Max level. Be it level 30, level 20, or level 10, depending on what edition or game you’re playing (though for my purposes, I’m going to assume you’re playing D&D4e). It has a ring to it, a sign that you’ve taken a campaign as far as it can go. In a way, you’ve won. To take a campaign, a story, a character all the way to this point is one of those unstated goals of many games. You bring that puny level 1 human fighter to the very first session with an unspoken hope that you can take him from struggling with kobolds and crappy equipment to slaying godlings with potent magical artifacts. As a DM, you get to go from writing adventures about helping farmers recover their pigs from marauding goblins to writing scenarios where players have to negotiate celestial politics and dangers in order to change the world for the better.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for something short and sweet. It’s my personal experience and my discussions with other people talking about their campaigns of yore that actually getting to that max level is not common in most circumstances. Real life intrudes and breaks up the group, people lose interest and want to do something different, the DM runs out of ideas, the players do something that breaks the campaign, and so on. Any number of things can put an end to a campaign before it reaches the lofty heights of level 30 and I think that the odds are against most campaigns in this respect.
A campaign can, in some ways, be compared to a TV series. As I write this, there’s recently been an article from Chris Perkins on that same subject posted on the WotC site. Some lucky campaigns, much like some rare TV shows, end exactly where they want. They’ve gone as far as they want, they’ve told their stories, they’re done. Just like TV shows that have to throw together a finale after learning they’ve been canceled, some campaigns have to figure out a way to end things after their DM learns that his job is transferring him across the country. And many TV series just end with no fanfare or resolution just like I think the majority of RPG campaigns end.
So planning shorter campaigns can be a way to ensure that you have a chance to complete it, to tell a story and leave everybody largely feeling satisfied at the end. Think of these shorter campaigns as the equivalent of a British TV show, where you may not get a lot of it and you may end up wanting more, but you (hopefully) can’t say that you didn’t enjoy what you did have while it lasted. Another valuable element to the short campaign is that it lets you do or try lots of things, both as a player and as a DM. As a DM you can use different monsters and areas (kobolds instead of goblins, Feywild instead of Shadowfell, wilderness emphasis instead of urban), try storytelling concepts you have never done before, or tinker with your houserules. As a player you get to play different races and classes, try new magic items or powers, or explore playing characters with different backstories and personalities.
Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t aim for taking your campaign to max level, if it’s what you want. There’s a lot of fun to be had in seeing a character go from a weakling who can barely take down a nest of big rats to a powerhouse who goes toe-to-toe with creatures that threaten all life. As a DM, throwing a primordial, god, or demon lord at the PCs to determine the fate of the world can make for an incredible climax to a campaign and that sort of opponent only appears more frequently as you look at the higher level monsters. And ultimately, if you enjoy your character, your story, and your group, you may just want to make the experience last as long as possible.
However, if you’re going to plan for your campaign to wrap up after reaching the exalted heights, build yourself an escape route or five. Hope that you will be victorious, but plan for defeat. That is to say, give yourself several pre-arranged story “outs” in case something happens and you need to wrap things up sooner than you’d hoped. For example, if your campaign’s big bad was going to be Tiamat and you’ve been hinting at it for a while, one “out” may be to have the PCs confront a priestess of Tiamat, defeat her, and disrupt Tiamat’s plans. At higher levels, maybe instead of a Priestess, it’s an Exarch or Aspect of Tiamat. Either way, the players can feel like they’ve accomplished something and “won” the campaign. It’s possible you might be able to pick up the campaign again later, either with the original heroes or a fresh faced new bunch that have come to take up the torch, but at the very least in the meantime you will have been able to bring things to a hopefully satisfying close. If the players are at a high enough level, your out may be to simply lower the level of your end bad guys and push the final confrontation to be sooner than originally planned. If you can manage it (and you might not), I suggest ending the campaign at level 11 or level 21. Why? Because I think it’s more satisfying for players to get awesome new powers just in time for that final dungeon and/or boss confrontation and can leave them with an even better feeling about the campaign in retrospect.
I build my outs roughly in bands of five levels. If the campaign falters in level 1-5, I have one way to end it planned. If the players are level 6-10 and it has to wrap up, I’ve got this slightly different version in mind. And so on. The plans don’t have be excessively detailed, in my opinion. No need to draw up maps or start putting together encounters (unless you want to or like that sort of thing, of course). You could be fine with just some notes or loose plans. For example, “Okay, instead of going to the Tomb of Marhad the Mad to recover the historical records showing that the nobility here is up to their eyeballs in worshiping Orcus and have been for hundreds of years, I’ll have the higher ups there at the tomb for a ritual. That way the PCs can stop their plans and capture or kill the ringleaders”. Even something as simple as “I’ve hinted crimelord Rachna as just a puppet figure for something bigger and worse, but maybe she really is as bad as she looks after all. She’s not murdering people and harvesting their organs at the behest of an evil wizard, she’s just a deranged, but charismatic, psychopath” can give you a clear path towards a fun and entertaining conclusion to your unfortunately abbreviated campaign.
So what’s my point to all this? The saying goes that it’s not the destination that you enjoy, but the journey to get there. That’s not wrong and it applies as much to tabletop campaigns as it does anything else. However, knowing how and where and why to end can ensure that the journey isn’t wasted and even make it that much better. Give yourself the opportunity to end your journey through the campaign in a place that’s fun, either by deliberately limiting the length or scope or by planning out some alternative endings, and you’ll probably find that you remember the campaign with more fondness and smiles than you will an epic campaign with lots of promise that faded away to nothing.
I agree that it’s important to be flexible and give yourself a variety of “closure” options. I have also focused on shorter storylines while throwing out hints to larger forces at play. My campaign is currently at Level 9, and they are within a session or two of Level 10. I’ve had plans for the “Ultimate Encounter to Reach Paragon Status,” but they have changed several times as the PCs alter the course of the campaign, and I continue to react and adjust the storyline. For instance, the primary villain hasn’t appeared for several levels, but the players are still aware of him and know they need to track him down. However, they are off working on other quests at the moment.