We’ve all been there. The game is going great. The players are excellent, the GM is doing a great job, everyone is excited to see what happens next. Who knows how this crazy story will end? We can’t wait to find out.
Then the group takes a short break so several players can handle some real-life stuff. The short break unofficially becomes a long break. Months pass. Everyone quietly realizes that the break is permanent and that the game is no more. We’ll never find out what happened next. We’ll never get our ending.
It happens. I understand that. But I think we give up on our endings too easily.
And I’ve decided that at least for games I run, where it is my choice, there will always be an ending.
We can do things like make sure endings are an interesting part of the game. And embrace restarting a dormant game. But sometimes that’s not enough. Here are ways to end our games.
Plan A: Conventional session-by-session resolution. This is how most games aspire to end. You just keep doing sessions until everything is over. This is easier if you do “seasons” or use another mechanism to forecast endings. This is great if you can manage it. It’s probably the ideal way to end most kinds of games. But it’s not the only way to end the game.
Plan B: Zoom out. Maybe there isn’t time to resolve the story session-by-session. Time is tight. Maybe someone is moving out of town or starting a new job or going back to school or having a kid. There’s time for a few sessions. Maybe just one. How do we conclude without it feeling rushed?
Remember that time in RPGs is fluid. Just as the GM can narrate days or weeks of travel in a few minutes, nothing stops the group from collectively adjudicating entire adventures and arcs at a zoomed out level. They can either use freeform roleplay, or a collaborative system like Microscope, which is specifically built to enable zooming in and zooming out on game events.
Anatoly Fomenko
Plan C: Communal or individual writing project. There isn't time for even a single session, as detailed above for Plan B, no matter how zoomed-out it is. But if the players have time individually, they can end the game in writing. This could take the form of separate parallel efforts, or a single collaborative resolution, perhaps through taking turns, or editing a shared online document. It can be an exquisite corpse. Writing is the most obvious way to do this, but players could draw, write songs, whatever they want. How canon all of this is up to the group, particularly if players are writing different aspects of the ending that touch on others’ characters; but generally, it is a good idea to keep it loose.
Plan D: Solo writing project. Whether due to external circumstances, waning interest, or something else entirely, sometimes the players are simply done before the story is. Even Plan C is not going to happen.
The GM still has the option to write the conclusion to the game themselves.
Solo RPGs are great here. Even a simple oracle system can provide enough outside input to resolve the story in an interesting way.
To the degree the players may still care about their characters, the GM can frame this as head canon or merely one possible version of events. Some of the characters could be offscreen. The GM’s conclusion doesn’t even necessarily have to follow the players, per se. An NPC or even an antagonist could be the viewpoint character for the resolution of the story.
This is the last resort because it doesn’t involve the group; it’s just the GM (or really, whichever participant in the game cared the most about the ending). But it’s still better than no ending at all.
Maybe no one will ever even read it. That’s OK. Put it on your blog, if nothing else (if you don’t have a blog, now is a good time to start one). The point is that if you spent dozens (or even hundreds) of hours playing a game that kept you and your players interested for that long, it deserves an ending. You deserve an ending, and there’s more than one way to get there.
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