Unless your entire campaign is about one overarching plot, or the final session is so mind-blowingly fun you can’t even talk for a week after it happens, I feel like the ending is no more important than any other session. So I don’t count any campaign a failure if it lasts more than two sessions, and those two sessions are fun.

One reason it went well is that, like Kurt suggests, I intended an ending. We were playing 3.5 D&D and began in 2006. It was pretty clearly going to be the last significant 3E game any of us were going to play, so I wanted to have a memorable finish. I also wanted it to be in some way true to D&D, so I had decided that, if I could control things, it would end when the PCs had done something pretty epic at 20th level.

Something I picked up from another GM in our group was that it’s a great thing to have a finale in mind for whatever segment of the game you’re in. I picked it up from his Stargate game. The previous “season,” in which I hadn’t played, ended on a cliff-hanger. The second season in which I was a player wrapped up those threads nicely but opened up more possibilities. It would been easy to continue, but if it remains in retirement, the campaign was ended in a comfortable way.

My other campaigns never had clean endings for three reasons. The first was the real-life hangups, like people not being able to make it for a few weeks. Too much of that and the campaign just fades. The next was excitement for other stuff. I still spend too much time looking at new stuff, but back then I’d bring several books from different games to sessions and the interest would drift. The third reason is that I never had endings in mind.

My most recent game had three arcs. The first was a struggle against the mind flayers, the second against fiends, and the third a struggle to rise to supremacy. I feel that if the game had ended on the envisioned moments (not specific outcomes) before the third arc, it would have still been satisfying.

Now, just because I reached a conclusion doesn’t mean we played until the campaign was “finished”. Mostly, I lose interest in a particular campaign when I DM. I want to play some new idea that I’ve gotten, or play in some other system. One of those games, we lost 4 of 6 players, and me and the other remaining player hobbled on to the game’s end.

Does a campaign need an ending point? I think not. Sure, it’s great if you have a series of campaign arcs, all progressing upward to a killer climax, but it’s not necessary to the game.

(And no, I’m nowhere near .300.)

Part of the problem for me is definitional: what exactly qualifies as a “campaign”? A lot of my games are serials, where I’ll run 6 – 10 sessions with one set of characters, and then a few months or a year later, will come back to those characters and run another. Do those count as separate campaigns, or are they one ongoing game?

Also, for a while, I experimented with the sandbox form a lot. If there’s no overarching plot framework to begin with and the game gets derailed, does that count?

Also, I run a fair number of one-shots, or experimental sessions, to try out a new rule-set to see if it fits. I’ve bought a fair number of small-press or indie RPGs in the last two years, some of which have never been run for more than a few sessions.

I tend to feel that if your last game ends on a note of closure, then you’ve finished it, regardless of whether you had bigger plans.

Now, my long-term Mage game which is about 1/3 of the way through the main plot, well, that’s a special circumstance: that one’s just on-hold (going on 6 months now), not derailed.

Six of the eight D&D campaigns I’ve begun have reached their intended conclusions. Three of those were short-format campaigns designed to be knocked out in a hurry, but the other three were long enough that I feel justified in bragging about it a little.

I’ve dabbled in running other RPGs, but never run a full-on campaign. And I don’t think I’ve ever -played- in someone else’s campaign that’s ended “properly.”