Don’t Rush the Ending

In case you missed the title, I’m going to be repeating it several times here. As in, don’t rush the ending.

We ended the first arc of our Nobilis campaign. That arc, and the game, have been quite enjoyable. Doyce has done a hell of a successful job both in adopting the incredibly complex mythology of the Nobilis realm with his own particular characters and spin.

And then we rushed the ending. Don’t rush the ending.

I understand all the reasons it happened. Hell, I’ve done exactly the same thing, more times than I can count. I’ve got a time limit in my mind, I’ve got an expectation of how far I’m going to get, I’ve got people beginning to look at the clock, or get antsy, or fall asleep …

And I rush it. Don’t rush the ending.

Any time the GM ends an encounter with, “Okay, here’s what happened …” then the ending has been rushed. The story is, after all, nearly paramount (the overarching story is only trumped by individual player character stories — sometimes). To turn the climactic battle into a photomontage, then into a crawl of text up the screen explaining the outcome … well, if it happened in a movie, we’d assume the budget ran out, or the writer and director couldn’t figure out how to end it, or the exec arbitrarily lopped off X number of minutes. We’ve seen it happen, and no matter what the reason, it sucks.

Don’t rush the ending.

Another example, which has happened to me a couple of times. Rushing through the end of a book, just to get to the end because of some perceived time limit. It almost always ruins the sense of the ending. I remember returning from a long business trip, during which I had almost finished The Mists of Avalon. I had about fifteen minutes of reading to finish the book as the plane was hitting the tarmac. I compressed it into about five minutes instead, skimming, pushing, blowing through whatever mood and message MZB wanted to wrap things up with.

I ruined the book. It tainted my whole experience with it.

I understand the reasons why that happened last night (just as I’ve understood the reasons from all the times I’ve done it). We were running later and later after midnight. To have truly done justice to everything would have meant cutting things off around 10p, and then wrapping it up in another session — which would have meant (given schedules) September, which would been its own distruptive/timing/momentum problem.

A thousand good reasons, just like I’ve had, and it all gets shoaled on the mantra Don’t rush the ending. But it’s true, because after all of the journey and mysteries and battle and the like — the story started to ratchet down into a photo montage around 11:30, and the final, big, massive battle between Friendship and everyone else, the death of the Bronze Man, and the judgment of Lord Entropy, and the shuffling around of chancels and inquisitorial houses and the like … got summarized in a few conclusing paragraphs.

Summarized nicely, mind you, but it still felt like reading a final novel by a writer, with the penultimate chapter followed by a page-long description of the author’s notes, found after her death. You smack the table and shake your head and say, “Gee, I wish I could have read the real thing.”

A thousand good reasons. Meaning a thousand reasons I agree with, a thousand reasons I would have done it the same way. It would have been another hour or two, easily, see? And to wait until September would be an awful mess. A thousand good reasons. I’d have followed them.

And I’d have been wrong, too.

Not a slam at Doyce (I hope is clear). A cautionary note for myself, as I head toward my own renascent GMing career. Don’t rush the ending. If I can’t do it right in the time alloted, I should cut things short and put it off until later. Acknowledge the problems that will cause, and suck ’em up.

Because if I rush the ending, the story suffers. And that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Don’t rush the ending. I’m going to put it in big bold print on my DM Shield, right underneath the Six Rules.