Episodic Play

I was talking to Captain Ric at the weekend, and he asked if it had become normal for RPG campaigns to be structured more like TV series, with distinct episodes, and story arcs, and the like. Well, I don't know if it's the norm in RPGs in general, but it is true that I tend to structure my RPGs more in this vein these days.

There's a reason for that.

Back in the day, I used to play pretty much every week, generally on a Saturday afternoon for 6-8 hours at a stretch. (I suspect the length of the session is less important than the frequency and regularity of the sessions.) Campaigns would last for six to twelve months, or until we either suffered a TPK or rebelled against the concept.

What this meant in terms of game-play was that we'd sit down, play for a bit, and whenever the allocated time came to an end we'd just stop. (Actually, I'd time it so we'd stop either right before or just after an encounter - our stop times were somewhat flexible, so that was easy enough to arrange.) Then we'd pack up, and the next week we'd just pick up where we left off.

Needless to say, times have changed. These days, I play for 3 hours once every four weeks (in any given campaign). This means that I'm now both more conscious of the pressures of time on the game, and I'm also aware that events carrying on from one session to the next are much more likely to be forgotten in the meantime.

My solution to this has indeed been to adopt a much more episodic structure to game sessions, complete with breaking each session down into four loosely-defined acts. (Obviously, it doesn't always neatly follow that structure, and I retain a significant degree of flexibility, but I at least start with a baseline.)

It was then a short step from adopting a TV-like episodic structure to looking also at the way modern TV series link episodes. In particular, in shows like "Star Wars: the Clone Wars" and "24", there are very distinct three- or sometimes four-episode arcs: a plotline will be introduced in one episode, which then ends on a cliffhanger; it is then followed up in the next one or two episodes, which end on cliffhangers; and then it is concluded in a final episode. Which actually works particularly well in level-based games, because three sessions is an almost ideal length of time to stick at a single level - players get to try out most or all of their new goodies, get used to the new power level, and then the move on before they start to get bored.

Likewise, I now tend to very distinctly group sessions into "seasons" or "volumes", each with their own character. Which, again, rather neatly fits in with the tiers build in to D&D-like games in recent versions (either explicitly in 4e or 5e, or implicitly as in 3e or SWSE). And so the first volume covers the Apprentice tier (1-4), concluding with the PCs reaching 5th level. At which point the story moves on to a distinctly new phase for a second volume in the Heroic tier (5-10), and so on. (Though so far only "The Eberron Code" completed all three planned volumes, so it remains to be seen if that's really a winner, or if it was just a lucky outcome.)

(Incidentally, the pressure of time now means that I have little tolerance for in-build "time-waste" activities. Whereas once upon a time I would have been fine with R poring over the DMG for an hour to pick out just the right magic item for his character, I now want to streamline this as far as possible - if you want a particular item for your character, just assume he finds time to go to the market to buy it; don't expect me to roleplay the encounter! Likewise, if you can do levelling-up between sessions, that's much appreciated. Now that game sessions are compressed, I'd like to cram as much into them as possible!)

Anyway, that's where things stand at the time of writing. It obviously remains to be seen how, or if, things will change in the near future.