My occasional Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons game has finally come to an end. A weird end, if I’m being honest, but an end. Which feels pretty fitting, all things considered, given the basic premise of the campaign, the way we rarely had consistent players, and how quickly things devolved on the mechanical side of the game despite the Dungeons Master’s attempts to use a ruleset he’d found online to better balance out the way the game is built against the way we were playing it. Our campaign of battles ended not with a final climactic fight against some supreme foe but with a solved puzzle that ended a glorious battle that wound up being a bit of a pushover once we all committed to fighting it during the two hours of our three-hour session time since we solved the puzzle in the first half hour of actual play and decided just to do an “alternate ending” where we fought everything just to use up all the time we’d scheduled.

My character’s complaints that we didn’t get to fight anything was the impetus behind that alternate ending, even though I, personally, loved the idea of ending this battle-centric campaign in less than an hour by solving a pretty clear-cut puzzle that the DM only thought we wouldn’t be able to solve because none of us stop to read things or think things through beyond the surface level of “how do I fight it?” I will miss the campaign, of course, and the end of it was a bittersweet moment, but I was, and still am, ready to have another free night during my weeks, especially considering that my other free nights aren’t really “free” so much as made free when the plans I have for them get canceled. A night to rest will be nice, considering how big my backlog of video games has gotten, but I will still miss gathering with that odd little group. Even if one of the players still got on my nerves, even after a year and a half of playing with them

All told, despite our attempts to make it a weekly game, the campaign ran for thirty-five sessions over the course of twenty-two months. I was able to attend thirty-one of them, making this the longest campaign I’ve ever played in by fifty-five percent. It is eleven sessions longer than my previous record holder, which was only twenty sessions long. That feels like a short time, given that most of the campaigns I’ve run that managed to actually take off tend to break into the fifties at least before they fall to scheduling issues, discovering some of my players aren’t the good, supportive people I thought they were, or the decision to stop using Dungeons and Dragons as a game until I realized that probably meant not playing tabletop games of any kind anymore since only one of my friends/previous players seems particularly interested in trying other games.

Still, for a game that was all about combat, boss encounters, and trying to play without any house rules, it went pretty well. I had a lot of fun. It was novel, trying to find ways to appropriately limit our characters as we went from fight to fight, each with a long rest separating them from each other, but we worked it out pretty quickly and were able to focus on just having fun with the weirdos the Dungeon Master brought in from Elden Ring for us to (mostly) beat the tar out of. I can definitively say that my character was the only one who didn’t ever die (which isn’t that big of a deal since everyone came back between sessions, in a manner similar to how characters returned to life in Elden Ring), not because he wasn’t doing his job as the party’s tank, but because he was just too strong to die. He had over three hundred hit points by the end of the campaign an I’d gotten his armor class up to twenty-eight for the last few sessions. Which didn’t always mean much, since we were fighting superpowered bosses pretty much constantly, but it was satisfying to know that I was playing pretty much the only character who didn’t always get hit.

Truthfully, the campaign ended a couple months ago. We beat the final boss, cleared what passed for the “story” of this combat encounter focused game, and then continued to play as twentieth level characters just so we could enjoy seeing our builds and character mechanics come to fruition. The Dungeon Master had us all send him ideas for interesting twentieth level encounters, which meant we had things like eldritch abomination Furbies that kept trying to drive our characters insane with their gibbering, a battle against a cult while the god of death rode its chariot up and down the halls, and then a battle against the mind-controlled tank who could not die, was fast as hell, and could hit like a truck if things lined up correctly. That last one was mine. There was a bit of framing, as a legendary mind flayer lich used an artifact to control my character, but the whole point was to let me see what the other players could do to stop my character since killing him was out of the question (I had more HP than most of the rest of the party put together). They were all a lot of fun, even if the final one ended so abruptly that it caught us all by surprise.

I’ve long wondered what might come next, given that the DM wants to run a more involved campaign. He’s talked for a while about doing something to prompt more roleplaying, to engage in interesting political machinations, and to have more going on every week than the usual combat grind. As it turns out, nothing comes next. The group has dissolved. While the Discord server we used will linger on for years to come, our time as a gaming group has ended and we’re all going our separate ways. Except for the people I have in one of my gaming groups, the DM included. The three of us and the one other player from outside this group are meeting again on Sunday to start up a game I’m running that will (hopefully) prompt roleplaying and include plenty of political drama. I’m sure there’ll even be some machinations! I do love a good machination, after all. But now my Thursday nights are free again, this company has split apart, and I’m left with my first time experiencing the bittersweet ending of a campaign that not only ran all the way to its end, but felt somewhat satisfying in its conclusion. My previous record-holder campaign ran it its conclusion, but it didn’t feel particularly satisfying since there was some weirdness with another player character that cast a bit of a shadow over the post-game wrap up. Enough weirdness that it is most of what I remember from that final session, other than a triple-critical roll on ramming a massive beast with an airship, my character’s one good skill finally coming in handy, and the fun fact that my character was able to walk away from a thousand-foot drop because he was just so hard to kill.

Anyway. This game has ended, I’m a little sad about it but still plenty happy to have had such a fun time and it hopefully won’t take me another decade to be able to play in a game that can give this one a run for its money in terms of total number of sessions. At least, that’s how long it will take to break my current record if I make a projection based on my past record holders. The twenty-session record took six years to set and this thirty-one session record didn’t happen until that game had been over for eight years, which means it’ll take another ten for this record to be broken. Or less. Who knows? All I can do is try to have a good time and not worry too much about whether the game will keep running or not.