Yeah, that can go badly. I completely overdid that the first time I DM, and none of those players would play in my games for years. (Only one ever came back.)
Iāve been GMing Ryuutama for the past year. The players design the world as they move through it and I just get to riff on what they come up with. Itās very relaxing.
Iād be interested to hear from anyone who has reached a definite finale in a Ryuutama campaign. Or any RPG campaign reallyā¦ endings are hard!
Weāve certainly left a lot of loose ends along the way that I donāt think will ever get tied. Iām imagining the characters will just walk off into the sunset one evening and weāll watch them till they disappear round a bend in the roadā¦
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Iāve played Masks once - a one-shot at a convention. It was my first ever play of a PbtA system and I was hoping to learn more about how those games were different from regular RPGs. I think it being superhero genre and a one-shot kind of stymied that. There was lots of interesting backstory/relationship/RP stuff talked about and scribbled down when we sped thru character gen. But the actual gameplay was 99% superhero punch-ups and 1% supervillian monologue-ing, so none of those interesting things saw the light of dayā¦
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I only had one campaign āendā The Yellow Death (a pathfinder campaign involving some here including @Scribbs) came to a natural ending.
Having saved the town from the riverborne plague, exposed Captain Cornelius as a mutated blob and visited the royal courts, the last we saw of the adventurers was as they relaxed in a sauna.
A cloud of steam, and they were goneā¦
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While I was in San Diego, I ran my campaigns in cycles, a cycle typically lasting two years. I managed to bring several of them to a finale:
- Oak and Ash and Thorn with the defeat of the dark lady of Ulster;
- Unmoved Movers with the successful defense of a rebuilt bridge over the Mississippi against the armed forces of Texas;
- Whose Woods These Are with the player characters freeing themselves from the illusory world in which they had been trapped;
- Under the Shadow with the destruction of the One Ring;
- Manse with a quest into the realm of death and the dead beneath the castle;
- Sovereignty with the superhero team battling Ares and Athene and attaining apotheosis.
In others, we at least reached an āend of seasonā finale, as in Worminghall, where the final episode had one of the PCs choosing to give up his studies of magic and go to the realm of the fair folk, or Water Margin, where the PCs took part in destroying the Chinese naval base on the Isle of Wight.
The trick is often to plant seeds in early episodes. For example, in Oak and Ash and Thorn, each of the PCs had a secret advantage to be revealed when their actions made it visible; I had assigned one of the PCs, Gwyneth, a Destiny of confronting the Dark Lady . . .
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Hmmm, sounds like fun, thanks. Well, not being the stars is something, but personally Iām fine with that. Especially starting at lvl 1. Who knows, if we survive the campaign, we might move on elsewhere with a bit of a reputation and feel all big billy big boots.
Iāve had to use charisma and strength as my dump stats as I need higher intelligence and dex. Con to stay alive and wisdom is a paltry +0. Iām not going to be conversing much. Hopefully the sorcerer and rogue can cover that.
I managed a reasonably satisfactory ending to my GURPS Cabal/Infinite Worlds campaign recently. The characters had been given a long-term mission to find out why the multiverse was so complicated and weird. They did not find out all of the details, but they did succeed in replacing the demiurge who had been running it for several thousand years with someone with more sense and a less inflated ego.
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I am waiting for her to send out a missive along the lines of
Dear Peoples of the Multiverse.
About this quantum physics / relativity stuff.
Itās got to go.
Do not be alarmed by anything that happens before you have finished reading this message.
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Years ago, I had an Unknown Armies campaign in which the players played themselves. It might have been a bad ideaā¢ and yet it worked with that particular group. I drove them all crazyā¦ later when a player moved away we had to switch to email plays.
The big showdown was bigā¦ I live in Germany and we have pretty strict weaponās laws but by the time the campaign drew to a close the characters/players were crazy armed criminals who went to Har Meggido to prevent the bad guy summoning some entity that was going to cause Armageddonā¦
I still have the email transcripts somewhereā¦
Best feature of that campaign: I made one of the characters afraid to walk through doors.
Our big fantasy campaign was in two halves and the first one ended when we defeated our arch-enemy (which my partner had subtly named Nemesis. Pronounced: Nemesisisississāwe watched too much Buffy at the time) and the characters became too powerful to continue as player characters. So they were retired as NPCs for further play.
Basically what I am saying is, to end a campaign it helps to establish some big big baddie who is badder than the rest of them and has it out for the players or the world or however epic you want to get. Once the PCs take down someone like that theyāll probably be happy to retireā¦ or they all die during the showdown if thatās the kind of campaign you run.
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She promised not to do that. There will be a message from her, but not that one.
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I find it easier to reach a finale or some sense of closure if there is a limit to the number of sessions in a series, as a GM and as a player (say, some events happening in game). I find it gives everyone around the table a focus.
But still, loose ends are just nice, they make the world around the players feel more real. If the group looks for the Cornucopia of Almond Delights instead of accompanying Bobbles the dog in the quest for the Spaceship of Vegan Paninis, they made a decision on what part of the story they want to have a direct influence on and which one is lost forever.
Back on track, we did character creation for Good Society for a series in hybrid video chat/text form! I am not entirely sure why I am so excited to write saucy love letters to other players as a Regency Era young rich heir that I already despise to pieces, but oh goodness, I am looking forward to it!
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I backed the KS (and the second one), but havenāt yet played it. Seems like a lot of fun, though itās a lot more Indie than my usual style.
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Donāt be afraid! Let the free-form flow -well- freely! See how you like horseback riding to see your secret fiancĆ©e without rolling a single die!
Your +5 Vorpal double axe will be exactly where you left it when you get tired and come back, I promise you.
Joking aside, a friend has the book, for me the subtitle was enough to get into this game, but I donāt know much more apart from that (and that there is an epistolary phase). Iāll come back and report when we get into it.
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I have finally gotten my traditional gaming crew together via zoom and started a savage worlds game using their 50 Fathoms setting.
The crew managed a daring rescue of their crewmates and then set sail only to immediately run into the Flying Dutchman and be treated to spectral terror and an ill omen of days ahead.
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Played our first session of Shadow of the Beanstalk last night.
Ended with me having a panic attack because I had not planned properly, and one player was like āOkay, so Iām going to head to my own personal hideoutā and not take the rest of them with her. 
The first event that happened was some NAPD officers stormed the club they were all in. One of them ran, one of them hid, and one of them surrendered. I was like āErrā¦ I do not have two of these three options written down.ā
Hopefully the next session will go much better.
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Just finished another Lockdown Roll 20 of D&D Essentials kit. Looking at the stats we have now clocked 55 hours of Roll 20 since lockdown (minus maybe 10 hours of me trying out the system) - first a free Cthulhu adventure and then this . We play twice a week about two hours at a time and it is still working well.
Good times (plus helping stay in touch/general abusing of 4 late 40s males who have known each other since school).
Players do all sorts of things and it is much harder to plan for or even respond to them in modern or futuristic settings than fantasy settings where you can gloss over with shrugs āmagicā. When they ask what the make up of the force is, or why canāt they use their sensors to know something or have access (as we all do these days) to pretty much all the information in the world at our fingertips - which of course you could never have written down.
Just answer with confidence and go with the results - thatās when, in my experience, you can have the most fun. Though it can be nerve-wracking and off-putting when you really are flying by the seat of your pants - we have all been there. Especially when you have a finely crafted adventure (or $50 worth of purchased adventure) which could be rendered useless.
Let us know how you get on!
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I think I have to disagree with that. If magic can do anything, and anything can happen in a magical world, then there are no limits to how you can solve a problem or resolve a story, and it takes no ingenuity to do so. As Robert Frost said of free verse, itās āplaying tennis with the net down.ā
Back in the 1950s, I learned from Edward Eagerās Half Magic that magic in good fantasy has to have rules. That was a great story because it kept showing the different ways you could get half of what you wished for . . .
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Fair! Used for humour in this instance!
What I really mean is that any functional adult with a phone can now get any information they want, at least at a basic level, with 10 seconds of typing. Itās impossible to plan for that.
In a fantasy setting you can more easily say āyou donāt knowā or āthat info is not availableā or āyou didnāt learn that when you were milking goats in the Dessarin Valleyā.
Though I disagree that magic must have rules. Itās not a very magical proposition!
Though the closest I get to that in actual games I have played is in Pendragon - where the edition I have does not have any magic accessible to PCs.