Know Your Ending: Lessons Learned from Lost and Battlestar Galactica
I don’t care what anyone says, the writers of Lost and Battlestar Galactica didn’t know all of the secrets about what was going on, and how it was all going to end when they started out. I don’t think they even knew how it was all going to end halfway through their last seasons.
I think that Battlestar pulled off their ending better than Lost, but I’m pretty sure (SPOILERS) they didn’t know what to do with themselves after they found the nuclear wasteland of Earth. Perhaps that would have been the perfect place to end the series…
(END SPOILERS)
How does this relate to RPGs? Quite simple: If you’re going to have a lot of intrigue, secret plots and misdirection, know where it’s going. Know what gears are moving behind the scene.
If you’re running a straight-forward adventure, where any secrets get resolved within a session, that’s fine. But if your plot has any ongoing thread, don’t fall into the trap of Lost and BSG, making it up as you go, as it gets more and more convoluted until you desperately have to patch everything together at the last minute for a big payoff.
You don’t need to know exactly all the minute details about the last scenes, but you really need to know where it’s generally going to end up.
In my upcoming campaign, the first thing I thought of was how it was all going to end, before I planned literally anything else out at all.
What are my tips?
- If you give details about something early on in the campaign, tie it in later on. Don’t leave hanging threads. One or two hanging threads are okay, but all of the major ones need to be sewn back in.
- Your BBEG needs to be a part of the story from the beginning. If suddenly, the big boss ends up being someone the players have never even interacted with or even heard of, you’ve failed. I’ve seen this happen plenty of times. Or, almost as bad, in the third act of the campaign, he’s introduced as you realize your need for a BBEG, since the heroes have killed off all the villains already.
- Don’t get too complicated. If you can’t remember all the details, you can’t expect the players to, but they’ll remember the ones you don’t. Trust me.
That’s about all I can think of. Have you ever experienced this issue? Chime in.
These three tips of yours are spot on. Too many times, GMs (myself included) look for the complicated magic formula, when it really IS this simple.
And thanks for spoiling Battlestar for me!!!
(never mind the fact that I practically threw up watching episode 1 of season 1, vowing to never watch again)
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While as a GM I am providing a backdrop for my players to act in, I’m not scripting a story from beginning to end. Just like when key actors quit in the middle of a season (Mr. Eko) or audience reaction is misjudged (how likable Ana Lucita would be), players are notorious for doing something unexpected and causing RPG campaigns to go off the rails.
As such, RPG campaigns are far more unpredictable than television shows, and I think shows like LOST or Battlestar Galactica typically have endings that make far more sense than most RPGs with the same level of plot twists and turns.
I agree, these are great tips.
I ran an 8-year campaign with a BBEG outlined. It could have run as long as the players or I wanted, entirely subject to their characters’ actions. Their main villain from game 1 was the same as the one in their last game. It was very rewarding for all of us.
Fortunately, there were only a few loose ends that actually took a few more games to finish or else the whole cycle would have started all over again. And NOBODY wanted THAT to happen!
You are so right about details. Don’t make them too complex. Fortunately, I made good notes. My players kept good notes too, not letting any idle remark I made be forgotten. They learned in the first few years that little things would come back to haunt them.
My games crossed over one Star Trek universe (classic movie timeframe), two Super Hero worlds (1990′s & 2015), and three D&D worlds (one of which was the regressed future of one of the Supers’ worlds). There were over 30 players (8 in the core group) and nearly two hundred or so characters that died during the campaign. Some had key moments to shine, and when they did it was great. Others had unfulfilled destinies that shaped the arena for the BBEG. Plenty of others were fodder.
I needed a padded cell when it was all over, but my players showed no mercy. They made me start a new campaign. Aaargh!