Campaigns Not Ending On Schedule....

[TheAuldGrump]

I decided to wrap up my current SteamCraft campaign a while ago, three months or more, to be a tad more accurate.

My 'problem' with it is that it is episodic - there is no underlying arc, no overall plot, no central story. It just bounces along merrily from one mission to the next. A part of me wants there to be a big plot/plots that is/are revealed over the course of the campaign. While there have been a few stories that lasted a mission or three, when taken as a whole this has been more about individual adventures than anything else.

Since I decided to wrap it up there has been no progress on actually doing so - I am having fun, my players are having fun, and the campaign continues to bounce along. There has been a total of three battles, none lethal, a good deal of sneaking around, and an enormous amount of blarney being spouted. While enjoyable it has been the least action filled SpyCraft game I have yet run. Even the spell casting has been heavier in charms and illusions than blasting.

I think that my attraction to an underlying plot may have made me decide to wrap up too soon. And that I didn't even fool me, let alone my players. Given that the first suggestion that they had for a new campaign was essentially similar to the current game, but with Gargoyles.... They seem to like the looser, adventure driven direction, at least as far as SteamCraft goes. Mind you, the Delta Green players seem to like having an overall plot that keeps popping up....

Has anyone else ever decided to wrap a campaign, only to realize that no, they weren't?

The Auld Grump

[Krensky]

Heh.

I had two long running games that I considered ending, but it neverquite happened.

The first was a WoD (more accurately a My World of Darkness) game sert in Osaka that involved the interaction of a "family" of Japanese hungry dead and a dojo of mages (four akashics. one shrine maiden, one tantric club kid, and one computer wizard). Someone in the group always had another idea to run, and by the time it petered out we'd covered almost a decade of game time, fifteen years of real time, and three different generations of characters.

The second was a Bubble Gum Crisis game invovling our team being the AD Police's SWAT team using Stingray Systems' prototype power armor. Over about eight years we didour renditions of the original OVA and probably another six or seven OVAs worth of original storylines.

Good times.

[Agent 333]

I've never had a campaign run longer than I expected, though my subconcious is apparently very good at plotting out campaigns that end when the school semester ends... though I'm out of school now, so I'm not sure that particular talent will ever be usefull again...

[NezMaster]

My games run forever. The average life span of my game is around 5 years. Usually when I'm tired of it, I brew on it for weeks before I tell anyone. The first few times I made the mistake of announcing that I was considering quitting the game, and wham, the interest was sucked out of players like air out the airlock. Whenever i asked if they wanted to 'finish all the unresolved threads, or just stop now and we could decide what happened as a story telling kind of thing, they always vote for the quick way out.

So, once i announce I'm quitting a game, it's pretty much over.

I've gone back and forth with a lot of games though, Including my current spycraft game where I have the opposite problem to you. It's a little to focused on combat, mostly becuase of my expereince with other genre's of games, though it's also too episodic for me. I keep trying to install underlyign threads as well, but it's never really worked out. Some of my 7th level players are still on their first subplot. Of course alot of those are compulsions they just haven't worked very hard on.

[Jodack]

My problem is I get "bored" too quickly.

I have had the same core of players for about six years now with some people coming and going.  We did the first three years as Spycraft 1.0 campaign.  The characters got to around 25th level.  I switched to a military Spycraft 1.0 campaign that lasted about three months.  I tried a slighty-future campaign using 2.0 which lasted about three months (I am not a big fan of 2.0....  I love 1.0).

The last two years or so I have been running two GURPS campaigns (alternating campaigns every two or three sessions).  One campaign is the Infinite Worlds... the other is an Espionage campaign that I blend GURPS and Spycraft.  I have been itching to get back to a straight Spycraft 1.0 campaign.... maybe as a player..  not a GM.

[TheAuldGrump]

Almost exactly a year later the campaign is finally wrapped.  It took me a while to realize that the players really wanted a lighter game than I was interested in, but were willing to have dark spots in what was essentially a light and fluffy game. About half the party reached level 18, though they very seldom used any of their abilities acquired after level 10 or so. (An exception was the Classic Fey magus, who was also very nearly the only character to get into combat.)

One surprise was that Eric (the Wargamer) who was dead set against subplots when the campaign began would be one of those arguing in favor of the fun and light game with lots of subplots. He is pretty much the only player with subplots in the Delta Green game, so I guess that he has come to like them. (Now if I can get him to run his O' Canada campaign so I can play in it. I have run his campaign more than he has, dang it!)

I was not all that surprised about the LARPers preferring light and fluffy, for the most part they were Changeling players in the LARP. (Yes, I ran the light and fluffy side of the World of Darkness....)

The characters have parted, some to Scotland and a ruined castle that is A. haunted and B. Belongs to the Classic Fey magus. The other group has gone and joined the rebels in Ireland, fighting for Home Rule. The Christian Healer magus has married a Selkie, and the party has broken his curse.

The next game will most likely also be Scoobypunkish, but more action oriented, with a bit more of a Pulp feel. Fantasy Archaeologists, with a bit of Vernes, a bit of Night in the Museum, and a touch of Indiana Jones. This time there will be an underlying plot, and if things go according to plan they will touch plot every two, three, or four sessions. More than half the group has taken the ability to use magic, either as a feat or by taking the mage class from Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth. (Still my preferred magic system for Spycraft.)

The Auld Grump

[TheAuldGrump]

One major difference - this time around there is going to be an agency of sorts, offering up the various missions, rather than a loose knit band of adventurers, going where they whist.

The Auld Grump