My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god’s hammer. A red-bearded bruiser with a laugh like the sky splitting. A silver-tongued schemer who can’t help brewing mischief. Together, they fight giants. I was hooked right out of the gate.
Soon after that Doctor Who’s cliffhangers held a generation of children spellbound week after week. James Bond felt like he’d go on forever. (Funny, that.) And the British comic TV Century 21 wrapped all those now-classic Gerry Anderson puppet shows into one shared universe. It all fed the notion that stories don’t ever have to end.
"Give me a child until he is seven..." No truer word, only in my case it wasn’t the Jesuits, it was serial storytelling. And that's fine for kids, in the eternal summer they inhabit, but as we get older we realize the ending of a story is what gives it meaning and value.
What about roleplaying campaigns? In the old days, campaigns were as open-ended as a daytime soap. Campaigns like that can eventually reach a natural conclusion, which is perfect if all the players agree. More often they fizzle out for external reasons, which is rarely satisfying. Nowadays, when campaigns are often built around a high concept with a beginning, middle and end (like Tim Harford's brilliant Redemption campaign, or his equally inspired Earthsea-style saga The Conclave) or designed in seasons like a TV show (Camelot Eclipsed or Keeping the Peace) it's worth thinking about how you can bring them in to land.
Writing guru Rebecca Makkai has some great tips about this. It's a longish series, but worth studying.
- Part One is about open vs closed endings.
- Part Two is about endings that come about structurally. For example, in Redemption the campaign ended when we reconsecrated the abandoned chapel we'd been sent to find.
- Part Three is about meaning, the takeaway you get from the ending.
- Part Four is about the sound, style and tone of the ending. (To apply this one to roleplaying campaigns requires a bit more work.)
- Part Five deals with the change brought about at the end.
- Part Six concerns the way the ending shades into past, present or future.
I suppose there are as many ways to play RPGs as there are people. And a like-minded group can fully explore the options to their hearts' content. Being old, I prefer to play as we did in "the old days," IE an open-ended campaign. I've never seen a party all decide together that they were done and retiring; an individual, sure, but not a whole campaign just going out like a candle. Seems to me that orchestrated campaign endings imply pretty hard that "storyteller" game mode; how else can you apply theories about story conclusions to an RPG? OTOH, if the group is ready for a change, I see no problem with coming to a good stopping point with the option to pick things up again at some point. Those breaks allow for getting deeply involved in an alternative gaming experience. But as I've said before, if I put in a ton of work building a setting, I want to use it. Indefinitely. And who bought the Forgotten Realms or Spelljammer thinking they'd run a single adventure arc and then shelve the thing? :0
ReplyDeleteIt's true that since I prefer a style of roleplaying that aims to create an imaginary life rather than a story, there can't really be an ending. Even if we've built up to some big arc -- the civil war in Tsolyanu, say -- and the campaign ends after that, it's not an ending from the individual characters' point of view, just a fade out. We could return to those characters at any time.
DeleteAnd that can happen even when there is a hard ending, such as Doomsday in Legend. That happened in our Iron Men campaign (occasionally discussed here on the blog) but we regularly return to earlier periods in those characters' lives, the way that characters in Mike Mignola's Hellboy universe get killed but because the stories jump around in time that's never the last we see of them.
Up to 2003, when I basically stopped with Roleplaying games for 14 years, I had only ever "completed" one campaign (as GM or as player). That was very satisfying, but it was just as good to play campaigns until people lost interest and wanted to try something new.
ReplyDeleteSince I resumed RPGs in 2017, I've managed to GM four more campaigns to a conclusion: but then, three of those were Forged in the Dark games which tend to have a natural end point when you're the biggest faction in town. The idea of more bounded campaigns does appeal to me. On the other hand, we also have a stable of games we've been playing as one shots (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, D&D, Troubleshooters, Deadlands, Hard City, Aliens), where every time we play we pick up with the same characters (well, not in the case of Aliens, I'll admit, since it rarely leaves many characters alive to carry over). There they feel more like seasons of a TV show, each game a self-contained arc that might run from 4 weeks to 3 months (Deadlands' Coffin Rock was a particularly lengthy one-shot!).
I find it quite nice to be able to return to old characters once a year or so. You get the continuity of character development , but also the feeling that the characters exist beyond the story arc of a campaign.
I have to admit that although I don't like returning to old characters, I'm a serial offender. The trouble is I can only play one character at a time, and once I've abandoned a character I feel I've lost them. I can play them again years later, but it's like the Enterprise crew in the movies -- they're not the characters they were in the TV show, they just look a bit like them.
DeleteThe advantage of an ongoing campaign is that it can go anywhere and be anything. One campaign I'm in at the moment is Blades in the Dark set in Ferromaine, but that just feels like it has a built-in shelf life. Criminal gangs in a medieval city, yawn. If it were a generic system like GURPS then I'd just feel it was a stage in the character's life, but BitD pretty much builds in the end of the campaign.
Sorry - I hadn't realised I'd published under my blogging account! Curse of having three Google accounts...
DeleteYeah, BitD is a race between your Trauma and your Lifestyle - whether you'll get rich before you burn out. And once the Crew is Tier 4 and has Mastery, and everyone is at 4 points in every action... you're just not the plucky underdog any more. I eked out an extra year of life from one Blades campaign by sending the characters on a Road Trip to U'Duasha, but at that point, we weren't really playing the same campaign any more.
Mr Morris, I have sent you a private message.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Stanley. I'll keep an eye out for it.
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