Roleplaying Games
C is for Closing Time: How to End a Roleplaying Game
From the Dictionary of Fearless Gaming
Run enough one-shots and a skill you’ll pick up is how to satisfyingly close game sessions. Natural endings are worth pursuing, but Real Life often forces our hands and our endings become cliffhangers, montages, or GM monologues! 🥴
I want to run X number of games and have closure on the last session rather than those games just fade offffffffffff. I recently completed a game series of Stars Without Number on Twitch/ActualPlay. Originally planned as 5 games, it became 7 as we discovered we had the time. That 7th game arrived and there was so much stuff unanswered, unresolved, ripe for exploration.
We had a pre-game talk about final ‘must-have’ scenes and then played to see what happened. We were fortunate that the final scene presented itself during play of that last session. The session’s and game’s central conflict resolved and we spent the remaining time on a montage of what the PCs did next — a denouement. I did a few post-credits interstitials to wrap up some favorite (and not-so-favorite) NPCs. It feels good to end a series, to look back and let my brain make connections about events and actions that occurred.
Sometimes, you don’t get a nice bow, you’re out of real-life time. If I’m the GM, I drive a little hard for a cliffhanger, as a pilot show might have. It counts as closure.
What’s key to a successful last session is that you talk with your players about those final acts, your last ‘must-have’ scenes. In my SWN game, our ending came organically from those ‘must-have’ scenes. We played them out then raced to that ending running to us. I didn’t pre-plan it. In fact, I thought one of the scenes was nigh impossible, except perhaps by a flashback. I was surprised we made it work.
I’m a big fan of deciding up front how many sessions we’re in for. We can always re-negotiate along the way. It’s important for me though to have some closure in these epic games we play.
“And that was the end” beats the snot out of “and we never got back to finish…”
