No Game Needs to End Without an Ending

We’ve all been there. The game is going great. The players are excellent, the GM is doing a great job, everyone is excited to see what happens next. Who knows how this crazy story will end? We can’t wait to find out.

Then the group takes a short break so several players can handle some real-life stuff. The short break unofficially becomes a long break. Months pass. Everyone quietly realizes that the break is permanent and that the game is no more. We’ll never find out what happened next. We’ll never get our ending.

It happens. I understand that. But I think we give up on our endings too easily.

And I’ve decided that at least for games I run, where it is my choice, there will always be an ending. 

We can do things like make sure endings are an interesting part of the game. And embrace restarting a dormant game. But sometimes that’s not enough. Here are ways to end our games.

Plan A: Conventional session-by-session resolution. This is how most games aspire to end. You just keep doing sessions until everything is over. This is easier if you do “seasons” or use another mechanism to forecast endings. This is great if you can manage it. It’s probably the ideal way to end most kinds of games. But it’s not the only way to end the game.

Plan B: Zoom out. Maybe there isn’t time to resolve the story session-by-session. Time is tight. Maybe someone is moving out of town or starting a new job or going back to school or having a kid. There’s time for a few sessions. Maybe just one. How do we conclude without it feeling rushed?

Remember that time in RPGs is fluid. Just as the GM can narrate days or weeks of travel in a few minutes, nothing stops the group from collectively adjudicating entire adventures and arcs at a zoomed out level. They can either use freeform roleplay, or a collaborative system like Microscope, which is specifically built to enable zooming in and zooming out on game events.

Anatoly Fomenko

Plan C: Communal or individual writing project. There isn't time for even a single session, as detailed above for Plan B, no matter how zoomed-out it is. But if the players have time individually, they can end the game in writing. This could take the form of separate parallel efforts, or a single collaborative resolution, perhaps through taking turns, or editing a shared online document. It can be an exquisite corpse. Writing is the most obvious way to do this, but players could draw, write songs, whatever they want. How canon all of this is up to the group, particularly if players are writing different aspects of the ending that touch on others’ characters; but generally, it is a good idea to keep it loose.

Plan D: Solo writing project. Whether due to external circumstances, waning interest, or something else entirely, sometimes the players are simply done before the story is. Even Plan C is not going to happen. 

The GM still has the option to write the conclusion to the game themselves. 

Solo RPGs are great here. Even a simple oracle system can provide enough outside input to resolve the story in an interesting way.

To the degree the players may still care about their characters, the GM can frame this as head canon or merely one possible version of events. Some of the characters could be offscreen. The GM’s conclusion doesn’t even necessarily have to follow the players, per se. An NPC or even an antagonist could be the viewpoint character for the resolution of the story.

This is the last resort because it doesn’t involve the group; it’s just the GM (or really, whichever participant in the game cared the most about the ending). But it’s still better than no ending at all.

Maybe no one will ever even read it. That’s OK. Put it on your blog, if nothing else (if you don’t have a blog, now is a good time to start one). The point is that if you spent dozens (or even hundreds) of hours playing a game that kept you and your players interested for that long, it deserves an ending. You deserve an ending, and there’s more than one way to get there. 

Deckbuilding in the Stygian Library: The First Layer

Last week: Exploring the Stygian Library as a Deckbuilding Game

Before we get into our first location, we have one important unanswered question. What are Felix and company looking for, exactly? Let’s stick with Knave 2 (“K2”) and roll on the Books table on page 40. We get 47: hunting. They’re after an ancient tome that details ways to hunt terrible, long-extinct monsters from deep under the sea. At least, everyone thought they were extinct. Lately they have revealed themselves to be dangerously non-extinct, so the value of this previously obsolete book has gone through the proverbial roof. Under The Stygian Library’s (“TSL”) distinctions of how hard a book is to find, we’ll put this at 30: “Obscure information, the sort of thing known only to a few scholars and jealously guarded.” Of course, Felix is happy to grab anything else that looks valuable; but this book is the specific reason his patron sent him into the library.

The Display Case

To begin, we’ll generate rooms strictly by the TSL rules. We certainly could create cards for every option on the primary roll tables, to populate rooms through a deck. And we may decide we need DM-facing deckbuilding components in the future. But in the interest of keeping it simple and iterating quickly, I’m going to limit the deckbuilding to immediate adjudication, and keep it away from elements that might be handled during prep in a non-procedural dungeon crawl.

Felix, Clotilde, and Guinevere crawl through the utility panel and tumble into the library’s first room:

• Location: The Display Case. Interesting Shoes.
• Details: Candle Sticks.
• Random Events: Something turns up - it’s unfriendly.
• An Ink Elemental and d4 Inkblots.

No easing our adventurers into this one. We immediately enter a potentially dangerous scenario, with “unfriendly” monsters present in the space. A few questions immediately present themselves:

• The random encounter is “unfriendly” -- how unfriendly?
• How far away? 
• Who sees who first?

Of course, these are the same questions handled by the traditional D&D rules of reaction and distance. Let’s try handling those with cards. For purposes of testing, I’m using dry erase playing cards, which are readily available online. They can smudge with shuffling, but are easy to erase and reuse. Index cards also work fine as a cheaper option, for those less particular about shuffling hand-feel.

We already know from the TSL result that the ink elemental and its blots are “unfriendly,” so we’ll limit reaction results to the negative end of the spectrum. Using the K2 reaction rules, that includes 2-7, everything from (gulp) “kill the PCs” to “Ignore the PCs.” We label the cards, shuffle them, and draw, for…

Gif by Shivur

“Ignore”! The best possible result. Phew. A TPK in the first room would have been underwhelming.

What do we do with this card, as well as the other reactions that we didn’t draw? Let’s set that question aside for now. Deckbuilders can incorporate the results of a scenario into the fiction in a number of ways. We could shuffle the “ignore” card into our player’s deck, and perhaps interpret its re-emergence later as the return of the original monster. Or we could preserve only the remaining reaction cards, suggesting that future encounters will face a dwindling pool of options. We’ll see if the answer reveals itself as go forward.

How far away are the creatures when the party encounters them? Traditionally 2d6x10 would give us a distance in feet for a dungeon encounter, but I don’t think we need to label 11 cards to resolve this. In many cases, cards are going to want to condense options to relatively fewer, broader choices, relative to dice.

For now, let’s just label three cards as close, medium, and far. We flip a card and get “medium”; the inklings are neither close nor far; they’re across the room, within a stone’s throw, but not right on top of our party.

Finally, is either side surprised? K2 treats surprise a little differently, with an opposed wisdom check (interestingly, this is a lot closer to modern/5E D&D than typical old-school rules). Felix has a +2. The Ink Elemental requires some conversion. We’ll halve it and round down, giving it a +2 on this check. There’s some more nuance suggested by K2 that we may or may not want to use later. For now, let’s just keep it simple and make four cards; monster surprised, party surprised, both surprised, neither surprised.

We draw and get… "monster surprised." The cards are really favoring the party so far. The adventurers spot the ink elemental and its satellite ink blots before the monsters know the party is there. Felix holds a finger to his lips and trio lays low. Since the monster’s default is to ignore them anyway, we don’t need to get into any kind of stealth adjudication. Our party also doesn’t need to spend much time in this space, as Felix quickly surveys the collection of unusual shoes and determines they aren’t worth stealing (per TSL, the value is 100 silver times the layer; since this is layer zero, these shoes are interesting, but worthless). The party uses the candlesticks here to light a torch, which Clotilde will carry. 

With no desire to linger here, the party delves deeper into the library. We’ll roll d20+1 (the layer they’re going to) for a location result of 5 (Chained Lectern) and a details result of 8 (Lamp-Post). We’ll pick up their adventure next time.

OK, So Where Is the Deckbuilding?

So far, all we have really done is replace die rolls with drawn cards. This is an intentionally slow start, because we want to gradually discern mechanics from gameplay, not dictate mechanics to the game and assume they'll just work out well. We'll build in more deckbuilding in future installments of this series.

Exploring the Stygian Library as a Deckbuilding Game

I’m a fan of deckbuilders, whether as video games (Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and others) or physical games (Dominion, Star Realms, and many more). I’ve always wanted to see deckbuilding in TTRPGs, but if that game exists, I haven’t found it yet. The closest I know of is Meromorph’s Atma card-based RPG. That game does a nice job of using cards to inspire unexpected scenarios in a TTRPG format; but it’s not a deckbuilder.

I’ve mocked up several different TTRPG deckbuilding systems, but finding time to test games with other people has been a challenge. My players would be happy to test something if I asked them. But any such ask comes at the expense of the other TTRPGs and board games we could be playing when we get together. That's a high bar to clear.

While I still plan to look for opportunities to test multiplayer deckbuilder TTRPGs, I’ve also decided to test a solo deck builder concept. When I see an interesting question like this generate zero replies, it suggests to me that there is untapped space that game designers should explore.

We’re going to keep this as simple as possible by only introducing deckbuilding mechanics when we really need them. The theory is that it’s easier to start with a very simple system and confirm it works ats a basic resolution system before adding really creative tweaks and neat subsystems. In short, we want to create a game that works like other solo TTRPGs, but uses the randomness of card draw instead of dice for moment-to-moment action resolution, as well as the concepts of deckbuilding for both the progression and consequences of dungeon adventure.

As I learned when my Dungeon23 project lapsed, trying to do a big project with a single output is a recipe for disappointment. A project is more robust if it can serve multiple purposes, so I made a list.

• Test if the deckbuilder model can work in a TTRPG
• Get some use out of adventures and other products I have purchased, but rarely or never run
• Experiment with solo RPGs
• Produce some blog posts

That feels pretty good, right? Let’s go!

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth

The Stygian Library

The Stygian Library (“TSL” for short hereon) by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen is a great example of a “depth crawl,” along with their similarly structured adventure, the Gardens of Ynn. Players explore a place that is generated in part procedurally; there is no fixed dungeon map.

I have used TSL before as a prep tool for my D&D games, where quite a few sessions revolved around a Borges/Prachett-style arcane library occupying a liminal extradimensional space, which could be accessed from different places. But I have never used its procedural generation tools in-session, as they’re primarily designed to work. Time to change that.

“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world. Space bends in on itself, forming a sort of wormhole, linking the library to other libraries likewise afflicted. The space between is a sort of pocket realm, budded off from reality, maintained by the sheer power of books.”

Emmy Allen, The Stygian Library

TSL is particularly well-suited to this project because the procedural generation of the dungeon makes it easier to run as a solo exercise. The dungeon is not a pre-defined space, so in using TSL for solo play, the player has to do less work to disentangle their player knowledge from their DM knowledge. 

Delve One

We begin in The City’s largest bookshop. Someone was murdered here last night. That’s unfortunate for Someone, but it is very fortunate for us, because we want to access the Stygian Library, and an entrance will only appear in a location that contains both (1. many books and (2. a recent death. Did the patron who hired us for this job simply take advantage of an accident that happened here? Or did they create the opportunity, by orchestrating a murrr-derrr? Best not to dwell on such questions.

Investigating the far corners of the bookstore, we find nothing on the first, second, third, or 13th search of the space. On the cusp of giving up, we find a barely visible door – not much more than a utility panel – hidden behind the heaviest shelves in the place. The key to the front door of the bookstore unlocks this lock as well, which makes no sense; a warning of what’s to come. We enter the Stygian Library.

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth

Our Brave/Foolish Explorers

“Tell you what, if it's a high card, I'll tell you who I am. But if it's a low card, I'll tell you who you are. Is that a deal?”

Deadfall (1993)

I am using Knave 2 (“K2” henceforth) for character generation and ideas, due to its simplicity; general interoperability with other games; and its use of slots, which are a good analogue for cards. I have run quite a lot of the original Knave, but this will be my first genuine experiment with K2. Here is my PC, with no rerolls.

Felix Digham

• A CON of 1 and a WIS of 2 (yes, I happened to roll the same results as the example in the K2 rules)
• Level 1, 0 XP
• 11 item slots
• Bag of spice
• Lamp oil
• Knife
• 2 rations
• 50’ rope
• 2 torches
• Mail shirt
• Helmet
• War scythe (two-handed, d8 damage) (slot 1)
• War scythe (slot 2)
• Poison
• 2 HP
• Careers: Merchant, Thug
• AP 2
• AC 13
• Personality: Truthful
• Appearance: Rugged
• Goal: Serve a deity
• Assets: Smuggles goods
• Liabilities: Known con artist
• Possessions not carried
• Strongbox (hidden in the bookstore and holding the below items)
• Scales
• 10 coins

I was a little confused at first by the merchant/thug and truthful/con artist dichotomies, but the assets and liabilities cleared that tension up. This is a person who has lived in the gray area between legitimate commerce and outright crime. No surprise that they are now employed in such dangerous and shady work.

Felix has spent 100 of his starting 110 coins to retain two hirelings for five days each. Should he survive one or more delves, he hopes to gather enough money to hit level 2 and retain some more sturdy companions to accompany him on future delves.

Clotilde Delamorn, hireling

• AC 11
• HP 3
• Level 1
• Attack punch d2
• MOV 40’
• MRL 4 
• 10 item slots

Guinevere Westerfield, hireling

• AC 11
• HP 3
• Level 1
• Attack punch d2
• MOV 40’
• MRL 4 
• 10 item slots

They carry some cheap sacks for loot, and nothing else. We’ll sketch out more about Clotilde and Guinevere (and Felix, for that matter) if they survive long enough to warrant our interest.

Next week: Deckbuilding in the Stygian Library: The First Layer 

Library of Babel gifs by Isaac Karth