Over on anyway, Vincent Baker recently wrote Long and Short, an excellent post about the merits of open-ended games vs. those with defined endings.
How do you approach endings (or, the ending) in your own games?
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Umm… the “Long and Short” link is broken…
Thanks, Sauron — it’s fixed now.
I think we are discussing a moving target of sorts with many variables. Most people will frame their response to where they are in their life. For example, a person in middle or high-school, possesing what adults would descibe as ‘unlimited’ amounts of time might extol the virtues of a very long, or never ending, game. On the other hand, is the married with childern adult that still likes the game but has to balance it against house repair, writing bills, family life, ect, might lean towards a more compact game. Also, players might explicitly want long or short games as well.
It’s funny this would come up now, as it has been the subject of recent discussion in our group.
Here is my opinion, colored by being “the family guy”. We had/have a DM that we used exclusively for a long time that would universally run a game till it simply burned out and died. In his view, he was giving players what they wanted because they would like their characters and he didnt want to ‘take them away’ with a definite ending. This view has merit, but I always felt a bit unfulfilled when it would taper off inconclusively.
When I took the reigns as DM I told the players outright that the game had a finite ending. I knew I would eventually lose energy as DM and want to play again. Also, I like epic battles, so I was envisioning this final, grand melee from git-go. The players took to the idea pretty well, and as the game winded down they actually started doing stuff in the game as a person contemplating retirement might do. One invested in a fledgling shipping company (an NPC they had hired for use of his galleon), a hotel, etc. One married a female NPC they he had romanced before. It was quite cool.
From a Meta game stand point, having a schedule of sorts helped me manage the story line without “railroading”, but nudging. I had one extra session at the end, but it did basically follow the timetable I had hoped for. It was a year long game, and I think to make it worthwhile to the player, the DM should really, really try to make their decisions have some long-term impact. Changing the local economy or eliminating a prominent NPC should have far reaching consequences. This gives the long game a more cohesive feeling and I think vital to its ‘survival’ to the end.
However, now that our group has grown a bit, we have decided to break games to half their length. This is specifically to allow the DM’s to rotate more and hopefully create a richer world. In theory, they would have more time between runs to craft better games.
In terms of systems, I dont have a lot of cross platform experience. I will say D&D is pretty flexible in that it “works” in short, even 1-shot settings (Tomb of Horrors?) to long campaigns (Slaver Series/Homebrew).
The players took to the idea pretty well, and as the game winded down they actually started doing stuff in the game as a person contemplating retirement might do.
I’m curious to see if something similar will happen in my group’s upcoming Trinity game, although the circumstances are a bit different. If nothing else, this means there’ll be built-in stopping points, but the overall intent is that if everyone is still gung-ho, we keep on going.
Rather than having an ending in the sense that when point X is reached, we switch games, our GM is planning to run the game in a series of arcs — each of which will have its own defined endpoint.
Your point about time of life and responsibilities impacting how one tackles endings is very well taken. I’d never actually examined it from that point of view, and I think you’re right on the money.
A rare moment of wisdom I assure you. 🙂
I just want to in response that if the players are gung-ho about their chars, or the game as a whole, it certainly doesnt mean they can’t be picked up again later. Sure, there is a possibility of them getting swept under the carpet, but not a certainty. In fact, I am currently revving up a “high level” (for us: 14+) infrequent game utilizing the characters from the campaign mentioned.
Judas: I’ve never actually run or played in a game that stopped — in an open-ended way — and got picked up again. I know that’s just my experience, but I find that a lot of other factors tend to come up after a game ends — some of which make it hard to resume.
That said, there have been games where, as a player, I would have loved to start them up again, but things have come up that made doing so impossible.
For the restart, these characters “completed” the previous campaign, so it was not an open ended stop. I don’t think i’ve ever seen a campaign re-ignite when it has ended at a crossroads where a major accomplishment wasn’t met.
I think we’re on the same page, Judas. I probably could have been clearer: By open-ended, I was referring to the fact that the group said “We might play this again,” not the in-game status of the campaign when it ended.