inter-party fighting ruined the session. I told them that it was clear the campaign was over, and I wasn’t going to run a half dozen single character plots– it was over.
It was such a bitter ending that no one started GMing for a couple of months– exactly the reverse of our current situation, where everyone wants to run a game, because we’re having so much fun.
As a player, this happened at the end of the last campaign (Strife and Pride, a D&D game that had reached 11th level or so). One of our players left, and we’d lost another along the way, so we invited a couple of people to join us mid-steam. After 3 sessions with the new people, no one was happy, so we quit. Those sessions aren’t quite “as real” to me when I’m recalling the campaign… kind of an oops that I acknowledge but don’t dwell on.
Sudden stop works a lot better with an episodic campaign. Current adventures are finished, one of the hot shot characters asks for too much money to film the next season, show cancelled…or something like that. 😀
I’m a fan of both Star Trek (Next Generation) and Lord of the Rings. I prefer LotR. But there’s no denying that even for people with my preferences, if you get only 80% of it, STNG is a much deal than LotR. 80% of STNG was worth doing. 80% of LotR isn’t.
I’m tempted to bow out of playing in the World Of Darkness (white wolf)game that I’m in right now (and I soooo rarely get to actually play in anything), but I’m afraid it’s gonna put a sudden stop to the game. Other people have expressed their mild distaste for it (all but one, and I don’t speak to him as much outside of game), and I think if one person bails, the storyteller might have a harder time keeping control. I hate to do that, but sometimes games come to a stop, because they can’t keep going.
For you Nick: Is the game the issue for you, or it some non-game issue. Basically, if the game improved would you still play, or does it just not fit your life anymore?
If you’d play in an improved game, then it sounds like there’s enough concensus that it might be worth a discussion with the GM– maybe there’s a new direction that’d get everyone jazzed again.
If you wouldn’t play, even if it improved, then that’s a tough spot to be in. If the storyteller’s your friend, you might confide that life situations (or whatever) are making it hard to play– could he please put in a dramatic story arc climax? That way if everyone else follows when you leave, there’s still closure.
The one ongoing game had ended, and no one else was volenteering to run something, so I started a dnd game with the players discovering a hexagon shaped artifact that teleported a hexagon shaped area of land, including the dungeon and the local villige, into a artificial plane, with another hex land with a dungeon appearing every time they found another artifact.
The game was strieght dungeon crawls and after several weeks when somebody mentioned they were thinking about running, I told him he could start the next week and stopped my game right there.
I had nothing planned for the game long term, and the players were getting bored with steight hack fests. So just dropping it then and there was the best thing to do.
this has come up in our group a couple of times. once, because the DM didn’t have time anymore. second, because the game completely and totally sucked.
I agree with Crazy Jerome: This approach does work better with more episodic games. I’d say that most of the pros and cons still apply for more free-flowing, unstructured games as well, though.
Nick, I’m curious to hear your answers to Scott’s questions, too. That’s a tough situation, but I usually opt for bailing — in as constructive a way as possible, preferably after explaining what’s bugging me about the game and trying to resolve the situation.