Does anyone ever actually finish their campaigns? I don't think I've ever actually finished a long-term game

Flames, digimon is superior to pokemon

My campaign's not designed to end.
Open sandbox forever. Three years later and it's still going strong!

Yes, me and my group finished several.

We recently finished a 4 year long campaing. It was good.

Finished a few. It's not that big of a deal, really.

We recently finished a V:tM game. We were sabbat infiltrators in a camarilla city, but one of ours blew our cover, HARD. The DM put his notes down, took another set that looked pretty torn and told us we'd take a little break before we escape the city.

I don't think it was his intention to end the campaign that way, but ... well ... looking at my pack, it was pretty much inevitable. We escaped from the camarilla, then from the sabbat trying to murder us for our failure, escaped on a boat to Australia, survived another assassination attempt on our way down there and decided that the characters would try to disappear somewhere around Melbourne.

It may not have been a satisfying end, but we felt we achieved something: Not dying.

Other than that, our DM is a big fan of endless sandboxes where we can do whatever we feel like, forever or until we all manage to get ourselves killed in stupid ways.

I've never finished a campaign, something always happens. Not that I have been in many but the one that lasted the longest is six months. Now my social life is dead and unsalvageable and I doubt I will be able to join one again.

I've run 3 that finished. Played in I think 5? Only counting 1+ year games.

There's no trick to it, unfortunately. It's pretty much all about having the right group, having fun, and staying interested in the story/characters.
Will say I've never finished a 'campaign' that was combat or dungeon oriented.

I run dungeon-crawls using the OD&D rules. Campaigns like this end naturally when the players finish exploring the main dungeon and clearing the wilderness around it.

If the players are at 9th or 10th level when this happens, and they're still rich enough after building a castle to raise and equip an army, and they're still inclined to keep playing their same characters after about a year of realtime gameplay, then they may decide to invade a neighboring barony.

A little bit of war-gaming at the end of a dungeon-crawler is a fairly satisfying endgame, but only for another 3–4 sessions in my experience; so it only really extends the life of a campaign by about a month beyond its natural lifespan.

I've finished one year long campaign and am about to finish another year and a half long one in about a month. It's doable, just takes some grit.

my highschool friends couldn't even finish one adventure / plot hook or arc in about 7 years.

we would try a new system, setting, adventure, set of characters or DM every time we'd meet to a point we got dozens of character sheet.

We'd pick up older adventures eventually only to ditch get onto something new next week.
It was incredibly frustrating, unsatifying and unfulfilling. These characters aren't even dead, their story was just never told.

I have finished two campaigns, ever.

One was a D&D 3.5 campaign back in highschool, and it ended in a mostly satisfactory way after about a year, but we started at level 5 and ended at 15 or so. The second was a Pathfinder campaign that ran for two years, starting at level 1 and ending prematuraly at level 15, because Pathfinder was burning me out on tabletop RPGs due to it being such a shit game. I had intended to end it at 20 but I couldn't stand to run it any longer.

I recently started a D&D 5e game from level 3 and I've got a good plan for where to take it, and I'm having fun running it, so I've got high hopes I'll be able to see this one through to its conclusion.

We finish all of our campaigns at some point, either through a TPK or through the characters reaching such a high level that the players agree to retire them.

Managed to finish the first campaign I ran with my high school group. I wasn't a very good GM back then, so it kinda sucked overall. I nudged them along way too much and didn't just let the game move at their pace. Same guys always bring up a bunch of fun moments from it, so I guess it wasn't that bad to them. Next game I ran ended, but only in the "Game over" sense. Players failed their goals entirely. It was pretty cool because the next game I ran took place in the same world, so they felt the consequences of their failure through the eyes of far less powerful people. That group messed up some more things, but ultimately destroyed who they wanted to destroy and succeeded on a personal level. All in all, I've ran three campaigns over the course of ten years with all three reaching a conclusion. Starting a fourth in a few weeks. I don't think my situation is the norm though, since none of the people I play with are flaky and I've known most of them for years.

The only campaigns we've finished are the premade ones. I just don't think anyone in my group has the stamina or creative engine that can last an entire homemade campaign

Not-finishing campaigns is the unfortunate fallout from our hobby. It's a long-term commitment, and lives move on, inspiration in characters wanes, inspiration in running a game world fades, ...it's life. I used to grouse about my folder full of 4th level characters.

THEN...we all woke up one day and realized we were in our 30's, and lives had stabilized somewhat. We started up "that new D&D" Pathfinder, and played Kingmaker to level 15. First time I ever got to cast 6th level and higher spells. (I bought the DM a set of metal dice as thanks). Good fun. I then picked up Curse of the Crimson Throne and ran IT to the end.

So...I think having prewritten adventures, and a defined story arc helps a great deal. But don't be too hard on yourselves about it. Have a good time and use a goddamn coaster

I finished Beyond the Mountains of Madness two weeks ago.

It did not end well.

The biggest problem, in D&D at least, with campaign burn-out is the insistence that a campaign *must* start at level 1 and continue to level 20. Nevermind that a level 1-20 campaign progresses through four or five different styles of fantasy as the characters go up in level.

Until about level 5 you're playing gritty fantasy; you're not powerful enough to affect the world in any meaningful way, the guardsmen can gang up and kick your ass if you try to raid a town, dragons and other iconic beasties just laugh at you, you're likely to get one-shot by a greataxe crit...

Levels 5-10 are more traditional heroic fantasy. Now you have cool spells and abilities to leverage in encounters, things that your characters may indeed be known for. You can stand toe-to-toe with monsters larger than rats and farm animals. You can take on the iconic beasties like dragons, if you plan it out carefully and come prepared and don't mind a casualty or two; such fights are epic encounters, the stuff of legend and song.

From level 10 onwards, you're more like a superhero than a fantasy hero. Spellcasters can teleport around the world, fighting evil or sowing discord as they wish; mundanes can't do shit aside from their gear but that's because D&D mundanes can't have nice things, in a perfect world the mundanes of this level would be hurling boulders and sundering mountains and stealing cathedral ceilings.

After about level 14, if your players are still getting tasks from quest-giver NPCs they may start to wonder a) why the quest-giver doesn't do it themselves, if they're still higher level, or b) why they're still taking orders from this simpleton, if they're lower-level. PCs of this level can go toe-to-toe with armies, carve out empires, and draw the ire of the gods themselves. Unless you're one of those idiot DMs who insists that every king is a 20th level PC class and every soldier is 10th level, in which case you haven't stopped to think about what that mean.

Conclusion: If campaign burn-out is a problem for your groups, don't do 1-20 campaigns. Focus on the range of levels you actually want to play in. Since low levels are ultra-lethal and high-levels are ultra-bullshit, for a traditional high fantasy feel I would suggest level 4-12.

Yes. Both ended prematurely though. One a person used unethical magic, then removed magic from the world, hence causing everyone to have a normal life. The other the heroes found out a dark secret, lost motivation, and went home. Probably the more sad of the two.

Of the ten campaigns I've played in that have ended, two can be said to have been finished.

You might be on to something, the two that finished were adventure paths (Carrion Crown and Tranny of Dragons).

I've finished 1 campaign in 4 years, then started another one with the same group. I recently started up a second game of SR with some of the members of the same group as well.

>coaster
?

This is the dream of every GM. Kudos to your GM dude

I agree wholeheartedly. there's just one guy in the party that has a stick up his ass about 'earning' high level play.

But that one time we started at level 16 in 5e just to fuck around is still probably the best adventure we've ran to date.

All you guys posting about your games are making me feel like the shittiest player/GM ever.

A thing you roll your dice into, to avoid them dropping off the table. Or destroying the table, if you use metal dice. Especially smart if you're using steel dice on a glass table.

I was in a game that had to get wrapped up early when the DM got a new job.
Just as the party slew our first dragon we were teleported halfway across the country. We could have just left it at that and retired our adventurers, but we tried to use the Shadowfell to get back to that cave and loot the dragon's hoard as quickly as possible.
The game ended on that and I like to think our characters were trapped in the Shadowfell forever, victims of our own greed.

>hexcrawl campaign
>player finds a wierd 5 sided portal, goes through it
>has trippy time, gets obviously cursed by an obviously god-tier wizard
>be much later
>party finds place where the portal got stolen from
>inspired by nuclear waste dumping sites, very clearly a bad place to be
>go through a series of trap rooms, full of dead elves
>reach central containment room
>4 doors unopened leading away, one pedestal in centre of room empty, with pentagon dust marks
>we go through door #3

Long story short I put endgame narrative shit floating loose in the world, and the players intentionally ignored how dumb it would be to mess with it. They randomly picked the door containing the brainwashing dragon-god and freed it by doing a series of mundane but obviously significant actions, basically because the dragon-god asked them to do it politely.

I had so little idea where to go next with the campaign, that I literally just linked them the poem 'Howl' ('this is what the dragon did to the world') and asked what they wanted to do next

oh and the campaign we did after that ended (we were doing dwimmermount) when someone fell through a crevasse 300ft on fire and impacted raw magical mega-oil, which burns about 3x as well as normal oil, and has about 4 different tables for the weird effects inhaling/touching the stuff has on living creatures.

The mountain's main reservoir of this stuff.

3 million cubic metres of it.

>Campaign ends with a discussion on how large a volcano has to be to cause an ice age

I have finished twelve games in the span between 2014 and now. They've all had good conclusions. They usually last between five and eighteen sessions, most are in the 9-13 range.

I currently have a 100% success rate for games I have GM'd. I've run so many games to completion that I can't even give you a number off the top of my head. Anyone who whines about not being able to finish a SINGLE is just a shit GM. Sure, you might get unlucky and end up with one game that didn't work out for uncontrollable reasons, but if it keeps happening and you don't learn from what you did wrong then you're a bad GM and you should feel bad.

I have only ever finished a call of Cthulhu "campaign". Friend GM was a cunt about giving our PCs information so our characters ended up mind fucked and murdered in horrible ways in the first hour of the second session.

Same GM tried to master a bunch of DnD 3.5 campaigns that failed and a zombie campaign with GURPS. All failed miserably for different reasons, but mostly his fault.

I tried playing with another master. He was a better master, but the party was way too murderhobbo for my taste so I politely stopped playing with them.

Now I'm the GM for a group of friends with some players that played with our old GM. Hopefully I wont shit on my campaign like he did.

How many sessions? Campaign length should be measured in sessions, rather than time in between sessions.

>tfw you know you're a shit GM but none of the other players want to step up to the plate
>tfw you don't even want to game anymore
playing pretend is truly suffering.

What makes you a shit GM? If you know there's a problem then we can fix it.

I can't even get people past character creations without wanting to fucking kill them.

Everyone wants to play some anime-cat girl panty stealing thief or power gamed min/maxed faggot. The only people I honestly want to play D&D with are the people who just aren't into games enough to want to go through the process of actually building the pen and paper part of their character.

Have you maybe tried playing something other than D&D?

My first shadowrun game I started ended a few weeks ago. I almost ended the game maybe 20 times.

>Shit always comes up, or the GM gets bored or frustrated, or I get bored or frustrated if I'm running.
Ugh.
On my way to finishing... it's slow going... Current group (of 6 years) rotates between campaigns. So we've been playing 4 on and off for all this time.

Friend of my finished his campaign in only two years. I missed all of it. It sounded awesome.

I'm in much the same situation as that guy and I'm sure that at the core of it, it's that I don't really want to GM. Just kind of doing it in the hopes that someone else has a story they want to tell eventually and maybe I'll get to play for a session or two.

No, because the only people who don't want to play D&D are tabletop vets who aren't looking for a traditional fantasy RPG playgroup, or people who want to play an extremely niche system for a very specific purpose.

I WANT to play D&D, I just can't find the right people without the game turning into a cringe fest.