I totally agree. The campaign end condition for my gangster game was “Rival Big Al must be dead or in jail and the power of his gang broken.” When I started I didn’t know the final showdown would be a frontal assault against Big Al’s summer home in Wisconsin. He could have been shivved in prison or gunned down on the streets of Lakefront City.

I’m planning to end my current campaign in 6-9 months. All I know at this point is that the bad guys’ plan will be exposed, a long-term NPC will reveal his true identity, the PCs will have a moral choice to make, hopefully the evil plot will be foiled, and the PCs will get off their backwater planet once and for all — bruised and battered, perhaps, but ready for a new chapter in their lives.

That new chapter may be played out in a subsequent campaign — it’ll be one of the choices in the prospectus I offer, and if the votes are there we’ll play it; but if not we’ll play something else.

Obviously, I know what’s going to happen in more depth that I’ve described, but I haven’t planned out every little event — in fact, I’m still making up events and NPCs without even being sure of how they fit into the great scheme of things. I’m not even sure if the big NPC-reveal will happen in the climax as an oh-my-god moment or whether it will fall in the rising action phase as a prod and further motivation.

I call this the “Schrodinger’s Box” style of GMing, and it’s kind of new and exciting…

Good suggestions all around — if I ever try this myself, I’ll definitely be coming back here to read pointers.

(And I’ll go ahead and PDF-ize this one. We’ll see how it does. Thanks for the feedback!)

Unlike the Cylons, I have a plan.

Avoiding railroading with a planned ending is easy. Just avoid railroading using the same techniques you’d use during the campaign. Let’s say the main campaign foe is a guild of thieves. Instead of planning the campaign end, you plan what the guild is trying to accomplish, with what, and how far they will go. Essentially, you have their ends, means, and ways. When the guild runs out of options, the campaign is over. Since the guild is likely to save their most nefarious ways and means until pushed, you probably get a nice climax.

A campaign end is different than a character story end. The latter is much more likely to lead to a railroad. If the player felt like the character was heavily invested in the campaign story, he might feel that his character story had also ended. If he felt like he had more to do–well then you have a good reason for a followup campaign with the same characters. If his character story took some of the focus off of the guild mid-campaign for some reason–well, you are having fun, and the guild can wait.

For that reason, whenever I have a campaign ending planned, I have a rough idea of the timeline (in game), and know the foes ways, means, and ends. If the campaign takes 8 sessions extra because we were having a great time, my “ending” can still go off as planned, no problem.

The one solution I’ve tried has been VV’s solution: to change the world out of the normal game’s scope. We never did reach the ending, but it was a useful guide to the adventures along the way.

I rarely even have an “end” in mind. Maybe the sketchy details or skeleton of what I’d like to see happen, but I try to let the end write itself from what the party and their adversaries are doing. I always have in mind with each session what the “big bad” or conflict force fore the party is doing in the background, and try to merge the two together for the end. I literally try to set up a beginning of a story and “possess” the villain to see what he would do. I let the party take it from there.

I’ve ended campaigns according to plan, but I’ve never made those plans dependent upon what the PCs do. In other words I plan a world changing event that the players may play a part in but cannot prevent. A battle amongst the gods, a natural disaster, or maybe a war between several governments on the scale of WWII.

Now the point isn’t to end the PCs careers, but to end an era that the PCs were a part of. Could the PCs continue to adventure after this event? Sure, but I wrap up all of the loose plot ends and change the game world in such a way that as a storyteller I can say “The End” and it feels right.

So with this approach I reccomend that you make the PCs part of the ending, but also plan something that is of a larger scope than the PCs themselves.

For long-term games I prefer to build a world and let the players decide what story they want to tell (which begins to naturally suggest an ending — good stories write themselves), but for shorter campaigns a more deterministic style might be called for. I think the decision depends on individual GM style and the type of game you’re running.

After realizing this I decided that I plan only one thing about ending. “The end exists”. And surprisingly, most of my games, that don’t die after a session or two, develop the ending itself. The plot escalates to a point after which there is no return.

How about ending the campaign by the rules? Like in the Burning Empires game? It has clearly fixed “hitpoints” for the campaign. When they hit zero then it is over.

Is that a plan? It is different at the least.

The plan was for each character to meet their ultimate fate. The party cleric united with her deity, the party wizard went off to be an apprentice to the god of magic on far off planes, the party rogue became an assassin for the god of thieves, etc. I had planned for the party’s fighter to die mid-battle and his signature sword, which already contained his soul, to become animated to deal the final blow.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? He made good rolls and lived through death effect after death effect. Nothing I did could stop him, and he managed to get the finishing blow with over 100 hit points remaining.

At any rate, I confessed that he had partially broken my plans and he was nothing short of delighted. Apparently when the DM sets out to kill you and fails, it’s a big ego boost. I rewrote his epilogue on the fly and everyone had a good laugh.

As always, a good GM doesn’t really plan at all. He/she prepares.