This is a one-off week in between bigger things. Holy shit, but that Stupid Narration Tricks Feature last week took a hell of a lot of work, and Let’s Build a Good Enough Dungeon: Blockout is also a demanding little bitch.

Anyway…

I was gonna do an Ask Angry for my breather level, but instead, I’m doing this. Ask Angry’s gonna have to wait. Maybe it’ll end up waiting long enough to be part of a bigger surprise. Who knows? We’ll see.

Today is this. What’s this? It’s about campaigns.

I asked a pretty simple question of my supporter Discord community over the weekend. At least, I thought it was a simple question. It wasn’t. Which was a pain in the ass. I was asking for a reason, and I was actually, genuinely, curiously interested in the answer. Here, I’ll ask all y’all, and you can answer in the comments…

How long, in real, actual, human, play time, not game time, is a campaign? If you assume weekly play sessions of reasonable length, how many weeks and months long does a campaign go?

Today, though, ain’t about that question. I want to hear your answers — most of them — but today is about where the question went and whether maybe we all have a problem and it isn’t the one we think it is, and it isn’t good for our games. Yes, we. As in, “me too.”

By the way, this is all bullshit. It’s one of my occasional ranty, rambly, unfocused musings. I’m just thinking about a thing and typing the thoughts so you can read them. Or listen to them. Depends on whether you’re on my site or you’re listening to the Proofreadaloud audio recordings my supporters get.

You’ve been warned.

The Campaign That Didn’t End On Time

As I noted in the Long, Rambling Introduction™ above, my community had a long discussion about campaigns and the length thereof over the weekend. In fact, the discussion has morphed, but it’s still going on. It started because I asked how long campaigns should last. Putting aside the useless, bullshit aphoristic non-answers like, “A campaign should last long enough to be complete,” or “As long as everyone’s happy to keep playing, the campaign should keep going,” and putting aside also the one or two total outliers talking about how they’ve been running the same campaign since they graduated high school when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, most of the participants came to an interesting agreement. One that had nothing to do with the actual length of campaigns.

My community all seemed to agree that it doesn’t matter how long you plan a campaign to last, it always lasts way longer. Unless it dies, of course. Campaigns can always die.

Honestly, this is a very common sentiment in Game Mastering circles. Not just about campaigns, but about gaming in general. Whenever I talk about actually doing good design and planning shit as you should, people always tell me that their planning always falls apart because everything always takes way longer than they expect. Players spend twice as long making decisions, combats take forever to resolve, or sessions just generally don’t get nearly as far as Game Masters planned or expected.

This is just that same thing applied to campaigns, right? “I planned this four-act campaign with nine adventures to fill nine to twelve months of play, but it’s been two years now and the campaign’s still going and I have no idea when it’s going to end.”

Now, before I start calling people out, let me admit that I’ve uttered that same sentence — or sentences very like it — dozens of times in my long Game Mastering career. I’ve started everything from short, six-session games to three-month mini-campaigns, and six-month-to-a-year campaigns, and every single time, I’ve found myself giving my players the same speech. “I know I said this campaign was supposed to end two months ago, but it didn’t, and we all seem to be having fun, so is this just our life now until it’s done? Is that okay?”

That’s today’s topic: The Campaign That Didn’t End on Time. And why that maybe isn’t not a bad thing, and why maybe we’re all lying to ourselves about it every step of the way.

Yeah, this one’s gonna be a ride. But first, let’s tick off two little items on the pre-flight checklist. Let’s clarify some clarifications.

When is a Game a Campaign?

Y’all know I have no stomach for pedantry and technicality, especially when it comes to sandwich arguments. That crap is all a stupid, useless waste of energy predicated on crappy Game Mastering and a crappy understanding of how language actually works. So let me repeat the only correct, useful definition of the word campaign worth discussing. It’s one I gave a long, long time ago.

A campaign is a continuous roleplaying game that lasts for more than three sessions.

That’s a campaign. That’s all. If your little game hits its fourth session, you’re running a campaign. I’ve explained that before. I’ve explained why it’s right. You might disagree. No one gives a shit, least of all me.

Actually, there is one even better, correcter definition, but my community has been arguing for days, and I’ve been screwing with their stupid heads using the Socratic method to try to get them to figure it out. I don’t want to ruin that. Maybe you can figure it out? Comment below. Maybe I’ll screw with your head too.

Planning for the End

Let me next acknowledge the pachyderm on the palisade here: this whole discussion kinda, sorta but not really, but also really assumes a certain approach to starting and running fantasy adventure roleplaying game campaigns. Broadly speaking, there are actually two different approaches to starting and running campaigns. Actually, there are three, but one doesn’t count.

The crap approach that doesn’t count is what I call the The Neverending Fuckabout. That’s where everyone just shows up and the Game Master does shit and the players do their little slice-of-life performance bullshit. Those are the sorts of games where the players are working in coffee houses at Wartstrix University in Fantasy Seattle or running a noodle shop in Kungfu Pandaland or whatever. That’s not a campaign. That’s not even a game. Get right down to it, it’s not even roleplaying. Sorry. If you like that kind of crap, good for you, but that is never, ever the kind of game I’m discussing. Not ever.

I actually personally consider the Old-School Plunder the Ruins and Manage the Factions campaign to be just one step over the line of validity from the The Neverending Fuckabout. I know that upsets some of you, and some of you are still willing to support me despite my complete disdain for your style of play. Thank you for that. You’re a better man than I am, Grognard Din, but I appreciate you. If only because you’re the only people in my community that I can count on to get a Kipling reference.

Truth is, though, your games are campaigns, and they are games, and they are roleplaying, but in my worldview, only technically so. Kind of like how chicken tenders with ketchup and Kraft powdered Parmesan dust is technically chicken parmigiana. Don’t let my judgment stop you from running the game you want to run. I consider you real gamers. Just not real gamers I want to play with. So I’m rarely discussing that kind of crap either.

The actual second approach, which is the first truly valid approach to running a campaign, is also the simplest definition of a real fantasy adventure roleplaying game campaign. It’s the String of Next Adventures campaign. That’s where you run actual adventures with actual goals and string them together with enough of a structure to work as a campaign and no more. One adventure leads into another smoothly, but there’s nothing more to it than that. Thus, you, the Game Master, either write each next adventure as you need it or else you buy a new module every time the old one is about to run out.

I have no problem with that approach at all. It’s fine. It’s even the basis for the whole Angry’s Open-World Game thing I published a few years ago. But it also isn’t what I’m running today, and it’s not my favorite way to run a game, and it’s not really the topic of discussion today. Except that it kinda is. I’ll let you spot it.

My favorite and the most correctest approach to campaign buildery and runnery is building and running an actual, factual scenario. You set a goal at the start, you start with a beginning, you do a bunch of middle, and then there’s an actual ending, whereupon the campaign actually ends. This is where all the coolest campaigns live. This is where your save the world and kill the god and defeat the empire and reconstruct the Wand of Seven Wands and reclaim your birthright campaigns all live. The high concept campaign.

Note, here, that my standard disclaimer about goals applies. It doesn’t matter one tiny little turd who is responsible for the goals or how many there are or when they’re revealed. It doesn’t matter if the players start off fighting a cult only to discover a deeper plot about a slumbering god and the seven seals that need to be destroyed. It doesn’t matter if the Game Master starts off by saying, “In this campaign, you’re part of the Rebel Alliance, and you need to help destroy the Empire’s doomsday weapon.” It doesn’t matter if each player chooses a personal goal and the Game Master weaves those disparate pieces of clay together into an elegant tapestry so that, by the end, Ardrick has reclaimed his family’s seat of power, Beryllia has been inducted into the Circle Arcanum, Cabe is running the Brotherhood of Don’t Call Us Thieves, We’re Treasure Hunters and Danae has rebuilt the fallen Temple of Templarius. All that matters is that the game starts with a plan for the end.

Of course, my other standard disclaimer here about planning and scripting also applies. You don’t have to plan everything for it to count as An Actual, Factual Campaign with Real Scenario Design. You don’t even have to outline the whole thing. I know these sorts of campaigns have a bad rep as being exercises in forced linearity along a plot railroad while the puppet-master Game Master makes the players act out his fantasy novel. But all of us here know better now. Or we should.

Obviously, because this whole discussion is about campaigns that don’t end when they’re supposed to, it really only counts for campaigns that start with a plan for the ending. Except that might not be true, but, like I said, I’ll let you spot that.

Don’t you love it when I just bullshit?

The Value of the Ending

I was just going to launch into my next idea here, but then I realized I’m making a big-ass assumption. Actually, I’m making two big-ass assumptions. I’m assuming you all recognize the value in planning for the end of the campaign, first, because, second, I’m assuming you all know just how valuable endings are.

Endings are really undervalued these days. Endings are actually kind of rare. Even the endings we get aren’t really endings. Outside of a few specific genres, nothing in our pop culture really stands alone. Nothing’s complete. Most movies, shows, and games are franchises, sequels, and cinematic universes. Everything promises a never-ending stream of content. Factor in crossover content on different platforms and endless spinoffs, and you never have to leave a universe you don’t want to. Are you a Marvel Fan? Star Wars? Star Trek? You can always find more new stuff. You can find more series, more movies, more spinoffs, more sequels, more, more, more. You never have to say goodbye.

But you do say goodbye. Inevitably, interest wanes. Or things shift. Or you shift. Inevitably, things get stale, or they go in a direction you don’t like anymore, or your attention is drawn to something else, or you just have less time and have to consume less. So things do die. They die all the time. They just don’t die on their own terms. Instead, they die from lack of viewership or lack of interest. Or they keep shambling along, not dying, like Dr. Galvani’s electrical singing, dancing frog corpse. But even those series have died a thousand deaths because a thousand viewers have already said goodbye.

For millions, Marvel died at Avengers: Endgame. I’m one of them. Sure, Marvel movies still open big sometimes and get decent box office returns. The franchise is far from a shambling corpse, but it’s also not the phenomenon it once was. You didn’t have to ask anyone if they had seen Endgame. The only question was whether they’d seen it yet. Everyone saw Endgame. You were weird if you hadn’t.

Of course, Endgame actually shows just how valuable an ending is. It outperformed literally every other movie in the franchise. Combined, Infinity War and Endgame together, the two-part ending of the entire Marvel decade-long story outperformed everything. Infinity War’s returns were considered to be the best a blockbuster film could ever possibly hope to do. The numbers guys all thought it had gotten all the money anyone would ever be willing to pay for a movie like it. Then Endgame blasted past it by $700 million. That’s a once-ever thing.

Brains love endings. Most of y’all know about closure and completion. I don’t have to tell you that brains like closure and completed patterns and closed loops and resolved tension. But there’s more to the story. Psychologically, endings recontextualize your entire experience with something. Brains evaluate investment based on payoff, and they wait for the payoff to decide how worth it the investment was. That’s part of why, by the way, a bad ending ruins a whole franchise.

Objectively speaking, it’s kind of crazy that a bad ending can ruin your opinion of something you loved yesterday. The experience you had yesterday is still what it was. It didn’t change. At the time, the emotions you had were real. But slap a bad ending on the end and, suddenly, those emotions and memories are inaccessible. There’s this sudden film of grimy, greasiness on them. Like Sadness rubbed her grubby little fingers all over them.

So every dollar you spent to watch a Marvel movie, every three-hour chunk of your life in a cinema seat or a couch crevice watching Tony Stark and Iron Man team up with Dr. Strangelove to fight Black Witch and Red Widow, the value of it all is undefined until that final moment when Thanos snapped all the bad guys away and everyone lived happily ever after. At that point, your brain assigns a final value. Was it worth it? And with Marvel, for pretty much every normal human on the planet, it sure as hell was.

The other thing your brain doesn’t really start doing fully until something ends is processing emotion and extracting meaning. When something still feels open and unfinished, your brain has a hard time reflecting on it fully.

Even when all you’ve got is a string of episodes, you still need a clear and definite ending. And note that the ending doesn’t need to be an ending for the characters. It just needs to be an ending for the part of the story you’re a part of. That’s why you can get away with saying, “And so the heroes rode off into the sunset, and they probably had many more cool adventures, but this is where we bid them goodbye, having shared their journey for a time, and now we go look for the next story to share.” That still lets your brain do its ending thing.

Consider the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled All Good Things… To this day, it remains one of the highest-rated episodes of any Star Trek series ever. For a syndicated show from the 90s that wasn’t playing on a major broadcast network, its viewership was immense. But what’s odd about it, objectively, is that the show was highly episodic. It was just mostly space adventure of the week fare. Even the plot of that particular episode wasn’t anything special. Captain Picard is sent by a space-time anomaly bouncing between past, present, and future and has to figure out how to sew up the space wedgie and set everything back in its right time. The Next Generation had done plenty of episodes with past versions of the characters, future versions of the characters, space-time anomalies, alternate histories, and all that crap. There was Yesterday’s Enterprise, Future Imperfect, Cause and Effect, and Parallels, just to name a few. That episode wasn’t even the first time Q had sent Picard bouncing through time to teach him a lesson about life and humanity and all that crap. Remember Tapestry. Even the closure wasn’t really closure. Picard fixes the space-time wedgie, Q says, “Keep exploring because the adventure never ends,” and the Enterprise flies off to continue its continuing mission. Which is exactly how the pilot of the series ended, more or less. All Good Things… was just another episode except for the last ten minutes, in which the show restated its thesis, showed a bit of character growth, and then said, “So long, folks, and thanks for all the fish.”

So let’s just agree that endings — final endings — have tremendous value, especially when they come after a long investment of time and energy and emotion and love and effort, and even if the ending is nothing more than the last episode in a series of episode that takes five minutes to end with a real, heartfelt, “Their adventures go on, but we say goodbye here.”

Of course, if you started with a goal or conflict and promised a resolution or accomplishment or payoff as part of a someday ending, more’s the better. You can do a lot of cool shit with that kind of thing, scenario-wise. So let’s also agree that there’s value in deliberately setting up an ending. Value that goes beyond mere closure. Endings drastically and posthumously increase the value of every minute spent playing the game.

Let’s also agree not to waste time pointing out that bad endings are bad. No shit. I know bad endings are bad. I was a Game of Thrones fan. I was a Lost fan. Bad endings are bad. But bad endings are only bad because bad anything is bad, and because endings are particularly important, the impact of a bad ending is much higher than the impact of a bad middle or a bad pilot. The fact that bad endings ruin things isn’t a reason to skip endings; it’s just a reason to be really careful about your ending. Beyond that, my advice for endings is the same as my advice for anything. It’s, “Try not to be shit.”

But The End Is Coming… I Promise

Let’s return now to the idea of the Campaign That Didn’t End on Time. Say you planned a roughly twelve-month, three-act campaign with a basic outline for ten adventures that would start with the heroes discovering a constellation had literally been stolen from the sky and end with them defeating a horror from the darkness between the spheres or some shit like that. Now, you’re eight months in, and you’re only just moving to act two. You’re way off the mark, and you know it. But everyone’s still having a great time, and so are you, and no one is really thinking of quitting anytime soon.

In other words, as Frienemy for Life NoxAeturnus said in the Discord chat, you’re running your best game, and everyone’s having a good time, but your three-month game has already become a six-month game, and at the pace it’s going, the ending is still two years away.

That isn’t the same as not having an ending. That’s just taking your time getting to it. That’s just not rushing. Or, as many Game Masters, myself included, claim, that’s just drastically misjudging the time or the pace or planning the outline badly. This isn’t about not having an ending. You’ll get there someday; you just don’t know any more when that someday will be.

That’s fine, right? Good even. If everyone’s so invested that no one wants the game to end and you’ve got more story to tell, why hold yourself to some arbitrary time limit? So you fucked up the plan, or the estimate, or the game went in an unexpected direction, or you had a fit of creativity and added a whole new arc to the game. So what? It’s going great.

Initially, I told myself that this was the non-est of non-problems. “Oh no,” said I, in my classic sarcastic style, “My game that I planned to fill only six months with is now stretching into its second year of great weekly game sessions that give my friends and me endless joy. Whatever will I do?”

But then, I got to thinking…

Thinking is the worst.

Every Campaign Has a Time Limit

As I said, I’ve presided over my fair share of Campaigns that Didn’t End on Time. Every time, I responded the same way every Game Master always does. I admitted I’d screwed up my planning and pacing, admitted I’d probably added a little too much side crap, and then I gave my players the same old speech. You know the one? “I know this game was supposed to end last month, but I screwed up my planning, and it ballooned a lot, and we’re nowhere near an ending now, but, hey, we’re all still having fun, right? So are we all game to just keep this going until it reaches its natural conclusion?” Each time, it ended the same way. The players nodded enthusiastically and said, “Yeah, we love this game; we don’t care if it goes on forever.”

That’s not counting the scheduling problems. Unfortunately, some people really mean it when they say, “I can only commit to this game for six months.” Though that already shows a flaw in the whole Campaign That Didn’t End on Time, doesn’t it?

Anyway…

You know what else I’m ashamed to say I’ve presided over my share of? I’ve presided over several campaigns that just kind of died. I’ve run a lot of campaigns. I’ve run a lot of long campaigns. My longest campaigns went strong for over six years. But when I count the number of campaigns that ended on my terms, when I count the number of campaigns I crafted an ending for and said goodbye to the characters and the world, there are fewer than I’d like.

Every campaign has an expiration date. Every campaign’s days are numbered. As I said above, everyone eventually says goodbye. Sometimes, it’s because interest wanes, sometimes, it’s because people get burnt out, sometimes, it’s the promise of some new exciting thing turns people’s heads, sometimes, people move away, sometimes you, the Game Master, move away, or sometimes life stops you from running games. Every campaign ends.

My memories of the dead campaigns are bittersweet. Yeah, there was a lot of fun gaming there, but that blot at the end that marked the campaign’s death without a proper goodbye is hard to ignore. A couple of years ago, a player who had had the misfortune to play at my table during a particularly inconsistent patch in my Game Mastering life and thus had been a part of three Campaigns that Just Died finally confided in me that, as much as he loved gaming at my table and was on board for any and every new game I wanted to run, he was really tired of not getting some kind of closure. He was struggling to commit to my games.

Every Campaign that Doesn’t End on Time is going to end. When you let the campaign go past its planned ending date and enter the realm of “no end in sight,” you’re giving up your knowledge of when the expiration date is going to come.

But smart Game Masters can see the signs of a campaign dying, right? Even if the Campaign Doesn’t End on Time, you can still keep an eye on things. When signs are coming that your campaign’s days are numbered, you can pivot and give it an ending, right? How many of you out there who presided over a lot of Campaigns that Didn’t End on Time and that also have a lot of dead campaigns littering the road behind you managed to pull that off?

It’s not always easy to spot when a campaign is dying. Often, by the time you see the symptoms, it’s been dying for a while, which means it’s a lot closer to dead than you might think. Your time to wrap it up is limited. That’s assuming you’re not the reason it’s dying. If you’re the one who’s well past ready to say goodbye, you’re not in any fit state to pivot to an ending.

Besides, if you had to take your campaign right now, wherever it’s at, and pivot it to an ending worthy of it in just two or three sessions, would you really be able to give it the best ending you could? I’m not sure I could.

And remember what I said above about bad endings. Bad endings taint the whole memory.

Why Are You Still Making Mistakes?

That took a dark turn, huh? Well, buckle up. It gets worse. I want to push back on some of our lies now. Because we’re dirty, lying liars, you and me.

Let’s talk about that, “Oops, I planned badly like Game Masters always do,” thing.

That’s the claim, right?

“Angry, I had a good plan with a solid estimate, but my estimates were wrong, and things took way longer than I expected. It was a mistake. We Game Masters always make that mistake.”

Most Game Masters, myself included, do struggle with estimating time and pace. Combats always take longer than we expected, subplots take longer to resolve, and players spend more time distracted with minutiae and dicking around and debating in committee than we expect. Plus, the players are always going off in unexpected directions. That’s roleplaying gaming. That’s Game Mastering.

Are you new at this? Are you still learning the ropes? Are you still struggling your way through Baby’s First Campaign? If so, then fine, you’re off the hook. But most of y’all are not new at this. You haven’t run Baby’s First Campaign in years. So why the hell don’t you know how long shit takes? Why do you still think you’re gonna be able to finish six combat encounters in a session if you never, ever have? If your players spend twenty minutes in committee discussion at every intersection, why don’t you know that a dungeon with three intersections will lose an hour of table time to the players arguing over which identical tunnel to explore first?

You don’t get to be surprised by this anymore. You don’t get to claim you’re bad at estimating. It’s not that you don’t know how long it takes to resolve a combat, it’s that you don’t like it and so you won’t accept it. You don’t want to put down on paper that one of your precious four gaming session hours will be wasted by the players arguing over which doors to open first. You won’t add that into your time estimate when you draw your dungeon map.

I’m not saying you’re a bad Game Master and that your pacing is the problem. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe you can fix it, maybe you can’t. Maybe this is just your game and your Game Mastering and your players, and there’s nothing you can do about it. All I’m saying is you can’t keep designing dungeons the way you design them and then pretend there was no way to know your three-session dungeon was going to take six weeks to clear.

You’re past the point where you get to act surprised anymore. I’m not buying it. Sorry. But don’t worry; you’re not alone. I act surprised too. I’m not strong enough to change the things I can, disciplined enough to accept the things I can’t change, and wise enough to tell the difference. At the gaming table. Because this is only about pretend elf games, right?

And so, I do what you do. I keep planning dungeons and adventures and campaigns based on how I think they should play or how I wish I could run them instead of how I know they’ll turn out. I neither change my approach nor do I accept my limitations, and then I act shocked when my Campaign Doesn’t End on Time.

I’m full of shit. So are you.

While we’re on the subject of radical, painful, distressing honesty, let’s talk about another thing that’s totally your fault.

Creepy, Creepy Campaigns

Did your campaign really not end on time because of poor pacing and time estimates? Really? Maybe that’s part of it, but is it really all of it? You can explain six months turning to nine that way, but when you’re eight months into a six-month campaign and still have a year to go, that’s beyond miscounting sessions.

How many of those extra sessions ballooned out of you adding clever ideas or throwing in a new subplot that wasn’t part of the plan? How many extra sessions came from you starting to build a two-session dungeon and then coming up with a cool idea to make it the most amazing dungeon ever, and then going with it despite knowing you were going to need four or five sessions? But that’s okay, right? Because it’s an awesome idea and everyone will love it, and the campaign’s already past its expiration date, and everyone already agreed to treat it like a forever game.

Oh, no, my six-month campaign has been going on for two years and bringing my friends and me weekly joy; whatever will I do?

That’s kind of got a different tone, now, doesn’t it?

I’m working on this big-ass project right now. This isn’t the non-sequitur it sounds like, I swear. I’m working on this big-ass project right now. Technically, I’ve been working on it for years, but also, technically, it’s been stalled for years. I’ve got a huge pile of project parts I’ve been tinkering with for a long time strewn all over my game design workbench, and I’m desperately trying to bolt everything together. Unfortunately, I also made a lot of big promises about this project, and a lot of people have pledged their support to the project. Many of them, to their credit, have stuck by me despite the stall and the external problems, and I don’t deserve any of it, and I’m more grateful than I can say. Which is why I am so desperately bolting the project parts together right now.

Over the winter, I redesigned a huge portion of the project and told the folks supporting the project all about the changes. They were all really positive. They loved the ideas. I did too. But in the midst of it all, one person, Frienemy for Life FrenchRiceMerman, said the word every creative and project manager dreads to hear.

He said, “creep.”

Creep is an insidious, infectious disease that destroys projects. It’s especially nasty to the passion projects of lone creative people. Every professional and creative knows what creep is. They know it’s deadly dangerous and they know how insidious it is. Creep kills by very small degrees.

Creep is just adding things to a project that weren’t part of the original plan or vision. Adding things isn’t always bad. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s even necessary. But every new thing you add throws the plan off just a little more. Every new thing needs resources. Every new thing creates interactions with other things. The problem is that most new things seem pretty small and innocuous by themselves. But they add up. That’s why it’s called creep. Creep always pushes projects over time and over budget. Creep is how you get the Project that Didn’t End on Time.

Hey, can you think of anything we’ve been talking about today that sounds a lot like a Project that Didn’t End on Time? Can you think of anyone in this discussion you’d describe as a lone creative working on a passion project? Do I have to draw you a diagram?

In my defense, my project wasn’t the victim of creep. Not really. The redesign came after a purposeful re-evaluation of the project and the vision, and a choice to change the project at its core. The stalls and delays were due to external factors that I allowed to balloon out of my control. Things happened, and I made bad choices, and I fucked up bad, and now I have to make up for a lot of lost time fast, and I did let a lot of people down, and I have a lot of trust to rebuild. But creep isn’t the issue.

But I bring this story up because it easily could have been creep. I’m super prone to creep. Most creatives are. Most creatives love their ideas and can’t say no to them. Most creatives have a problem knowing when to stop tinkering and stop designing and execute on the plan. Most Game Masters are creatives.

FrenchRiceMerman did me the greatest service any professional or creative can do for another. He saw the risk of creep, and he knew that creep is death, so he hit the creep alarm. That’s because everyone in a position to understand creep knows that it’s impossible to spot from the inside and that it’s an emergency.

So here I was, a few days ago, watching my community discuss their Campaigns That Didn’t End on Time, and debating about how it really wasn’t an issue because we’re running our best games and everyone’s happy, and who cares if they end on time? I even quipped that it’s the dumbest thing in the world to worry about. But if I had been in any other room, with any other group of creatives, I would have run to the wall, broken the glass, and activated the creep alarm.

My biggest, most important thesis is that Game Mastering is, at its core, True Game Design. That means we’re all designers. We’re all creatives. We’re all professionals. What I saw should have head me screaming creep.

If Game Mastering is game design and it’s about running the best gameplay experience you can, then creep is death. Full stop.

You Had a Plan

I probably sound crazy by now. After all, it is just pretend elf games, and most of us don’t have billions of dollars in box office returns or the success of their entire creative game design empires riding on the outcomes, and it is still just a thing we do for fun. I have to be careful because some folks in my community trust me so damned much that they take every exaggerated thing I scream as axiomatic, undeniable truth. Which, to be fair, is a good bet, because I am pretty brilliant.

But we need perspective too. The stakes aren’t that high. It’s just a game, and it’s really just for fun, and as long as it’s fun, it’s okay. But I really did want to push back on the blasé attitude we all have toward the Campaign That Didn’t End on Time and the flippant dismissal of our bad estimates and pacing problems and our willingness to run off down the garden path. If the question is just, “Are we having fun?” then fine and dandy, ignore me. But, as Nox said, if the question is, “Am I running my best game?” then we do have to challenge this shit. Is the Campaign That Didn’t End on Time really running your best game? Is the fact that no one’s ready to quit today really enough proof that it’s your best work?

So let’s end by going back to the beginning. Go back to the day before you pitched your players the campaign that would become the Campaign that Didn’t End on Time. Go back to the day when it was just a plan, when it was just an outline. Go back to when the campaign was just a vision you had that you knew was going to be great enough to make your players happy.

Whatever you wrote down, whatever you envisioned, you knew it was going to be great. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have written it down. You wouldn’t have pitched it. You had a reason to write down everything you did. When you wrote “six-month campaign” somewhere on that sheet of paper and when you made a note about where it was going to end, you made deliberate choices for reasons. You may not remember the reasons now, and you may not have consciously known the reasons then, but you had them.

Putting aside screwups and mistakes and normal improvisation and small whims of creative fancy and necessary adjustments, all of which do really happen, if you’re not at least close to that plan in your campaign today, what happened? Why did you deviate from the plan? Why did you decide the plan that was good enough to pledge six months or a year or whatever to and to sell five friends on, suddenly wasn’t going to work? Did you ever, at any point, actually make that decision? Did you ever actually say, “This plan needs changing because X, Y, and Z?”

Or did you just stop respecting the plan and treating it like a roadmap to follow and instead just start dicking around and doing whatever you want because it seemed more fun that way?

And is that really, truly what you think leads to your best game? Or do you think, maybe, it might have gone better if you’d been a little disciplined in your execution?

I know I sure as hell could use a little more discipline. At the gaming table. Because this is just about pretend elf games.

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This challenging, ugly, painful rant only exists thanks to the generous support of my fans, especially Frienemies for Life NoxAeturnus, Alyssa, Whoosh, FrenchRiceMerman, and all the others who participated in the discussion, raised good points, called me out, and took my abuse with more far more grace and dignity than any human should ever take abuse over a game in which you pretend to be elf. Thank you all.