Some Random Stuff About Campaign Design

I've found that a 3-4 hour game session makes for a good equivalent of a single episode of a TV series - something in the region of 40-45 minutes. This gives a good amount of time for a beginning, middle, and end. However, this definitely works better in a reasonably rules-lite game; something like D&D tends to quickly bog down in combat in a manner that inhibits storytelling.

Most TV series have a season of about 20-26 episodes, with 22 still being the most common. I've found that this also gives a pretty good format, allowing a fairly well-developed story to be told over the course of a year, without squeezing it unduly or stretching it beyond interest.

Conveniently, a bi-weekly schedule should allow 26 game sessions in the year. Even if you drop several sessions due to Christmas and other breaks, there's still plenty of room for 20 sessions in year.

But: When watching "The Clone Wars", and also when running SWSE, I found that something that also works well is if a few episodes are chained together into a mini-arc. (I found 3 sessions to be ideal here, with the added bonus that in SWSE and/or D&D it made sense to have the PCs level up after each 3-session arc. Though in 5e I would be inclined to have a single-session intro, have the PCs level from 1st to 2nd at the end of that, and then kick off the first 'real' arc.)

When it comes to Adventure Path products then, what I probably don't want are six largeish adventures that the PCs will get through at whatever speed they get through, nor do I really want 17 'episodes' that don't actually have any concept of how they tie into individual sessions. What would be better would actually be a presentation of about 6 mini-arcs each split into three 'chunks', with each chunk designed to fit into a single session, plus a 2-part finale for the game. (In 5e, add a single-episode introduction.)

Furthermore, it would be beneficial if each session were then written in such a way that there's a stripped down version that contains only the minimal set of events required to progress the plot (ideally playable in 2 hours), followed by a number of additional elements (further encounters, or side-quests, or similar) to allow the session to be expanded out to 3-, 4-, or more hours of play. That would be exceptionally useful, as it would allow me to pick up the campaign and just use it as-is, without concern that the whole of one session would be blown on a hugely-wasteful throwaway encounter ("Tomb of Horrors" 4e, I'm looking at you!).

But then, that would involve much more scripting than even an Adventure Path really benefits from. Though perhaps if the campaign were then presented in some sort of matrix format, so that elements could be encountered in different orders, or not at all...