How Campaigns End - campaign duration survey results

tl;dr: few tables (1/3) are getting ~10 levels done in a campaign; once you get a tier done, contingency plan your wrap-up if you want one.

A twitter poll by rahab_akatriel asked "do you generally get to conclude your campaigns with a planned-out ending, or do you find that they tend to kind of sputter out and die? Which happens more often?" and the results were an interestingly even split between 'fizzle, neat wrap-up and ongoing'. I chopped the 'both equally' option in half and gave half each to 'attrition' and 'planned finish' for this comparison.

There is another piece to be read into the 'have not yet ended a game' but for now we can look at the 'planned conclusions' vs 'ended unintentionally' split. I had a dig around in my survey archive and there is nothing to directly answer this question so we need to get a little creative, therefore everything from here is grain-of-salt estimates.

First trying to get a measure of what people intend to happen, we can pull favourite tier of play from a few sources. This suggests that most people want to be playing in Tier II - certainly we are not seeing an aspirational 'I want to get there' big score in the high tiers.

So digging into Mia Gojaks Facebook Survey to try and get some detail on this we first ask "do these respondents want to be playing in campaigns" to confirm they are suitable to look at for an answer to how campaigns end. Short answer, mostly yes - we can exclude the respondents that do not want to play campaigns and still have ~ 1000 respondents.

What level to these players start at? Mostly level 1 but almost all Tier 1 in any case.

Grouping these starter groups into 'level 1', 'level 2-4' and 'level 5+' we can see where they all eventually stopped. Values for the 'start at level 1' group pulled out as that is the largest group.

So broadly this group of players got what they wanted. They started off at Level 1, wanted to get to ~Tier 2 and most of them played through at least that. We see the first 'spike' of endings at level 5 ~ roughly ending Tier 1. We see another spike of endings at Tier 10, where they finished Tier 2. I do not know how to read that cluster of endings at level 12 but another at level 15 is the end of Tier 3.

Coming back to the question at the top - do we see a similar pattern of campaigns ending before they should? If we take 2 tiers ~ 10 levels, then if we see most campaigns play through 10 levels, most people should have gotten what they wanted. Instead we see that ~35% of campaigns manage to get through at least 10 levels which suggests that the ~31% of campaigns achieving their planned conclusions from the original poll is coherent.

It is a different question to 'did the campaign have a nice wrap up or did it run out of steam' after those ~10 levels, but it does suggest that once you punch through your 5 level mark, start your clock ticking for a finish or a wrap up as most games make it this far but most games to not make it through a second tier.

I am interested to see that the only 'level 9 and your character becomes a named character and retires' from back in the day is broadly coherent with this as well.

Key sources:

Mia Gojaks Survey of D&D 5e Facebook group users.

Elderbrain 2020 survey.

Dragonsfoot 2011 poll on forum.