What’s the easiest way to tell the difference between instructions for a board game and rules for an RPG?
Typical board game instructions will include guidance for setting up and beginning play; resolving actions throughout the game; and for determining how the game ends and who wins.
RPGs, by comparison, will usually only include the first two items on that list.
This Ends Here
OK, “usually” is doing some work there. I know that many RPGs include rules for ending the game. Anything meant for a single session probably does. A lot of storytelling games obviously do, with their emphasis on narrative structure.
Many OSR games eschew planning for endings, I assume deliberately, either because they (a. want to distinguish themselves from overly plotted non-OSR games and (b. are agnostic about whether or not players will transition into some kind of domain play, or delve dungeons from the first session to the final TPK.
But a lot of games don’t take a clear position on endings. D&D 5E, the 800 pound gorilla of TTRPGs, devotes all of three paragraphs to “Ending a Campaign” in the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide. One of those three paragraphs is actually about how to start a new game in the same world. The other two paragraphs essentially say that the game doesn’t have to go all the way to level 20, and that players should have time to wrap up personal goals, in addition to resolving the party’s collective end goal.
Decent advice as that goes, but there’s no procedure for ending the story in a satisfying way. Or for hitting different individual characters’ beats in an organic way. Or for intertwining those individual resolutions with each other, and with the party’s overall goals.
Pragmatically, I understand why the writers spent their page count this way; a lot of games just peter out rather than properly ending, so why worry about a scenario many players will never reach? And DMs that reach a true campaign ending are (via survivorship bias) much more experienced than the newbies running their first sessions, who need all the help they can get.
But on the other hand, many great games can have humble beginnings. No one is sweating a mediocre kickoff after they’re 30 or 40 sessions in; they can barely remember what happened in that first session. The ending of a campaign, by contrast, will always be remembered. Or at least, it should aspire to be. Games should help GMs figure this stuff out.
The Game Within the Game
Some groups use collaborative storytelling games like The Quiet Year to launch an RPG campaign within a separate system. The same kind of idea can apply to concluding the adventure once it is over.
World Ending Game is “a tabletop game made to serve as the last session of a campaign in any system.” The book is a collection of mini-games and scenarios, but in particular prompts and active questions that can turn an impossibly big, amorphous challenge for a GM (“how do I bring this to a satisfactory end?”) into something rationally digestible.
It explicitly uses cinematic language, calling for “camera directions” to execute its scenes. I consequently imagine it will be easier for the average PBTA game to make use of the book than the typical OSR game; but even the latter audience should be open to applying its tools, or articulating a contrasting vision for what “the end” means in an RPG. Even grognards who normally sneer at the idea of calling for a “hard cut” during a game should loosen up when ending a game – concerns about narrative railroading or the odor of scene-based gameplay are a lot less salient once the group has reached the end of their campaign.
For a game I ended recently, I took inspiration from World Ending Game, but because I can never resist tinkering, I created my own thing rather than using one of WEG’s scenarios straight out of the book. Fortunately, it worked out pretty well!
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