I finished my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign last weekend and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about endings since. Game endings in general, I mean – it doesn’t need to be restricted to tabletop. It’s something I hadn’t really considered before, I realised, and now that I am considering it, I realise there’s quite a lot going on.
Take our D&D finale as an example. We’ve been playing The Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign for months now, ever since the spring, so we’ve invested a lot of time in our characters and in their adventure – and I suppose in our group relationships too. We’ve been on a journey. At the weekend, all of that energy we’d invested – which had been building and building over time – was channelled into one climactic point.
It was a suitably grand occasion. We had a huge battle with floor maps and miniatures and, I’m reliably told, our Dungeon Master had no problems killing us if the dice declared it so. For a while, it did look dicey, too. I’m sure I would have died had I not been unexpectedly turned into a T rex; I’m a three-and-a-half foot humanoid hare normally. As it was, though, I bit a bunch of people in half. I was living my best life.
The event, then, didn’t lack a sense of occasion. But once it was over and our enemies lay at our feet around us, and the main characters in the story were saying, well done, you’ve saved the day, that still didn’t feel like enough. And I was struck with a powerful sense of directionlessness and purposeless-ness as the campaign came to a rather abrupt end.