Hi, I'm Jim and I am a long time role-player, long time GM and owner of an FLGS so have plenty of experience running for and playing with complete strangers as well as friends groups. I played my first RPG 40 years ago (yup, I guess I'm old now) and it is still my very favourite pastime.

Jonah and I have been talking a lot about strategies for wrapping up campaigns. Folks have talked about it once or twice here in the lab, but I'm curious about strategies people have used for ending a long-running campaign----how did you prep? Were there things you felt you needed to leave out? What was the highlight? Were there things you didn't cover in-game, but addressed in different ways?

That is, how many TTRPG campaigns that you were a part of reached a conclusion where you'd say the fiction of the game was finished? Story told, done, complete, etc? Instead of fizzling out (due to scheduling conflicts, loss of interest, moving on to a new game, etc). I'm trying to figure out if my experience is typical or not. I've played in or run 20+ campaigns since I got into TTRPGs about 20 years ago, but I've only ever "finished" 3 campaigns. One-shots don't count! I mean something that was meant to be episodic and take a long time to unfold. (I made this a post instead of a poll because I'm interested in specifics if you have them!)

I was curious what was the best campaign you never finished? Why was it great? Maybe the combats were engaging and cinematic? The world building was excellent, and you felt like you were really part of it. The role-play could have been dynamic, and fun. What was the reason it stopped? And most importantly what would you need to see the resolution? A final boss fight, or a more narrative focused ending to the story? For me I really loved a sequel campaign where a player slide into the dms chair and my character got to see the fallout of the decisions made in the first story arc. I was also the only recurring character, so it was interesting to go from a Teen Hero, to a defacto Team Leader. It was a splinter group and one player, who the current and previous dm (now a player) just was really hard to schedule around. I think I might broach the subject once we the DM isn't running a campaign to see if we can at least do a little wrap up arc. This was inspired by Jonah's post last week (How many campaigns have you played in/run that actually finished?) , (https://www.skool.com/game-masters-laboratory/how-many-campaigns-have-you-played-inrun-that-actually-finished )

Hello, my name is Jonathan. I’m from Denmark and relatively new to both being a player and a Game Master and I'm hooked. I’ve been a Game Master for my 11-year-old son and a couple of his friends for about a year. I’ve also been playing in a group with other adults for a year, where we take turns being the Game Master, and now it’s my turn. In both groups, we use D&D 5e. In this context, I’ve become very interested in proactive role-playing and think it makes a lot of sense to give the players more responsibility for the story. That’s why I’m here—to exchange ideas and seek advice. We’ve just had our Session 0, where we created character goals, and all the players are on board and excited for the next part of the adventure. Now I’ve started preparing factions, NPC goals, and the first possible encounters. I'm considering using proactive role-playing for my son's group as well. I might modify it a bit so they can engage with it. Does anyone else have experience using it with children? Looking forward to being part of this forum. And thank you for a great book and introduction to proactive role-playing.