Nick, I’m curious to hear your answers to Scott’s questions, too. That’s a tough situation, but I usually opt for bailing — in as constructive a way as possible, preferably after explaining what’s bugging me about the game and trying to resolve the situation.

If you’d play in an improved game, then it sounds like there’s enough concensus that it might be worth a discussion with the GM– maybe there’s a new direction that’d get everyone jazzed again.

If you wouldn’t play, even if it improved, then that’s a tough spot to be in. If the storyteller’s your friend, you might confide that life situations (or whatever) are making it hard to play– could he please put in a dramatic story arc climax? That way if everyone else follows when you leave, there’s still closure.

I’m a fan of both Star Trek (Next Generation) and Lord of the Rings. I prefer LotR. But there’s no denying that even for people with my preferences, if you get only 80% of it, STNG is a much deal than LotR. 80% of STNG was worth doing. 80% of LotR isn’t.

It was such a bitter ending that no one started GMing for a couple of months– exactly the reverse of our current situation, where everyone wants to run a game, because we’re having so much fun.

As a player, this happened at the end of the last campaign (Strife and Pride, a D&D game that had reached 11th level or so). One of our players left, and we’d lost another along the way, so we invited a couple of people to join us mid-steam. After 3 sessions with the new people, no one was happy, so we quit. Those sessions aren’t quite “as real” to me when I’m recalling the campaign… kind of an oops that I acknowledge but don’t dwell on.

I’ve only run one campaign that *stopped*, and it was due to a TPK. We could have continued with new characters, but the players were excited about another campaign we had already talked about.

The campaign in question was our first 3rd Edition D&D campaign. It was a straightforward, generic series of connected adventures, using the default setting information from the core books. The idea was just to explore the new version and do simple hack ‘n’ slash.

But then they released the Dragonlance Campaign Setting. And for my players, who grew up reading the Chronicles and Legends, this was the world were D&D was meant to be played. So we dropped our current campaign, wished those characters a fond farewell, and dove into a new Dragonlance campaign. And it was a great choice; the campaign is still going strong years later.

This same idea, of stopping a campaign suddenly for something new, obviously can apply to a more radical change: going from D&D to GURPS, going from face-to-face to online, things like that. Obviously, this works well when the players are excited to do something new. Keeping the old campaign can actually be detrimental to the group. Thus it is often best to just cut the old one off, and start something new to capture that enthusiasm.