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.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.
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: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.
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.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?