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Why did my campaign end before I felt it was “finished?”
It seems to me that most (or nearly all) pathfinder/dnd campaigns fall apart before the story is finished. The question is why, and what can we do as players and GMs to set ourselves up for a successful campaign that leaves everyone satisfied. I’d like to focus on adventure paths specifically. I recognize in advance that a campaign does not have to end when the adventure path says it does, and that satisfying endings can occur at any point in the story depending on your perspective. Still, I think many players and GMs end their campaigns sooner than they would have liked, so I’d like to explore why.
I think self-written campaigns usually break down because of the herculean task of writing your own material. GMs, even committed ones, have lives and work and family. They also run into writer’s block or need extended hiatuses to develop new material. I think any extended hiatus can spell doom for the campaign. I could be wrong about that, but in my anecdotal experience GM delay leads to players moving on to other games and, from there, generally to campaign collapse.
To restrict the task to more manageable amounts of info, I’d like to survey you cannibalistic humanoid forum dwellers on your experiences with adventure paths specifically:
1. Of the campaigns you have begun, how many have you completed start to finish?
2. How many reached a satisfying ending for you story wise even if they didn’t reach the end of the printed material?
3. For the campaigns that collapsed, why do you think this occurred? Players not showing up? GM's lack of commitment? Scheduling difficulties?
I would love to put together an idea page for ways to avoid critical campaign collapse, which I think begins when more than three sessions are missed or canceled, or when more than three sessions occur with only two players showing up.
I’ll get around to extensively posting my own experiences if this takes off, but I’d love to hear what you all have to say on the matter. To start off, the only adventure path I have run to completion was Carrion Crown--on the second attempt. It took a couple of years to get all the way through. The successful run was generally a weekly game. I think doing it weekly really helped, though I know life gets in the way and it is rare to find a GM and 3 or 4 players to commit to weekly sessions. Still, even bi-weekly sessions seem to spell disaster unless the GM really rides herd on their players, reminding them of each session and trying to persuade them to show. The campaign in question also had a set of players that shifted over time--as one dropped out I had to go out and recruit another. I think only one of the players made it through from part 1 to part 6 without interruption, though a couple others were non-sequentially present for 3/4ths of it.
What do you guys think? Why do these campaigns break down? How many players do you need for a quorum? Are there strategies you guys have to avoid campaign collapse? Please assume that the written material is interesting and the games are fun, those are different issues.
