Mass Effect-tier Campaign Endings

You've spent years on the campaign, countless hours poured into moving and shaping the world around you and being moved and shaped alongside it. You've sat down for the last session, and suddenly everything goes horribly, horribly wrong...

... Tell us about that campaign, user. The one that broke your heart for wasted potential.

Stop bringing that up! Let us forget already.

Is someone going to post the cockblocking an elf greentext and save this piece of shit thread?

Here it is:


>Party is teifling alchemist, Orc bezerker, a naga rogue, a cleric and me, a Paladin
>So they walk down the stairs, and the lobby is right around the corner
>Rogue hears something
>someone creeping up the stairs behind them
>giant cultist cube out for our souls
>Run from the murder cube
>Nobody says shit about the cleric
>He also didn't get the hint
>Rogue just shrugs at me
>DM gives me a weird look
>NEar total party wipe, due to bad rolls. My Paladin is only one left, and on low health.
>Everyone else is bleeding out
>BBEG "Stand down, stop fighting me, and I shall let you live. Join with me, and serve me, and I shall bring back your beloved, gifted with life so she never has to leave you again."
>The rest of the players are silent
>Deal with glares
>Phew
>The dick-ass DM ain't having any of that
>I look at him
>I calmly point his "mistake"
>he becomes visibly upset, draws attention from everyone else
>Won't show it to anyone due to it being shiny.
>silence in the room
>spots the squishy members of the party
>Cleric puts up shields to defend them
>Mishap temporarily averted.
>HOWEVER, not the fallen will ragequit
>Cleric opens a door
>Call bullshit
>DM claims the cleric cast the spell
>Call bullshit on that
>DM's face is anus-red

What mistake? I'm confused about the cleric. What happened to him?

It was a good campaign, the fact that the butthurt user that wrote all that didn't like the enemy motivation doesn't change that. Everything can sound stupid if you make it a greentext.

I was in a Shadowrun game that ran eight years and covered two editions that just ended when the GM had a mental breakdown and basically said "I'm done, the characters die, fuck you guys." It's unfortunate that things ended that way, and I don't blame him for doing what he did, but I'm still a little sore about the whole thing.

Why'd he do it

>HOWEVER, not the fallen will ragequit
Classic pasta. Well aged, but not spoiled

His wife left him and got basically everything in the divorce. The house, the kids, most of what was in their accounts and 75% of his 401k somehow. The guy wasn't the most stable person all the time and he was in a really shitty situation, but still he was a good friend and a great GM. I wish things had played out differently for a bunch of different reasons.

I can't blame him for snapping after having his entire life stolen from him.

I guess that's what men deserve after all those years of soggy knees.

Sounds like yet another reason not to get married.

>being straight unironically
>marriage, to a woman no less
he deserved everything that was dealt to him, this is the price of stupidity

After a really, really wonderful year and a half long D&D campaign, one of our players was leaving the state to go to grad school and we decided to put a capstone on the game rather than end it without him.

We thought we had over four months of weekly to wrap things up, but scheduling conflicts and family emergencies delayed things week after week until circumstances forced the GM to condense the last arc of a 17-month long game into the span of about three sessions. What was supposed to be weeks of intrigue and buildup for our final confrontation turned into an NPC just sort of announcing that an Illithid from another dimension was the big evil pulling the strings the whole time and she learned exactly where to find him.

We were immediately ushered to the final dungeon (which we had to skip an entire floor of for time) and treated to a potentially interesting but really rushed plot reveal before the final battle that a bunch of NPCs, both enemies and apparent allies, were part of the spooky intereimensional squid man's "spy network." Not that it mattered, because the game was going to have to end right after the Illithid died, so what should have been an extra adventure to clean up loose ends and deal with the betrayal of some campaign-spanning friends got hand waved as "the spy network collapses and goes underground after the death of the mastermind." The items associated with everyone's personal goals were discovered in the Illithid's secret vaults almost as an afterthought, and we didn't get a chance to play through the resolution of any of those arcs because the game ended right after that.

I shouldn't be bitter because it was nobody's fault, but goddamn. It was such a lackluster ending to hands-down the best game I ever played in. I really wish things had been different.

This is why I keep telling people to just have children outside of marriage if you want them. Or at the very least don't stick her bloody name on everything you own. That's stupid.

Damn, this is the ultimate blue balled ending. I think I'd rather have the game get dropped and shelved and remain uncompleted than see something like that happen.

Let me sing you the song of fucking suffering, Veeky Forums

>Join D&D 3.5 campaign during the first year of college
>Meet some of the best friends I've ever had in my life
>DM is a really creative guy with entire binders full of homembrew dungeons and campaign notes at the ready
>Other players are absolute bro-tier, and the one guy who isn't great at roleplaying really comes into his own through the GM's encouragement
>Being in this group helps me come out of a social shell and feel more confident in myself than I had ever felt in high school
>Meet every weekend of the year until the summer
>Globe-trotting sandbox game takes us across a huge map full of cool points of interest, ending with a big adventure in a sunken temple
>We get back the next year and do it again, picking up from where we left off and having another phenomenal year of the campaign
>But then
>Near the end of the first semester on year three of the campaign
>DM starts getting short with us and irritated over small things, like long-running in jokes or attempts to use magic items in weird ways
>We ask if something's wrong and he says he just says he wishes we "took things more seriously"
>One session he declares that an ancient demon who's been scrying on us has decided we're too dangerous
>Dozens of giant demons summoned while we're at sea and tear the level 15 party to shreds
>DM starts yelling at us that the campaign is fucking done and we should have been more careful and we're all dead and then storms out
>Two days later a post goes up on facebook that he failed all his classes and got kicked out of college
>Never see or hear from him again
>Everyone's too burned to try getting a new campaign started so we just do one shots and board games for the rest of the time we're at college

It's been years and I still haven't picked up a campaign since I finished college. I got too invested over those three years and knowing most games never reach their ending makes me afraid to get burned like that again.

>Construct gone divine kills all but the rogue, who drives the entire spelljammer into the sun.

It was an acceptable ending. My players were so pissed though. I just told them to suck less next game.

Ugh. I never even played Mass Effect and I still remember getting mad just hearing about it. It's like hearing about someone taking advantage of someone else.

No one tell him about GW or WotC.

Or Capitalism.

Not a day goes by I don't spend at least some amount of time thinking about how fucked up one of those things are.

>Showdown with the BBEG's brick-wall of a second in command before the final fight
>DM must have fucked up on his health or something, because nothing we did to him seemed to matter
>We burn through tons of supplies fighting him
>It takes like 70 rounds before he fucking dies
>All of us are at low health
>Can't stop to rest or restock because the DM pulled one of those "The villain is casting a powerful spell, you have to make it to him to stop it" routines.
>We all go up to the top of the tower to fight the BBEG
>We die very quickly
>DM goes "Well, I guess evil wins this time. I have some setting notes for you guys to read so that we're ready to start a new campaign next week?"

He's lucky no one tried to strangle him.

Don't worry user, eventually the dynamic process that defines you will cease to function and you won't exist anymore.

I was in the middle of DMing a huge final boss fight when one of the irregular players said "Can we speed this up? I gotta go soon."
I was so absolutely flabbergasted that it completely threw off my mojo. This the first campaign I had ever run, so it was even worse.
Luckily the game was saved by a player using a deck of many things he had picked up a long while ago to finish off the overpowered BBEG, and I was able to tie it in to a reoccurring gag that the player had.
All the players who were in that session say that it was great, but I still can't shake the feeling that the ending sucked.

I mean, that's horrible and all, but he kinda deserved it for letting her put her name on HIS shit. And for allowing an alimony at all. NEVER allow an alimony. Your spouse cannot force one, you have to AGREE to it. And if your fiancee won't marry you because you won't get an alimony, that's a gigantic red flag and you're better off without the gold-digging bitch.

>Campaigns
>Getting proper endings.
HA!
;_;

Was it D&D? I have to admit, unless everyone there is totally dialed in to the narrative skirmish aspects of the game, it is *very* easy for combat to drag. Especially high level combat.
Anyway, your players probably still enjoyed themselves, focused more on the thematic fun than draggy combat.

>His wife left him and got basically everything in the divorce. The house, the kids, most of what was in their accounts and 75% of his 401k somehow.
Sharia can not come soon enough

Calm down there Mohammed.

< - MFW it ended.
Not years, but definitely months.
Warhammer Fantasy. Was a wizard in a group that was trapped in a city that had been swallowed by the warp. Chaos Gods (featuring a custom-Slaanesh that was all about Aryan beauties and big shining knight stuff -- it was frustratingly cringy) were fighting for control. We were the monkey wrench.

Played a Bright Wizard. Initial group of players deliberately committed suicide over and over again, brought in friends to supplant them.

Anyways, long story, so TL, DR:
I kill an NPC we needed (things escalated unintentionally), he was a Death Wizard and basically shoved his soul into my body so he could haunt me forever. Discovered he had a daughter, woo redemption arc!

Eventually found said daughter being grabbed by the Slaanesh-replacement, allowed Death wizard to use my body to channel spells and eventually he flung his angry soul at a greater daemon in order to save his daughter. Nearly died, took daughter to safety, ended up so fucked that my allies cut a deal with 'friendly' Tzeentchians to keep me alive.

Turned out safe place was compromised; Slaanesh thing corrupted the whole place, removed our only safe haven and got the daughter anyways. I ended up mindhacked by the Slaanesh thing.

Turned out the twist of the campaign was that one of us was a descendant of Sigmar and was a conduit the gods wanted to use to fuck Sigmar up more directly, supplant him. Turns out I 'won' that lottery.

Endgame: We find a ritual that requires me to use said Sigmar connection and basically Save Everyone.

Problem: People we were working with were Slaaneshi. I ended up sacrificing my soul to it, doomed the Empire.

Everything I'd fought for through the entire campaign went the worst way possible. All friends died and my soul/body became a puppet for Slaanesh.

Still mad.
Bonus: it was my first full-length RPG.

This was amazing the last time I read it, and it still is!

>Find that one campaign on Roll20 that isn't a D20 system or filled with spergs and edgelords
>Play campaign for over a year.
>Party is all cool dudes, GM is a cool dude.
>Enjoy your character for the first time in fucking years.
>Get past all the villains and plots and shit
>Get to the BBEG(Ugh.)'s final fortress with an army of NPCs you'd met along the way.
>RL slams the GM, College hits half the Players.
>Game gets indefinitely postponed.
>Conclusion never.

More of a Half Life 3 then a Mass Effect 3, but still.

>Problem: People we were working with were Slaaneshi. I ended up sacrificing my soul to it, doomed the Empire.
Did you miss obvious hints about them being evil or did your GM just decide fuck you bad end?

Still one of my favorites

We had a couple of slim hints. A flash of purple light when we first encountered them, their aesthetic resembling the Slaaneshi replacement's style (which... didn't really help much given the GM's aesthetic preferences), and a cryptic divination that suggested we kill their leader -- but at the time we believed their leader was the descendant of Sigmar, so the divination was easily interpretable as "kill the conduit to deny the chaos gods their route to Sigmar's power."

That and, without them, we didn't really have any options aside from committing suicide or siding with a chaos god. Everyone else that was good/neutral aligned died.


So... bit of both?

Yeah, no one understood that greentext when it was first posted either. That's the cockblock

That blows, user.

>I got too invested over those three years and knowing most games never reach their ending makes me afraid to get burned like that again

I've been stuck in this exact same rut for the past six years.

So I'm guessing the joke is the random nonsensical bits are supposed to compel me to ask what the hell it was trying to say, but it just makes me look like an asshole for trying to respond to copypasta?

>Dresden files game (FATE system)
>Squad is Dragon servant sociopath (me), red court infectee/emo, were-gorilla lolsorandum player, LG detective who dabbled in magic
>Highlights include:
>Were gorilla transforming in the ghetto and flipping a van onto some would be hitmen
>Our safe house getting firebombed and our subsequent flight to a new place
>Infiltrate white court penthouse party, meet my dragon patron there, and find out about the bbeg, a high ranking white court guy and his troup
>He flees down into the hotel lobby, plenty of witnesses
>Were-gorilla ignores ~4 "Are you REALLY sure you want to do that?"s from the GM, and the part begging him otherwise, and harambe's out in the lobby to attack the white court guy
>We're now fucked, police called, white court gets away anyway
>Gorilla runs away, gets killed by police, same for red court infectee
>I start killing witnesses, LG detective tries to stop me, I kill him and effectively NPC out

There was some serious salt about that. It was a really good campaign up to then.

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