When your Campaign pulls a Firefly

[Freelance GM]

This seems to be a regular thing.

You start a D&D Campaign. It goes great. It may be the best campaign you've ever DM'ed. Things go smoothly for 9 entire months. Your players have great chemistry together, and are having an absolute blast. The campaign starts off great, has some dramatic build-up, reaches its climax, and begins hurtling towards an epic conclusion....

...And THEN life gets in the way.

Seriously. I had my campaign intricately planned out, so that it would be tied up neatly with a bow just in time for 2/3 of the group to graduate from college. One new (and awesome) job later, and I'm no longer available to DM.

So, I am left with a sadistic choice worse than any I could ever create for my players:

The KOTOR II Conclusion. Cut content until I have trimmed 10 weeks of gaming into something we can resolve in however much time becomes available (estimated 2 to 3 sessions instead of 8 to 10). Gives them closure, but may not be as good as it was meant to be.
Or...
The Ending That Could Have Been. Quit teasing their hopes, ice the campaign, and write out a lengthy narrative "What should have happened" for the players to give them the closure they deserve, but not the kind that they want.

See, this sucks because it's my junior year of college. Once I'm out of school, I may not have the opportunity to run a game like this again. I've realized that I'm really not a fan of long-term campaigns, precisely because of stuff like this happening. I was planning to let this be the last epic, 1-year-or-longer campaign I may ever DM. I wanted it to be the best story I have ever told, and so far, it has been.

Eventually I'll post a summary of my campaign, for your reading pleasure, but I wanted to start a thread to ask, "What is the greatest campaign you never got the chance to finish?" If you have experience with this kind of scenario, or ideas for a third option, feel free to talk about those, too.

[eru001]

tell your players and ask them which they prefer. Life sometimes gets in the way, it happens. They'll understand, and may even have a third option handy. you never know, but generally talking things over is not a bad Idea

[Knaight]

I'd aim for something that would have been a major turning point, then just end it there. As for this happening, it's absolutely routine. Logistics and scheduling kills more RPGs than anything else, from people moving to schedule changes to abrupt changes in business.

[Mutazoia]

"Rocks fall, everybody dies."

[AdmiralCheez]

You could try to transition it to an internet game, either through something like Skype/Roll20 or a play-by-post message board. It's not the same as playing in person, but it is an alternative. PbP in particular is very easy on schedules, though it does take longer to actually finish.

[Thrawn4]

Do not use option 2. It will not be the same. Better a small ending than a forced or no ending.

That said, I've been facing a similar situation for about a year now. Great V:tM campaign (actually the second campaign, starting with the same players and characters that did the first one, so we already had a lot of investment and character development). Each around 25 sessions. Great times, fab interactions, everybody on the same page, and lots of surprises for everyone, including me as the ST.
BAM, one gets sick and a child, around one or two sessions before the conclusion of the campaign. Everybody still wants to play, but having a child complicates things - a lot. Does not help that two other players have a tight schedule anyway.
So yeah, we still would like to finish. But it does not look good at the moment, and the longer we wait, the more slips our memories.
Our campaign has fallen into topor.

[Mordar]

Is the new job making you move far away or is it just a major prep-time drain?

My best suggestion is move the frequency of the live game down to whatever is manageable (maybe once a month), and try to help the players stay engaged in between with email/web based interactions. Make the sessions more "marathon-esque" if necessary. If the majority are staying in the region after graduation, that might not even be necessary.

If, however, people are spreading far and wide, it is more difficult. I did, however, have a group of friends (this is at age 30+, so it is possible post-college) that would get together perhaps 1-3 times a year, bringing in the GM and players from far and wide to continue an epic campaign. They would have a mega-gaming weekend and spend lots of time playing and hanging out. It is often easier to schedule 16-20 hours of gaming on a single weekend than it is to schedule 8 weeks of 3-4 hour sessions, and you accomplish more in those mega weekends than you do across the 8 weeks. Supplemented with online interactions in between and these guys absolutely raved about the experience. Think of it like grown-up slumber parties, or your very own little game convention where you can have cheaper food and enforce hygiene rules!

All is not lost. Don't abandon hope, and don't short-sell your ending!

- M

[nedz]

Get everyone to book a weeks holiday - and finish the game.

[Calen]

I had a campaign that I was running with seven people. Four of the people told me that they needed to drop out for RL reasons within a month of each other. For my last session I boiled the major plot points down and ran a fast acceleration game.

So essentially your Kotor II scenario. THe one big thing I would suggest is don't have combat - make it descriptive or skill challenge based. That will save a lot of time for storytelling.

[Quertus]

One alternative no one has mentioned yet is to get a ghostwriter ghostDM. Hand someone your campaign notes, your "what should have been", and get them to finish the campaign.

As far as campaigns that have ended before their time... I've had a lot... from jobs to child birth to players just outgrowing the game... I'm all verklempt, talk amongst yourselves.

That's actually not facetious - my blood pressure went up, and I got a noise bleed

[TheCountAlucard]

Years back, a group of players came to me and told me how the DM they played under was so awful that they had collectively nominated me as their candidate to replace him in a secret usurpation they were planning.

Which is to say, yes, his game was that bad ("[PC]'s god shows up and makes everyone draw from the Deck of Many Things!" was actually a game session, people), but they still liked their characters enough to want them to still be playing them. Just not under that DM anymore. So I found myself at the helm of a new game.

I spun up a largely-improvised series of adventures involving helping an industrious wizard invent a race of automatons, and then another series dealing with the consequences of events that took place in the first (in which one of the Archdevils decided that having a race of automaton slaves might give him an edge in the Blood War). Unfortunately the session before my planned finale (breaking into Hell itself to foil the Archdevil's plans), Life Happened and the game went unfinished. :smallsigh:

[Freelance GM]

The fact it took me this long to reply is a testament to how busy it's gotten... Usually I'm more dependable. :smallfrown:


Is the new job making you move far away or is it just a major prep-time drain?

- M

Prep time drain, and the new job happens to interfere with the one night everyone was open. Three or four of the nine players, and I, the GM, are balancing work and school, so we can't really just pick another night.

I'd postpone it until the Summer, but the problem is that the players won't be here over the Summer. 5 of the players are from different states, and have to pack up and go home literally one day after the quarter ends, due to our school's ridiculous dorm policies. Of the nine players, five of the group's six original players are graduating, and won't be back next Fall, so we can't just finish it then...

My group is still forming a consensus on whether or not they'd prefer the KOTOR II ending or the paraphrased one, so no update on the final decision yet.

[JeenLeen]

You could offer both, assuming you have time.

If your group wants to play out a KOTOR ending, let them do so, but you could write out what the ending would have been. That way you can game for a bit more on this. Alternatively, if they just want the ending spelled out, you have hang-out time or time to do a few one-shot games for whoever can make it.

I was in a 3.5 D&D game for over a year, and we got so overpowered that it quit being fun for everyone and nobody (including the DM) wanted to keep playing but we call cared about the story. Your situation is very different, but this is an example when the Ending that Could Have Been was done. Our DM told us the story, all the potential ways it could go, and all the hidden agendas. It was nice, and we moved on to another game.

[DarthSpader]

The BBEG screws up and leads be group to his lair early. Big fight. Rock falls on the BBEG head. Party wins. They find much loot. And become lvl 20. Spend next 8 sessions partying around and stomping whatever they want.

[veti]

Yep, it sucks. I don't have any particular recommendation for how to handle it this time.

But it doesn't have to be your "last chance" at anything. Next time, plan for this.

Choose players who are going to be within reach for the long term. Be prepared to drop frequency to once a month, or once every two months - for a long session (minimum 8 hours, I suggest a Saturday afternoon). If you make it fun, and get a group who gets on well, people will be willing to travel up to a couple of hours to attend those sessions, so that's how wide you can cast your recruitment net.

It's completely viable to keep a campaign going on this sort of basis for more than 10 years. But it helps if you have a slightly more intensive, higher-frequency kickoff period for everyone to get invested in.

[Thrawn4]

Choose players who are going to be within reach for the long term.
That's an unreliable plan at best, life does a lot to get in your way. I woul rather recomment to plan short campaigns that require only a few sessions. You can always stuck up and rely on previous NPCs, plot hooks and events.

[Drakefall]

Oh poo. This sounds a rather unfortunate situation.

Hmmm... Perhaps you could implement a somewhat less drastic version of content cutting.

Instead of playing out all the events of the remaining sessions you could have on freeform session where the players and yourself spin a narrative of how you reach the final chapter. Maybe roll the odd die or two here or there to randomly determine the course of some things. Following this you can have your big conclusion in the final one or two sessions. This way at least your players get to steer the story to the conclusion, they get to ensure that anything they feel is important, especially in the form of "off screen fluff actions" or the equivalent, gets properly dealt with, and they still get to play that epic conclusion. It would also feel a fair bit less choppy than speedily jumping through the final arc.

Regardless of how you proceed, however, I concur with the suggestions about informing your players of the situation and asking their opinion on how to proceed.

Good luck!

[Velaryon]

It's happened to me many times in the past, both as a player and as GM. Sadly, more often than not it ends with a game being unfinished. I still want to know what was going to happen to my half-elf weretiger fighter and his fire genasi half-fire elemental wizard and aasimar cleric friends when they were captured by the ice-wielding sorceress in the Underdark in the very first campaign I ever played in, which ended abruptly in 2002 when the DM's coursework and approaching senior year finals got to be too time-consuming to finish the game.

I've tried several approaches: I've ended games early by condensing the remaining content to just a couple sessions, usually because I was suffering DM burnout and just wanted it over with ASAP. I've also left games unfinished because players moved away/ceased to be friends/had other life challenges pop up.

My "current" 3.5 game (I put it in quotes because it's now been 13 months since the last session but I refuse to let it die) started in 2009, because I asked my friends "how come nobody is running D&D lately?" and their response was "we're busy, why don't you put a campaign together?" It started off as a series of unrelated adventures based around jobs they picked up from a bounty board, but it turns out I can't help myself from tying threads together and trying to weave a larger plot on an epic scale.

Said campaign has gone on hiatus several times for reasons including: sudden Blue Screen of Death on my laptop that contained all of my game notes and hadn't been backed up in months, difficulty coordinating work schedules of several people with unpredictable hours, me having a case of severe depression thanks to being dumped and being unable to focus on planning the game (this actually happened twice, with one of them also nearly destroying my friendship of one of the players), one player being too busy with wedding preparations, me being too busy with graduate school, and most recently a combination of schedule conflicts, me working too much, health problems in my family, and depression sapping my motivation.

So in addition to either fast forwarding the remaining campaign and leaving an unsatisfying final stretch (what I will call the Dollhouse Approach in keeping with the Whedon theme of the topic title) or stopping it abruptly (the Firefly Approach), I think you have another couple of options:

"The Netflix Resurrection Approach" - stop when you have to, but because you (and presumably the other players) enjoy the game and want to continue it, you cast game necromancy on it and revive the game whenever life is no longer in the way and you can. This can be tricky because people sometimes need reminders what was going on, might no longer have or be able to find their character sheet, or might not want to continue their character and might rather play a new one. I've taken this approach with my campaign, so I can say with confidence that it helps to have good campaign notes that people can refer back to before the game starts up again, and it helps to keep talking about the game in between sessions to keep things fresh in people's minds.

Alternatively (I don't have a catchy name for this approach) is it possible to break the remaining campaign down into chapters? Basically turn it into a series of smaller campaigns that still weave together into the larger narrative that the longer epic campaign would have told. This might change the form of it a bit, as you have different characters or different players sometimes, but can still work and even make the game world feel larger and more lived in.

[Freelance GM]

But it doesn't have to be your "last chance" at anything.

I think you might have misunderstood me, there.

See, after 6 years of DM'ing, I've finally realized that most campaigns die prematurely. Lack of interest, moving players, work, school, or real life intervenes before they can reach their natural conclusion. I'm still going to be running tabletop RPGs for the foreseeable future, but any campaigns I ran after this one would be designed as self-contained, episodic adventures, so that a lot of those problems can be avoided. Think 5E's D&D: Expeditions, but homebrewed. You can miss a session, or 3 sessions, or change characters in between games, and the over-arching story is largely unaffected.

This isn't the first campaign I've ended early, but this campaign was intended to be the last time I write a full, 1-year campaign. That's why I'm especially mad about this one in particular "pulling a Firefly." That, and because a genuinely good thing (my new, awesome job) is what killed it for my group.

Also, update: most players are leaning towards the "How it should have ended" narrative, or the "free-form story" session.

[Mutazoia]

I think you might have misunderstood me, there.

See, after 6 years of DM'ing, I've finally realized that most campaigns die prematurely. Lack of interest, moving players, work, school, or real life intervenes before they can reach their natural conclusion. I'm still going to be running tabletop RPGs for the foreseeable future, but any campaigns I ran after this one would be designed as self-contained, episodic adventures, so that a lot of those problems can be avoided. Think 5E's D&D: Expeditions, but homebrewed. You can miss a session, or 3 sessions, or change characters in between games, and the over-arching story is largely unaffected.

This isn't the first campaign I've ended early, but this campaign was intended to be the last time I write a full, 1-year campaign. That's why I'm especially mad about this one in particular "pulling a Firefly." That, and because a genuinely good thing (my new, awesome job) is what killed it for my group.

Also, update: most players are leaning towards the "How it should have ended" narrative, or the "free-form story" session.

This is why a lot of 1e DM's ran the published modules, rather than designed an entire cohesive campaign. With out a central plot, you can leave off any time. The draw back is the episodic nature of the sessions leave you feeling less like running a campaign, and more like starring in a weekly TV show where everything is wrapped up in a nice bow every week. There's little time for character development with the episodic approach, and a lot of people enjoy said development.

Unfortunately, as we get older, being able to start a game on Saturday morning and finally crawl out of your friends basement on Sunday evening gets harder and harder to do. There are definitely times when I miss my jr high/high school days when summer vacation was nearly an endless string of gaming sessions, but that's not really a realistic expectation any more. Now, the best we can hope for is to set aside one day a week (usually more like a few hours a week) to sit down and game.

Eventually, you will get use to the new schedule with your new job, and you will be able to set aside time. You may have to pick up some new players that can match your schedule, but I doubt you'll need to give up the epic campaigns.