Game conclusion
The last episode of my roleplaying game was this afternoon.
I had an intermittently rough weekend, and was very late getting the plot finalized, and by yesterday I was nearly ready to just cancel the game, and then I got kinda grumpy again this morning. And my ongoing headache appeared again this morning. So I wasn't expecting much out of today's session.
But in fact it went quite well; possibly the best session of the four. The dice mostly behaved dramatically appropriately, the PCs likewise, the plot came together nicely, even the timing/pacing worked fairly well. (I had included a rough timeline in my notes--climactic sequence should start no later than 4 p.m. realtime, that sort of thing--and we were maybe half an hour to an hour behind schedule for most of the afternoon, but right near the end I realized that the 30 to 60 minutes I'd been planning for the denouement was unnecessary, and that actually playing through the details of the tearful reunion at the end would be anticlimactic, so we ended almost exactly at the planned time.)
Unlike last session, this session there was plenty for the PCs to do. And I gave them one or two blunt hints/pushes in the desired directions, but that worked fine; and of their own accord, they did several things I'd been hoping they would do, along with several things that I hadn't anticipated but that worked well; and they gave me a couple of plot ideas that I smoothly incorporated on the fly, including the final bit of the multi-part climax, which somehow hadn't occurred to me but which was really the perfect conclusion. There was a lot of energy and enthusiasm in the room for most of the afternoon. And one particularly dramatic moment that I came up with late yesterday as a throwaway turned out to be especially emotionally compelling for the PCs.
Oh, and both sets of villains appeared on-camera and did villainous things, and the PCs helped foil them in both small and big ways.
I don't think I'll be running another game anytime soon--took too much time and energy to be feasible very often. But today's conclusion was about the best I could've hoped for. Thanks, players!