RPGaDay Challenge 2019 - LAST

Last.

The Last prompt on the Last day of the RPGaDay Challenge for 2019. 

As far as those participating in the event, I am very much embracing the idea of the word. I would be very surprised if I wasn't the Last person still putting up entries. 

As I noted in other places, I got hung up on one of the previous prompts and life outside of the blog caught up with me, causing me to fall behind and fail to complete RPGaDay on time. 

Hmmm. That all makes it sound like I am blaming things other than myself but in the end it is my own fault. I let myself get distracted.

There's always next year.

What Last brings to mind is the final session of a campaign and honestly I have mixed feelings about the very concept. 

Throughout my time in the hobby I have been part of games as both a player and a GM that were specifically designed to run their course in a given length of time. Before even beginning certain game series, we would all know that it was set to go X number of sessions and then we'd move on to something else.

These days I do this quite often, especially given my current gaming schedule. I am in two or three groups (there's a lot of member overlap), I have a wide variety of genres and ideas I want to try out, and only so much time. I would rather GM a game for a dozen sessions, create a satisfactory ending, and then announce another game then never get the chance to play some of the campaign concepts I have in mind. 

Well...sort of...you see...

This dynamic, which is so common these days even for me, is not my default way of going about things. Perhaps it's more accurate to say it's not my default way of thinking but rather something I've adopted and adapted to out of necessity.

In my mind, there should never be a Last session of a really great campaign. The best campaigns are not finite or at the very least should not be thought of as finite. To put it another way, I don't usually plan a Final Episode for my Star Trek campaigns. They run until we don't feel like doing them anymore or the group splits apart do to scheduling/life conflicts (almost always the latter). This is also how I approach Superheroes, Traveller, Star Wars, and most Fantasy projects. 

Games Last as long as they Last. Stories have a beginning, middle, and ending, but the beauty of the unique narrative art form that is tabletop RPGs is that they can, in theory, go on and on and on. 

I would love to have another campaign like my old, classic, live-in-the-setting, open universe games of yesteryear, where the stories, characters, setting, and plots went on forever, until they didn't. Games built to Last with no Last call. 

Thanks for joining me for the RPGaDay Challenge Event of 2019.

Let's do it again next August.

AD
Barking Alien