What Do I Know?

Up to day fourteen of RPG a Day, and here is today’s question:

Which RPG Do You Prefer For Open-Ended Campaign Play?

Well, this is awkward.

I don’t prefer open-ended campaign play very much these days. Because I like campaigns to have satisfactory endings, and I like to play a wide variety of games, I tend to run games in “seasons” these days.

Part of why I prefer this style now is that in the past, I had so many games that just drifted off, and it felt like I let down the people playing. Being able to run a 9 to 12 session “season” of a campaign, knowing that we completed a large story arc and may come back to these characters, feels a lot more satisfactory.

Now, if we twist this question, just a bit, and turn it into “what RPG do you prefer for open-ended play,” meaning, “I don’t prep anything and let the game develop when I start running each session,” then I’m going to go with World Wide Wrestling. While I might play on feuds that started in other sessions, or reference events that happened in other games, I never start booking matches until we sit down at the table, and I often have the players do some “outside the episode” scenes from The Road supplement to help shape what’s going to happen for the night.