This is the second post in TT’s How to End a Campaign series. Each post will cover 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 (more of a non-approach, actually): Ending things with a whimper.
There are lots of ways to end your game with a whimper. Any time a game just sort of . . . stops, that was a whimper.
Sometimes it comes down to logistics: Jenna doesn’t have Saturdays free anymore, and George has to skip every other week. No one planned it that way, but the game can’t go on.
Other times, you or one (or more) of your players just loses interest, and lets the game die without trying to bring it to an actual close.
The key difference between this approach and the others is that when you end things with a whimper, it’s more of a non-decision than a decision. It happens, or the group lets it happen, and you move on.
Pros
Over the years, I’ve ended more than my fair share of games this way, and it sucks. I’ve also played in quite a few games that ended like this, and it sucked as a player, too.
There are no pros to just letting your game die a quiet, useless death, except on the most basic level: At least it’s over.
Good games deserve better than this. Even so-so games that the group has lost interest in deserve more closure than a whimper provides.
Cons
There are two main downsides to this approach. Firstly, it’s not satisfying. The players don’t get any resolution for the plot thread their PCs were involved in, and they don’t even get one last chance to do something cool.
Secondly, nobody learns anything when a game ends with a whimper. As the GM, you’ll wonder which of your players lost interest, and which ones might have stuck with it. Or what you could have done better. Your players will likely have similar concerns.
It’s not the end of the world when a game ends like this — chances are, you’ll pick up a new game and be back in the thick of it before too long. But even bad games deserve a conclusion of some sort, a definite act that ends them so you can move on with no weird, unresolved feelings about the previous game.
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 experienced the whimper? How did your last campaign (as a player or GM) end?
Oh, I’ve had many a campaign end with a whimper. Our last big campaign did end with a whimper… but there were unusual circumstances.
See, we’d had a solid group going for about two years (though there was drama– ugh). At the very end, one person left to move cross country and we added a pair to replace him.
It was completely unlike the campaign up to that time– an irrelevant coda (of 3 sessions) to a solid campaign. We dumped it, rather than continue with the mockery of a campaign.
While I think in campaigns, I execute in adventure arcs. Most arcs last 3 to 5 sessions. That way, if things look like they aren’t going to continue, I can work faster to at least finish an arc.
And with an arc, if the stars align just right, I can pick it up later with some of the same players and a few new interested ones. I’ve done this with my Oriental Adventure campaign and hope to come back to it this Fall. If not, at least the characters got through their first adventure.
-bento
Scott: I feel your pain. Too many games end this way.
Bento: Story arc thinking rocks. My current GM is using a very similar approach, and it gives us a lot of freedom that we wouldn’t have with a more traditional approach.