D&D General How often do you complete a campaign as a player?

[SkidAce]

I voted "never" because all our campaigns ongoing and open-ended.

 

[Mull Ponders]

Pre-COVID, playing in person, rarely. Something (almost) always happened.
Post-COVID, playing with VTT, 100%. Even though the players are across three time zones.

 

[Shiroiken]

We've been largely successful with campaigns. It helps for the DM to have a general story in mind that they want to tell, because that should be the lifespan of the campaign. Once told, it's best to conclude the campaign, rather than push on until it peters out.

 

[MNblockhead]

I am only a player in one shots. I was going to be snarky and say I finish 100% of campaigns as a player--they are just really short campaigns. But I did join a Warhammer Fantasy campaign at the end of last year, but had to job out because of a job change and move. I am happy, however, that I have completed every campaign of DM'd since 2014. I had a period of no-gaming at the beginning of this year, due to the above-mentioned change in jobs and move, but I was able to wrap up my prior campaign before then. I'm now three sessions into my Warhammer Fantasy campaign.

I wish I could commit to one campaign as a player, but my work schedule makes that impossible. The only reason I've been able to keep my campaigns as a DM running is because my players and I pull out our calendars and select the next saturday we are all available. There is no way I could commit to a set schedule.

 

[Orius]

Never, but that's because I'm usually the DM.

 

[GrimCo]

As a player, i can count on my fingers how many campaigns we finished. To be fair, decent amount of them were open ended sandbox types with no clear end. We play until we got bored or someone had idea for something new. We have one grand campaign consisting of 3 separate campaigns in which every player will pick one pc for the story finale. It started back in 2014 and is on hiatus mostly since 2020 ( one of players had 3 kids in span of 6 years and he is planing on 4th soon so he is out for at lest 2 more years, he is going for that 4 in 8). But we will finish that one.

As a dm, i tend to run short campaigns. 10 sessions or less with more narrow focus and usually it's succed or die type of scenarios, so tpk is one of the endgame conditions. If it's tpk at session 2/6, it's game over.

 

[Hussar]

As a player, i can count on my fingers how many campaigns we finished. To be fair, decent amount of them were open ended sandbox types with no clear end. We play until we got bored or someone had idea for something new. We have one grand campaign consisting of 3 separate campaigns in which every player will pick one pc for the story finale. It started back in 2014 and is on hiatus mostly since 2020 ( one of players had 3 kids in span of 6 years and he is planing on 4th soon so he is out for at lest 2 more years, he is going for that 4 in 8). But we will finish that one.

As a dm, i tend to run short campaigns. 10 sessions or less with more narrow focus and usually it's succed or die type of scenarios, so tpk is one of the endgame conditions. If it's tpk at session 2/6, it's game over.

That is another facet of this I realize. Open ended sandbox campaigns, by their nature don't really ever "end". They just get stopped playing. Kinda like strongly episodic campaigns. If you are simply doing a dungeon of the week campaign (or whatever the episode happens to be) and the campaign moves on after you complete your latest "episode" then, again, fair enough. I'd count that as a success. Even a TPK is still an "ending". Ending =/= succcess. At least if everyone is dead, well, that's the end isn't it.

Where I count failure's is when things end in the middle of something. When the campaign has ended, for whatever reason, but it's pretty obvious to the table that this is not where things should be ending. If your campaign is ending in the middle of a combat, for example. Or you're traveling from A to B and the campaign just fizzles mid journey. That sort of thing is where I call it a failed ending.

 

[Lanefan]

That is another facet of this I realize. Open ended sandbox campaigns, by their nature don't really ever "end". They just get stopped playing. Kinda like strongly episodic campaigns. If you are simply doing a dungeon of the week campaign (or whatever the episode happens to be) and the campaign moves on after you complete your latest "episode" then, again, fair enough. I'd count that as a success. Even a TPK is still an "ending". Ending =/= succcess. At least if everyone is dead, well, that's the end isn't it.

Where I count failure's is when things end in the middle of something. When the campaign has ended, for whatever reason, but it's pretty obvious to the table that this is not where things should be ending. If your campaign is ending in the middle of a combat, for example. Or you're traveling from A to B and the campaign just fizzles mid journey. That sort of thing is where I call it a failed ending.

Given those parameters, I've been more successful than I'd originally thought. Ignoring proto-campaigns that fizzled after just a couple of sessions (usually a new-to-it DM quickly realizing that playing is better) and the one still in progress, I've been in as player:

Short (4-month) intended-to-be-sandbox campaign that ended after 1 completed adventure
Long (10-year) sandbox campaign that ended when a) the system collapsed due to level and b) the DM burned out
Long (8-year) partly-sandbox campaign that ended when RL got in the way and the DM ran out of players
Long (10-ish year) sandbox campaign that I joined and left a few times while in progress (RL time constraints)
Long-ish (3 year) sandbox campaign that I left fairly early (didn't see eye to eye with the DM)
Long (11 year) sandbox campaign that I left while in progress (RL time constraints)

So of those, I was there for the end of the first three and had left before the end of the other three. In both cases listed as "RL time constraints", the main problem was too many games, too few nights in the week. I don't know how the campaigns ended that I left part-way along.

And that brings up another variable that the poll doesn't - and can't, really - account for: that oftentimes a long campaign will outlast many of its players, who come and go as the campaign rolls along. Does it count as an unfinished campaign if the campaign itself was successful but I-as-player wasn't around for all of it? Or how do I count the 8-year one, where I was around for the start and the end but missed a couple of years in the middle?

 

[Hussar]

And that brings up another variable that the poll doesn't - and can't, really - account for: that oftentimes a long campaign will outlast many of its players, who come and go as the campaign rolls along. Does it count as an unfinished campaign if the campaign itself was successful but I-as-player wasn't around for all of it? Or how do I count the 8-year one, where I was around for the start and the end but missed a couple of years in the middle?

Unfinished means whatever you want it to mean. Do you feel that the campaign came to a satisfactory conclusion? Then it did. I am not about to play a bunch of silly buggers definition games about trying to define what "finished" means.

 

[cranberry]

I've completed every campaign that I've played...that wasn't cancelled early by the GM for one reason or another.

(The GM cancelations have occurred three times over a period of approx. 40 years)