 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and after just recently ending two of my long-running campaigns in spectacular fashion, with many more about to close and even more on hiatus until I can get the time stone, I'm sorry guys one day soon I swear, I thought that now would be a good time to talk about the concept of one of the biggest parts of every journey, the end. So as always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion and if you want to finish the fight with whatever it takes on your own, feel free to play your endgame however you want, but without a way, let's begin. So there is nothing like an ending. We watch, listen, play in so many stories that the ending is almost an afterthought until it's finally upon us and we're left thinking, oh shit, this is it. What do we do now? And that question of what do we do is a terrifying prospect that either makes or breaks an otherwise great story. You may not watch Game of Thrones, but you've undoubtedly heard about what a trainwreck the final season was. The Last Airbender, no not that one, was known for having a fantastic ending and Avengers Endgame, while not telling a particularly compelling story on its own, served to end one of the longest running and multi-charactered games of mutants and masterminds that this world has ever seen. The ending shapes how people look back on the story as a whole, and I really do see the MCU as a big game of D&D superhero edition. It is a perfect example of how to end a high-action combat-oriented ass-kicking campaign. Having all the heroes fighting the big bad recurring villain in an ultimate clash of wills is paramount to a good final fight, and it's even better the higher the stakes are. In your games you could have someone be kidnapped, maybe there's a bomb or the ship that they're on is on a direct course for the iceberg or something like that, and once the fight starts you don't let it end until they are done. This is the final fight and all stops need to be pulled. If the party starts to kill the villain too quickly, either have him spring a crippling trap on them, or if the bad guy is beaten especially quickly, pull a, this isn't even my final form, and have the villain upgrade himself for the quote unquote real battle. Sure, that might be a little cheesy, but players don't know what the DM does behind the screen, and if you've seriously misjudged the power level of your party versus the villain to the point where the fight is basically over in five minutes, then you probably should bite the cheese bullet and fix it to ensure a satisfying conclusion. Now, if your campaign is focused on political intrigue and espionage, and even if it's not, then perhaps a more subtle hand is required to give the players what they want. Sure, you can still have that final boss fight, but the circumstances leading up to it, and the repercussions around it are going to need to change. In a normal heroic story of justice and valor, the party reaches the bad guy, fights him, and the day is either saved, or the world is eaten by Cthulhu. In a roleplay heavy game, however, that just won't work on its own. If the game in so far has been about working the people around you to get things done that you need done, then half of the battle should just be getting to the battle. Not by fighting monsters up an extended stairwell until you reach the evil king's throne room, but by orchestrating events to actually manage to get the king in the room in the first place. The actual fighting should be an afterthought, and if your villain is especially insightful and has been a major evil mastermind throughout the course of the campaign, then please, please don't have the bad guy be so arrogant as to not think about the possibility of failure, or better yet, they should expect it. Have them plan ahead so that the characters have to worry about whether or not they should kill the boss, not because of the moral quandary of killing, but because killing the boss could potentially make things worse, or maybe the boss expected to be killed and it doesn't matter. If you've seen Watchmen, you know what I'm talking about. Those are the kind of final fights that stick with you for the rest of your days and convince you to talk about it to anyone with an ear ad nauseam, or perhaps the final part of the story might not include a bad guy at all. Maybe, at the end, the last bit of the story involves finding a way to fix the world of whatever ails it, or escaping from an evil cave, or unlocking the puzzle of an ancient artifact that could save the universe. In these hero versus world events, the ending relies not on how hard you can hit stuff in the face, but on how smart you can be at solving a puzzle that may not have a conventional answer or help even a conventional base. A game where the end happens based on your choice, and your choice is either the right one or the wrong one or somewhere in between. I remember the last session of a year-long campaign where the final fight with the embodiment of all evil was just a room, with a little girl wrapped in chains in the middle. There wasn't a big monster or a smug bastard with a goatee and a vaguely European accent, just a girl. A terrified little girl who represented the embodiment of all evil, not because she was a mustached, whirling railroad heister, but because evil when you boil it down is fear, desperation, and self-preservation at the expense of everything else. Our last choice was whether to kill her or set her free into the world. We couldn't leave without making the choice, and there was no alternate route. I don't think I'll ever forget charging into the room as a level 20 paladin with a shining pegasus, only to be faced with that. That is a hard memory to lose. But no matter how you end your game, you just can't skimp out on the where are they now portion. I know it's gimmicky, it's overdone in stories, but for a D&D campaign I really think that it's important to give each player a chance to bring their individual stories to a close on their terms. So when a campaign ends I go around the table and I let each person say what happens next with their character, where they go, what their future endeavors are, how the world will be changed by this now veteran adventurer leaving their mark on the world of the campaign. It's such an insignificant thing from a planning point of view. It's almost an afterthought, it requires zero input from the DM, but every time I do it I know that whatever they're saying is to them 100 times better than anything I could have written up, and I pay attention to where they go too because there may come a time where I need to pull an NPC out of my ass in the middle of a session, and nothing feels better than letting a previous character of yours make a brief cameo reminding you of where you're going, where you've already been, and how to end a story of D&D. So yeah, I hope that this video helped somebody. I know that writing an ending can be hard, believe me I spent five years of running campaigns before I even understood the concept of an ending, and I've barely even made it to that many endings myself, but over time you'll work it out, and if you've been on the ball as a DM up until that point, you'll know what to say to close the book on this story. But then I'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, leave a like, comment, sub, support me on Patreon, join my Guild Wars 2 Guild, and remember to always kill your DM, for he is the real final boss. But yeah, Davie out.