Bad End

I'm curious as to what other people's best (worst) early campaign endings are. Pic related.

How are you defining "early campaign end"?

Not sure if this counts but a game ended because of the players could not make it more so the GM didn't want to run for the 3 others anymore.

I have only had campaigns last 2 sessions. This year's campaign's end was brought upon because one of the players left forever for Latvia and the other got a job where he's an international truckie.

I'm gonna sell off my books and just lurk Veeky Forums for fun storytimes and weep that I never could make a fun storytime of my own. Decades down the drain.

If i had to guess I would say tpk

Yep

That doesn't seem like a bad end to me. That IS neat.

The worst was a DM giving up after session 1 (roll20 + discord) because "I wasn't having fun". He was younger than everyone and spent 10 minutes describing his donut steel setting and backstory.
I think he didn't thought we would stray from some meticulous plot. He got lost the instant we deviate from being heroic (and suicidal) to try to survive.

I had a Star Wars game over Roll20 fizzle out because the DM decided he wanted to play in another game before we ever even started the campaign.

I also a game recently fizzle because the person who was going to DM had a bit of a mental breakdown and couldn't do it. I tried to keep it going but we just didn't have enough players. I also admit a lack of motivation due to worry over would-be DM.

>be me GM
>Pathfinder
>stay with me here
>Started a game at level 1, because they wanted a grind.
>Have them get told that bandits have holed up outside a cave on outskirts of town.
>they all run off at full tilt.
>ask if they are going as a group
>get told its a competition who kills most bandits.
>first player enters
>cavalier on horse
>Decides to challenge the 1 lone bandit outside cave on a smoke break, who is affectionally refered to as Keith
>player dismounts horse and runs at Bandit Keith, misses.
>Keith swings his long sword and crits, confirms and rolls 17 damage. Drops the cavalier inconscious
>Keith goes to finish off cavalier when >Player 2 enters the clearing
>Player 2 is a monk
>Player 2 decides to flying dragon kick the bandit in the chest.
>misses horrendously
>Keith swings and again crits, confirms and takes out the monk for 15 damage, knocking him out like the cavalier.
>The player 3 decides to stealth behind Keith
>Keith is flatfooted so sneak attack too.
>Actually hits, for 1d4+1d6 (decided didnt need strength) and does 2 whole damage, a full third of Keiths Health.
>Keith crits confirms and drops the rogue like a sack of potatos
>finally player 4 shows up and using the cavaliers horse as cover fires an arrow and misses.
>Keith walks over and stabs the ranger, not a crit this time but for some reason ranger didnt want constitution and goes to 0.
>this took 10 minutes real time.
>I decide to roll back the clock, bad rolls.
>Take 2, Cavalier enters the clearing and challenges Keith and repeat everything that happened.
>Except that the ranger lands his bow and kills Keith.
>Ranger goes inside cave and 3 bandits are sitting around a campfire
>Ranger quits.

The bandit had napkin stats
AC 12, +1 Atk +1Damage 6hp with a d8 longsword. He killed 7 PCs before his fall.
I am no longer allowed to use solid red dice, because they are evil now.
Keith did it for America.

I had a group of idiots who, while under armed guard of a bunch of Grey Knights and packed in a small, overlapping fire-friendly hallway, pull out and fail to set off a melta bomb while standing in front of them.

In semi-unrelated news, storm bolters are fun.

>Decides to challenge the 1 lone bandit outside cave on a smoke break, who is affectionally refered to as Keith
>Bandit Keith
I like your taste in names. +1 Brownie Point to you user.

>Keith did it for America

Godspeed, Keith.

D&D 4e. The players were defending a fort from a small army of undead minotaurs after they were forced to land their airship. I drew up a large battle map and placed concentrated groups of enemies around the outside of the fort and added plenty of NPC "defenders" on the walls. The groups of enemies were explicitly designed as individual combat encounters: I even told them this straight up.

They decide to split up, each taking a section of the wall by themselves + NPCs, including the two Leaders. In a group of eight players, all but two of them died, though they held out pretty damn well considering no one died until the last few rounds of combat. The campaign, which had suffered plenty of character deaths beforehand and had been going on regularly for just under two years, fell apart almost immediately after the session; didn't even need to wait until the next week to know it was done.

An end to a campaign that was early.

Dumbass.

Just go out and be social, you can find new people.

So this one ended up being a fucking awesome game, but we had one session that I straight up did a redo of. For context, the game ended up being Payday 2 in space, where the final heist landed Humanity in a clusterfuck of first contact. However, on-topic:

>Cover of Night, Raid a Senator's Apartment so the competition can bury him
>Ironically, it's the good Senator that's paying for this
>Players enter without a hitch, quiet entry and what looks to be a slow but guaranteed win
>searching around the players find keycards, a guard eating edibles instead of patrolling, basically good spirits
>cue the Stairwell of Death
>one player tries to quietly knock a guard unconscious
>Guard feels a thump on head and doesn't fall over, turns and draws pistol
>Beast, the muscle, keyed a mic in before Guard could talk effectively jamming, cue quietest ass-beating ever
>Chains, hackerman with two pistols, rolls around the corner and starts going downstairs after that finishes
>more guards
>I roll randomly to see when guards will rotate their patrols, when they'll go get food out of the fridge, etc
>dice decide that every guard needs to go to this stairwell and join on the edibles
>three hours of resolving consecutive fist-fights in this stairwell
>Beast draws his space magic sledgehammer and clobbers the penultimate guard, final guard realizes these masked assholes in power armor are going to fucking kill him unless he surrenders
>donadcum.mp3
>players progress through facility, effectively having cleaned the place out
>two guards remaining, easy go
>wrong.mp4
>Chains draws a shotgun on a guard who startles him
>"where is your suppressor, Chains?" as four shotgun blasts echo through the building
>final guard is on the otherside of a doorway wanting to bum a smoke from the man who now lacks a torso
>immediately screams into walkie-talkie for backup
>"user, what did you say the DEFCON Level this planet was at? Threat Threshold Negative? That's good, right?"
>cont

I don't know how I feel about a Minotaur race.
On one hand it is clearly the best and almost a requirement of a good fantasy setting.
In the other they should be maze guardians who live until killed. (More of a magic contruct than a race)

I had an aneurysm at this point, and got stuck explaining why Chains should've just left his shotgun at home for this run if he wasn't going to suppress the fucking thing, but then I resumed being the simulator of this train wreck.
>players had found a vault full of gold, a secret elevator, and a truck loaded with really high-tech stuff
>truck now had a previously unaware guard's ribs scattered on it, and every siren on the planet went off at once when the final guard shit himself
>vault closes, sealing one of the thieves inside
>despite being a fucking space wizard with electric powers he couldn't psionic his way out of a sealed vault yet
>players hear over the headset their Informant start freaking out, saying he's going to try and get them an escape car
>Beast insists everything is good
>Chains also does the same
>players hear on the open channels the military forces mobilizing
>four thuds are heard from outside the building
>Chains was in the garage to see - for brevity - a fucking Starcraft Marine kick the garage door in
>immediately gets pasted by the Drop Trooper
>Vault-boy tries to short out the power grid to force the vault open
>in doing so overloads himself and dies in a glorious spray of electrical sparks and viscera
>Beast realizes he can't beat a dude with his hammer that is twice his height and made of steel so he puts his hammer down and holds his hand up
>Speedy was their runner, and decided to just run out of the facility and jump fences
>"can you outrun an autocannon, Speedy?"
>Military had mobilized massive gunships with autocannons to secure the senator's place, one got a good lock on Speedy and her bits hit a speed of Mach 2 as impact registered

The second go round the players had the same fist-fight on the Stairwell of Death, but didn't fuck up that badly beyond that. Pretty sure they won't let me make "stealth missions" for them ever again, though.

>Dice decide every guard needs to be in stairwell to get in on edibles.

I stopped reading. Kys, that is lame and stupid and bullshit.

I kind of agree with that randomly rolling the guard patrols and not putting some sort of limit on how many would walk through some random place was dumb. The players themselves were a bit dumb for everything going tits-up with the shotgun and sounding the alarm, but at the same time it also feels like you really, really didn't have any middle-ground between 'party is hidden and safe' and 'party has been sighted, call in the SPESS MARINES'

Which also might be a bit on them depending how long they dawdled after the alarm getting sounded, but really it feels like it was kind of a mess on both of your parts. You especially might want to double-check your security tables if they had another stairwell fist-fight.

That's just me trying to humorously explain, well after the fact, why the fuck each guard decided to go up the stairs one after the other. In reality a given guard would do two laps of his route then I'd roll to see which guy he rotated to. They all started trying to switch with the guy who patrolled the top floor, and thus the stairwell of death began.

The whole "STEEL REHN" thing was something they were entirely warned about going in. This wasn't just "show up we're stealin' shit sneaky-like!" there was a preplan and everything, where the players were pretty much all but told OOC "don't do something that will make this go loud, it would be akin to suicide." And then shotgun blasts.

Looking back though, you're right; the system I had in place for rotations was a hot mess. I've since decided that, if I ever set up a session like that, patrol routes are going to be fixed. Patrol swaps should probably be something I telegraph to players who try and find it, as a reward for them taking time in quiet missions.

so you're willing to undo rolls via time travel but not willing to fudge the rolls without the players knowing?

A bunch of my friends got together for a Call of Cuthulu quick campaign that was supposed to take 2-3 sessions. They did it in less than 3 hours. The issues was that their party was 7 people, and they were all Pathfinder players who are known for two things: bold moves and in-party arguing. The campaign was some kind of time loop thing where you need to figure out what is going on and how to stop it before you go through too many loops and your mind ages to the point that you die. They skipped huge chunks of the plot by being friendly to all the NPCs (because they never play COC), making bold moves (because they never play COC), and having some really lucky rolls in the end segment which is a battery of rolls to survive wandering in some kind of void. It was just 3 time loops, in less than 3 hours, and they beat the campaign.

The worst ends were all the campaigns where players just gradually stopped showing up until we didn't have enough to continue.

The minotaurs were raised from an abandoned and deprecated kingdom to the south of the fort, from which it used to guard their border. The kingdom in question used magical fauna to confuse and surmount their enemies until, one day, it fell into political unrest — a coup was attempted on the king at the time. Shortly after, however, the entire kingdom fell into ruin when the magical plants that were their specialty ran rampant throughout, cutting off almost every means of escape, causing the vast majority of its population to simply starve to death, if they weren't already killed in the haphazard crush and growth of numerous hedge mazes.

The player characters were on their way to said kingdom to investigate claims that the hedge wall that had stood for hundreds of years had started to wither and decay.

I hate endings clearly determined by people who wanted le epic screenshot shit, but it's incredibly unsatisfying for most people actually involved.
I had a guy who transmuted the moon into gold and then used the gold to buy god. sure it sounds cool to mongoloid redditors, but it's really fucking shitty for people actually playing.

I mean, I had a player vaporize their moon, turning it into a world spanning silver desert, but the campaign as a whole didn't actually end there, and nor was it meant to. 'Though, I couldn't agree more on the topic of players doing things only to satisfy themselves, especially if it's at the expense of a campaign as a whole.

I roll in the open.
Only make rolls if there is a chance to fail, otherwise just say what happens, its what fudging rolls is, i just cut out the bs.

My regular DM decided he wanted to try a dungeon module as a break from our ongoing campaign of 7 years, says it will be a character heavy 3-4 sessions. We made it 1 hour before TPK.
Delving into some caverns to rescue a group of Svirfneblin from cave orcs, the party decided to go through a linked series of caves to ambush them. And rolled 'gelatinous cube' for random encounter each cave. Rolled out in the open, too. Each encounter took a party member, losing 5 of the original 7. The last two were ambushed by an orcish scouting party, were masdively overwhelmed, and tried to flee back the way they came. Orc arrows caught one, giving them at least a quick death. The sole survivor ran into a gelatinous cube, face first. Miraculously, they survived, barely escaping into the next cave. Where they promptly ran into the 2nd gelatinous cube.
We called the game there. The player of the last PC was upset over their loss for 2 years.

Early ends have only been just 'game stops happening for various reasons'. A few with one session left to go.
Bunch of stupid ends of games that actually ENDED though.
Like negating everything that happened because of fucking time travel More times than games that have ended without involving time travel, even, it's been 'okay TIME TRAVEL happens, things in the past change hugely your characters didn't even meet or were completely different, everything you went through didn't happen at all!'

Bad end is best end for ERP.

GM got tired of our bullshit in the very first session, and decided he changed his mind about GM'ing this campaign. His form of telling us was informing us that an enemy wizard used wish to drop a meteor on our camp. Full wipe, now I'm GM'ing next week.