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.
