How does the story of your character end? Do they live to see the villain vanquished? Do they leave the party after an adventure took too much of a price? How often do we think about the end of our characters and their story?

The GM might have some ideas of how a quest, an adventure, a campaign might end. Prewritten campaigns often have suggestions or possible endings for when the story comes to a close. But what about the characters? Do you, the player, have thought about the end? The goals that drive the character, and what were to happen should they reach it? After all, you thought about how they started, where they came from. Why they are on their current path.

Obviously, we play to find out. One quest at time, one mission after another. Things change, characters evolve. Though, if you were to have a vision for how their story could end, it could provide even more interesting context for where they are right now. A fully fleshed-out character needn’t only be fully formed from the past onward. We are as much the author of their destiny as we are their players.

I think it’s a great exercise to think about your character not as their player, but as their writer and their audience. It’s interesting to make decisions for where we, the player, want to see them end up, and reverse engineer their current choices to make it happen. Take a step back and look at them from the top down. See the path they have taken, and the possible paths ahead of them. Where are they going? What would be the most interesting, dramatic, surprising thing that could happen for us, regardless of what the character would want?

There’s the game called Heart. It’s a great game for many reasons–the Resistance system it uses is fantastic for drama and tension; the lore and worldbuilding are weird and bizarre and near-perfect. Your character has a Calling, a reason to explore the strange dungeon that is the Heart beneath the city of Spire. And each calling comes with Beats. Every session, you choose two of these beats to let your GM know what sort of story development you’d like to see next game. It’s a great and strange system that lets players choose what could happen to their character in the next few sessions. Some of these beats are so explicitly final, that reaching them would signal the end for your character. And in Heart, the end if always dramatic, leaving the world different than it was before, and most often deadly for your character. You chose how your journey ends, you decide the destiny of your character, and tell the GM that think their time has come.

The characters are always at the mercy of the dice, the GM’s whims and preparations, and the choices we force on them based on who we think they are. But we, the players, we don’t have those restraints. We are in charge of where they go, what they do, and how they end up.

How do you want their story to end?