This is the last post in TT’s six-part How to End a Campaign series (previous entries are linked below). Each post in this series covers one approach to ending a long-running game, including pros and cons.
As Identifying the Tough Stuff discussed, “end a campaign” was one of the most common answers to the question “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do as a GM?,” which I posed in TT’s GMing profiles thread.
This last approach is a bit unusual: Having a plan to end your campaign, and sticking to it.
Given the semi-mythical default model for campaigns — the decade-long odyssey that never really ends — this one, ending your campaign according to plan, is fairly uncommon.
In my experience, most gamers don’t like to think about ending campaigns. If you’re in a good game, and you’re playing with your friends, chances are you don’t really want it to end.
In a way, it’s a lot like books and movies: When you’re watching a great movie, or reading an amazing book, you know it’s going to end…but you really wish it didn’t have to.
And just like that book or movie, your campaign is going to come to a close at some point — and that’s where planning the ending comes in.
Pros
The biggest advantage to this approach is pretty simple: You have a plan. Having a plan means that you can easily avoid the not-so-hot ways to end a campaign, particularly ending it with a whimper.
When you know from the beginning how your campaign is going to end, you can write your adventures accordingly. You can also foreshadow the ending, and build up to it in exactly the way you’d like (and if you make sure your players know in advance how long the game will be, they can do the same).
Aiming for a pre-planned ending can also lead to tighter pacing, because you (and your players) know that every moment around the gaming table counts.
Cons
Part of the enjoyment of roleplaying is the lack of constraints — within reason, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Because it adds a constraint, having a definite ending changes that dynamic in a way that not all players will enjoy.
Plotting your campaign out in advance removes some of the flexibility that you usually enjoy as a GM. Once you’ve made your plan and started implementing it, you might not want to fiddle with the details for fear of breaking something — even if doing so might make the game more enjoyable.
You also run the risk of railroading, which is rarely desirable in a long-term campaign. What if something unexpected happens in the second session, and it completely invalidates the ending you were shooting for? Do you change the ending, or remove some of your players’ freedom to choose their destiny?
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)
One thing I’ve always had in mind with this series of posts has been turning it into a free PDF. It offers what I think is a fairly comprehensive overview of what’s often a tricky topic, and it’s nicely self-contained.
That said, this series also hasn’t generated that much discussion, which may mean that there’s not all that much interest in it — it’s sometimes tough to tell.
Would you like to see this series made into a free PDF? Would it be useful to you, or do you think it’d be useful to other GMs?
And have you ever ended a campaign according to plan? How did it go?
I would do the pdf anyways. Just because there is not a lot of comments doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth reading. I read this blog everyday, really. I rarely post a comment but find everything here worth reading.
As far as the topic: No, can’t say that much of anything ever goes as planned.
I ended a year-long campaign a little while back with a plan in mind. The only piece of advice I’d emphasize is to be flexible when implementing that plan. I had to change around some very large plot elements because one PC decided to be tenacious.
The plan was for each character to meet their ultimate fate. The party cleric united with her deity, the party wizard went off to be an apprentice to the god of magic on far off planes, the party rogue became an assassin for the god of thieves, etc. I had planned for the party’s fighter to die mid-battle and his signature sword, which already contained his soul, to become animated to deal the final blow.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? He made good rolls and lived through death effect after death effect. Nothing I did could stop him, and he managed to get the finishing blow with over 100 hit points remaining.
At any rate, I confessed that he had partially broken my plans and he was nothing short of delighted. Apparently when the DM sets out to kill you and fails, it’s a big ego boost. I rewrote his epilogue on the fly and everyone had a good laugh.
As always, a good GM doesn’t really plan at all. He/she prepares. 😉
I used to plan these endings – but they have the unfortunate side effect of beeing what I’m excited about. Not what the players are.
After realizing this I decided that I plan only one thing about ending. “The end exists”. And surprisingly, most of my games, that don’t die after a session or two, develop the ending itself. The plot escalates to a point after which there is no return.
How about ending the campaign by the rules? Like in the Burning Empires game? It has clearly fixed “hitpoints” for the campaign. When they hit zero then it is over.
Is that a plan? It is different at the least.
One of the biggest boosts of confidence I ever got out of GMing was when I ended a mini-campaign exactly the way I wanted to at the start of the game.
I starting gaming heavily in college, with a GM who ran campaigns with planned endings. Our actions in the game affected the way we got there and (to a lesser degree) the way they played out. One warning I’d give in regards to a “planned ending” though is to be conscious of a tendency towards railroading. Another thing to look out for is giving too much of the end spotlight to NPCs. (This happens when you start writing the end-game using characters you as GM can control, because that’s the only reliable way to tell the ending you want to tell. At that point, you’re doing it for yourself, though, and you’re really better off just writing a book/story, not running a game for others.)
For long-term games I prefer to build a world and let the players decide what story they want to tell (which begins to naturally suggest an ending — good stories write themselves), but for shorter campaigns a more deterministic style might be called for. I think the decision depends on individual GM style and the type of game you’re running.
Martin – You should release the PDF. The content is good stuff, and a lack of feedback may be a sign of agreement with the subject and not a lack of interest.
I’ve ended campaigns according to plan, but I’ve never made those plans dependent upon what the PCs do. In other words I plan a world changing event that the players may play a part in but cannot prevent. A battle amongst the gods, a natural disaster, or maybe a war between several governments on the scale of WWII.
Now the point isn’t to end the PCs careers, but to end an era that the PCs were a part of. Could the PCs continue to adventure after this event? Sure, but I wrap up all of the loose plot ends and change the game world in such a way that as a storyteller I can say “The End” and it feels right.
So with this approach I reccomend that you make the PCs part of the ending, but also plan something that is of a larger scope than the PCs themselves.
I say release the PDF, it puts this kind of info all in one place and people can read as they will with all the like info together.
I rarely even have an “end” in mind. Maybe the sketchy details or skeleton of what I’d like to see happen, but I try to let the end write itself from what the party and their adversaries are doing. I always have in mind with each session what the “big bad” or conflict force fore the party is doing in the background, and try to merge the two together for the end. I literally try to set up a beginning of a story and “possess” the villain to see what he would do. I let the party take it from there.
I rarely have an idea of how a campaign should end when I begin. There are a lot of games that have defined endings– like a PTA season, but also the Adventure Paths that Dungeon Magazine puts out.
The one solution I’ve tried has been VV’s solution: to change the world out of the normal game’s scope. We never did reach the ending, but it was a useful guide to the adventures along the way.
Is this kind of campaign ending really all that unusual? I know it was discussed 20 years ago, and probably before that. I have no idea how many people take advantage of it, though.
Avoiding railroading with a planned ending is easy. Just avoid railroading using the same techniques you’d use during the campaign. Let’s say the main campaign foe is a guild of thieves. Instead of planning the campaign end, you plan what the guild is trying to accomplish, with what, and how far they will go. Essentially, you have their ends, means, and ways. When the guild runs out of options, the campaign is over. Since the guild is likely to save their most nefarious ways and means until pushed, you probably get a nice climax.
A campaign end is different than a character story end. The latter is much more likely to lead to a railroad. If the player felt like the character was heavily invested in the campaign story, he might feel that his character story had also ended. If he felt like he had more to do–well then you have a good reason for a followup campaign with the same characters. If his character story took some of the focus off of the guild mid-campaign for some reason–well, you are having fun, and the guild can wait.
For that reason, whenever I have a campaign ending planned, I have a rough idea of the timeline (in game), and know the foes ways, means, and ends. If the campaign takes 8 sessions extra because we were having a great time, my “ending” can still go off as planned, no problem.
I always write with the ending in mind. In fact I usually start with the end when crafting an adventure. For a campaign it isn’t much different; I’m always thinking how it will (could/should) end.
Unlike the Cylons, I have a plan.
😉
Calling this approach unusual definitely stems from my personal experience — I’ve seen it only very rarely in the games I’ve played, and never used it in a game I’ve run.
Good suggestions all around — if I ever try this myself, I’ll definitely be coming back here to read pointers. 🙂
(And I’ll go ahead and PDF-ize this one. We’ll see how it does. Thanks for the feedback!)
Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean it has to be too specific.
I’m planning to end my current campaign in 6-9 months. All I know at this point is that the bad guys’ plan will be exposed, a long-term NPC will reveal his true identity, the PCs will have a moral choice to make, hopefully the evil plot will be foiled, and the PCs will get off their backwater planet once and for all — bruised and battered, perhaps, but ready for a new chapter in their lives.
That new chapter may be played out in a subsequent campaign — it’ll be one of the choices in the prospectus I offer, and if the votes are there we’ll play it; but if not we’ll play something else.
Obviously, I know what’s going to happen in more depth that I’ve described, but I haven’t planned out every little event — in fact, I’m still making up events and NPCs without even being sure of how they fit into the great scheme of things. I’m not even sure if the big NPC-reveal will happen in the climax as an oh-my-god moment or whether it will fall in the rising action phase as a prod and further motivation.
I call this the “Schrodinger’s Box” style of GMing, and it’s kind of new and exciting… 🙂
“Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean it has to be too specific.”
I totally agree. The campaign end condition for my gangster game was “Rival Big Al must be dead or in jail and the power of his gang broken.” When I started I didn’t know the final showdown would be a frontal assault against Big Al’s summer home in Wisconsin. He could have been shivved in prison or gunned down on the streets of Lakefront City.