What was the greatest ending (or a closure) to a campaign that you enjoyed?

Group Suicide:

The portal to hell had been opened using their blood and would only close when their lives ended. Humorously it was the Rogues idea to commit suicide before the demons captured them, the Paladin wanted to fight till the end killing as many as he could. 4 leaps later and their corpses are charred in the bottom of a volcano and the realm is safe again with the exception of a few wandering demons.

Their ship was half scrap, their weapons were down, and the terrorist's ship full of explosives were about to jump directly into a UN base and detonate.

So they fucking rammed the thing.

Okay, I gotta go sperg on you. If there is a strong correlation between the length of a school semester and the length of an RPG campaign (which it seems to me you are implying), that means that for it to be the average there would be a roughly equal distribution on both sides of that bell curve—that is, there would be as many short campaigns as there are long campaigns. Based on my experience, I can easily imagine one-shots being by far the most common campaign length, and then possibly lessening in some convex fashion.

I think you mean an average campaign tends to have a length of one college semester, or that the most common campaign length is the one college semester.

I have never enjoyed the closure of our campaigns.

We maybe finished two and they both felt incredibly forced.

Taken from WOTC market surveys.

rpg DOT net/news+reviews/wotcdemo.html

Average sessions in total survey population was 15.4 sessions.

Assuming weekly sessions......that's.....half a college semester, actually.

But then if you factor in things like holidays, people flaking, finals week, midterms, and other stuff...it may start weighing closer to a full semester.

It's possible that one-shots may have brought this down some, but then:

At least with other gamers in my age group, one-shots are pretty fucking lame. It renders much of the progression and story mechanics of roleplaying games moot. And this survey was taken nearly a full decade before one-shots became really popular because of normies invading our hobby.

what do normies have to do with one-shots?

Probably when the semi-historical campaign ended in a way that prompted interest and gave rise to further campaigns in the setting.

Basically one of the players became female Ghengis Khan and created her own NotMongol empire which had a huge impact on the setting and made things really interesting. Subsequent games took place in the centuries after, and also one that was at the same time but in another part of the world, basically that party having to deal with the actions of the original party.

>Most stories are too ambitious for the reality of most games

Fucking this. I kept wanting to do lvl 1-20 campaigns

> normies invading our hobby

I don't know where you came from but can you go back?

Sorry, I've likely been here longer than you.

Don't you have university or high school classes you need to prepare for?

For campaign conclusion, it would have to be for World Wide Wrestling, when the drug addict character is left in the ring with his love interest as the last two during the royal rumble.

After announcing that he wants to give up the drugs and be like his love interest, he steps over the ring surrendering the title shot. So the love interest runs outside, throws him in the ring and makes him propose to her. Campaign ends in a wedding.

Con attendance shooting through the roof due to normies.

The Bazinga Bubble of nerd hobbies.

>ever managing to get players to keep playing your game to the end of a campaign

My first campaign ended for my part with my character heroically sacrificing himself so his last surviving friend and the rest of the party could survive.

>21 high school aged PCs and principal NPC
and then the harem anime started
right?

I mean this really sounds like the premise of an anime

I'm thinking of sabe marionette j

>As a player
Second campaign I played in. Lasted over a year. We got sidetracked quite a bit and only one of us still had the same character we started the campaign with, but we went from level 1 to around level 14. We beat the BBEG we'd been fighting against the whole run and all our characters got some semblance of a rewarding conclusion to our arcs. DM also left it open enough where we could still imagine what our characters would do next.

>As a DM
First full playtest campaign of my homebrew system. Lasted 6 months. Players surprisingly kept themselves on the rails the whole way through. I was expecting a spectacular derail every step of the way, but it never came. Players completed their missions and got their rewards. It also took place in the same setting as the first campaign mentioned and their mission was to tie up a loose end that had been bothering me since the game ended.

>My warforged was the last surviving pc after a giant battle with the invading undead.
>We won but just barely
>I looked and saw the field around me littered with friend and foe alike
>I looked and saw the dead bastard that started all this was lying in peaces
>my quest was over the day was saved. I was done. There was no more need of a fighter like me
>and so, I just stood there unmoving
>hours turned to days
>the dead where burred and armour reformed to tools
>day turned to week and then to months then years
>the felid of my last stand became a farm with me as a scarecrow
>decades passed and the farm became a town
>the town became a city
>rust had long ago covered me but the people still remembered me
>sometime people would leave flowers
>sometime children would play around me
>through all the century's I remained ready for when the world needed a fighter like me
>I waited a very long time

My character died to save the rest of the party from the lieutenant of the BBEG. They eventually defeated him and erected a statue in my honor.

A bit of information of the setting will be nessesary for this.

The setting was a pseudo Norse mythology like world with the players jumping between the many realms along the pathways of the world tree (Yggdrasil). Along the way finding out that Yggdrasil had produced seeds that would go out into the void and form new world trees. These seeds took the form of semi humanoid creatures that were shaped by the various factions that were fighting over them and their rearing. The campaign ends with them discovering that Niffleheim (the norse equivalent to hell) was an icefield made up of the physical manifestation of all the souls of those who had died in the realms for the purpose of feeding those world seeds when it was time for them to grow. They did so as the world seeds that they had been finding out about had begun to be planted by the various factions, each trying to essentially build a world for themselves to use as a life raft when Yggdrasil died. The players had one of these seeds that had been traveling with them that they had influenced out of its previous brainwashing (done by Odin) and wound up in a fight for territory with Surtr the god of fire. They killed the god but not before both seeds wound up planted. The two trees twined together and as they grew began to consume the souls of not just the dead but also of the living. The party bound their souls into their weapons and planted them in the trees giving themselves pseudo immortality as legendary weapons in the new twinrealms that the two trees became.

Mine lasted both semesters but had to end both as it had reached its natural conclusion and a key party member in a party of 3.5 people was graduating.

Also after you've faced a Martian shuggoth under Buckingham Palace, there's not much left to phase you...

I like it.

My tiefling anti-paladin finally atoned for his sins and became a paladin again with a magical circlet filled with the souls of my enemies, killed the evil sorcerer, and before the killing blow warped back to my village in the mountains where I was kinged by my people.

I couldn't summarize it and do it any jusrice without taking at least 5 to 10 posts, but it was a campaign I ran for over 4 years. I know there's an archived thread about it though; Google "Ark of Andrassia" to read it.

Tl;dr version - lich survivor of an ancient kingdom suffering from a deadly plague seals the remnants in a pocket dimension to quarantine them; the PCs find the tower that is the gate and try to unseal it, not knowing what it contains. In the end, BBEG sacrifices himself to save the players and help them escape the collapsing pocket dimension, once they have learned the truth.

We were rooting out one of many lairs of necromancy tied to an overarching threat that had gone underground. We found a paladin of Kelemvor who had been cursed with undeath, an ironic and twisted treatment since the paladin focused on helping people find atonement and a peaceful death. He was a skeleton, but did his best to be a holy warrior. He taught my fighter how to channel his inner light, and I MC'd into paladin.

We took him along on a lengthy quest to root out several lairs. There were a lot of cool sub-adventures, including a haloween themed party with a bunch of kenku who mimic their outfit's sound.

When we finally reached the ultimate lair, the death knight who had cursed the paladin was entombed by Zuggtamoy (story details omitted here). When we peeled off the mushrooms, we reawoke him to finally slay him and lay our companion to rest. We fought a two-stage battle. The DM brought out a big foam black cube (looked like some necron shit) that was his phylactery, and we had little spikes for our minis. The surface opened up for the final stage.

The paladin died in the fight, but we laid his spirit to rest. It was a great campaign.

I'll let you know when I have one.

The game where, one by one, we all died defending a port town from a large fleet invasion. As we slowly realised that we would not be winning, the game took a shift towards taking out as many enemies as possible (often in suicidal novas) and evacuating as many civilians as we could. Nobody was mad, we all had a great time, and it's probably one of the best rgp gaming experiences I'll ever have.

We fired our lives and the souls of the willing dead at a star-devouring nebula monster to try and kill it.

I know the feeling

Storytime?

Played a campaign where the PCs thought they were the heroes of a prophecy and destined to kill the seven chaos beasts only to have 3/5's of them brutally slaughtered upon fighting their first one...well, two.

They kind of chose the wrong first fight desu.

Of the two living party members, one ran away to her home and the other started a search for the actual heroes of prophecy, ended up become an NPC in that campaign.

Likewise, I have had ONE campaign that has actually reached it's conclusion out of dozens I have played in. The GM hadn't even finished explaining the consequences to the wider world (and later told me he had intended to discuss what our characters spent the rest of their lives doing, and if we wanted to run a second campaign with the characters) before someone butted in discussing the game they wanted to run next.
A little bit of me (and I think the GM too,) died that day.

I think it has a lot to do with how we feel about the characters and the campaign.
If things are going well then we want to keep playing with the characters, so the campaign gets an extension, a new big-bad, a new continent to explore, whatever, it just never ends; if things aren't going great it slowly falls apart.

Kind of similar to TV shows I suppose. If it's going well there is another season until the seasons suck so much it gets cancelled.

Seconded. Without "normies" the hobby dies.
I have been a PnP RPGer for close to 20 years now, and can honestly say the games that are coming out now are generally better written and more varied than they ever have been.