I think there are few things worse than running a game you know is going to be unfinished ahead of time.
I'm moving soon and one of the groups I'm with is going to have to be disbanded, probably permanently since no one wanted to be a DM. So I tried to bring the campaign to a close but we just didn't have enough time. So I had to bullshit an ending and I'm probably going to end up dissatisfied with this for like, forever.
At least I still have my online group, but damn, what a shitload of fuck.
Unfinished Games
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- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
Unfinished Games
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
The other side of that is when you run an awesome, kickass game that would go down in your personal histories as just diamonds and emeralds and rubies and gold and love and then you muck it up with a sequel using the same characters.
Everyone just kind of decided to forget the events of the sequel. It could have been badass, but it was too ambitious and I overplayed my hand.
The first campaign was about roles and nobility and the proper dharma of the age. The second was about the limitations of the players, rather than the characters, and I screwed up by making the BBEG too conniving and aware, railroading the plot into a trainwreck of players giving in to their most heinous personal faults.
Highlights include:
A messiah whose power grew from the defeats of his people (the player's fault I chose to highlight was his selfishness); he was intended to sacrifice himself and grow stronger through it, but instead kept failing to his baser nature to the point where he refused to resurrect a loyal dead follower because the follower's powers were so awesome he wanted to keep them for himself.
A powerful wizard who wanted a utopian kingdom of his own (the player's fault was derision); rather than accept the messy influx of refugees that would disorder his kingdom he refused them and in doing so their secret knowledge fell into the hands of the enemy.
A great general who was tasked with keeping his kingdom viable and afloat (the player's fault was despair); when the kingdom's mystical patron was assassinated, he led a brutal civil war and crushed the surrounding areas in his rampages (leading to the two situations above).
There was a way to recover the story from it all, but the players were so disappointed by the events that I couldn't meaningfully show them the light at the end of the tunnel without looking like a douche. I really failed the players and ruined a great, two-year-long story in doing so.
There are worse things.
Everyone just kind of decided to forget the events of the sequel. It could have been badass, but it was too ambitious and I overplayed my hand.
The first campaign was about roles and nobility and the proper dharma of the age. The second was about the limitations of the players, rather than the characters, and I screwed up by making the BBEG too conniving and aware, railroading the plot into a trainwreck of players giving in to their most heinous personal faults.
Highlights include:
A messiah whose power grew from the defeats of his people (the player's fault I chose to highlight was his selfishness); he was intended to sacrifice himself and grow stronger through it, but instead kept failing to his baser nature to the point where he refused to resurrect a loyal dead follower because the follower's powers were so awesome he wanted to keep them for himself.
A powerful wizard who wanted a utopian kingdom of his own (the player's fault was derision); rather than accept the messy influx of refugees that would disorder his kingdom he refused them and in doing so their secret knowledge fell into the hands of the enemy.
A great general who was tasked with keeping his kingdom viable and afloat (the player's fault was despair); when the kingdom's mystical patron was assassinated, he led a brutal civil war and crushed the surrounding areas in his rampages (leading to the two situations above).
There was a way to recover the story from it all, but the players were so disappointed by the events that I couldn't meaningfully show them the light at the end of the tunnel without looking like a douche. I really failed the players and ruined a great, two-year-long story in doing so.
There are worse things.
- Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp
- Knight
- Posts: 447
- Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 1:12 am
Lago, why don't you just continue that adventure online or get new players to continue your story?
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"Real Sharpness Comes Without Effort"
I second this. Ideally, while being able to participate.Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:Lago, why don't you just continue that adventure online or get new players to continue your story?
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My longest-running game in my homebrew campaign setting never finished because we literally ran out of time and have never been able to get together for that amount of time again. This was years ago...we'd done something like twelve game sessions of a very large group of people (hard to manage, think I ended up swearing a lot) and got to within two or three sessions of being finished with a classic epic story arc, but just could not find time to meet up again. Sad. The last battle saw one party member disabled on the verge of death and kidnapped by the enemy, and another party member feigning defection to the enemy after they'd been trashed (not fatally) by the BBEG and his goons in a preview of the final battle. So everyone was amped up to kill him and end it and...they're all still waiting on the underground precipice to decide what to do next, a literal cliffhanger.