Best practices for an episodic campaign

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Yeti Spaghetti

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What are some recommended tips and tricks when running a highly episodic campaign, one that changes an adventure setting every 1-3 sessions?

Recurring monsters and NPCs? Switching between investigation-heavy and combat-heavy adventures?
 
Highly episodic? I only had one campaign that was highly episodic in the way you are describing, and it was weird. But I learned things, and some of my players remembered it ten to fifteen years later, so I must have done something right.

So let me start out with how it was weird. I was running a Shadowrun campaign in the basement of WoTC's game center in Seattle's University district. so, mid-nineties sometime. I was playing an "open table" (anyone could grab a template or make a basic character and join at any point) because some of my friends would wander in and out, and some of the folks who were playing in Magic: the Gathering tournaments would stop by to kibbitz, and then join the game for a bit, and I got several friends of friends joining at random. So I would have a rotating cast of between seven and fifteen(!) players at the table, and the total number of characters in the campaign was somewhere north of thirty. My core group was five, and then later six people.

The highly episodic part of the campaign was actually a second chapter: I had a Rocker character who was sent on a "World Tour" with his band to get him out of Seattle (for those of you who know Shadowrun, the tour was co-sponsored by Renraku and Aztechnology, both of which had the runners as a thorn in their sides...). The rest of the group went along as muscle, technical support, and pyrotechnics/sfx, for the fighters, deckers/riggers, and magical types respectively. So each tour date and the prep days leading up to it was its own episode.

A few tricks that helped:

-There was a Yakuza clan who were out to get the rocker and the runners. Similar opponents in most of the cities, but not all, led to a series of, "let's figure out where the hitman is *this* time" encounters that gave coherence to the campaign.

-If there was an Awakened critter (read monster) that was unique to the location, I would let the party encounter them to give the space "local flavor."

-There were a handful of NPC "annoyances" who would show up at random venues -- I particularly remember one groupie who would show up at random to help, tease, or try to seduce the Combat Mage into getting her backstage passes.

-I always played out the gig itself, and the aftermath, for each of the dates, keeping to the theme.
 
My long-running Mythos/Folk Horror Investigation game could be described as episodic. It's a high fatality game, so player characters come and go and it started set in the late 19th century and has gradually moved forward into the 20th century with WWII currently looming on the horizon. There are connecting overarching "plots" of villainous organizations/cults, but most of it has been self-contained one-shots or small adventures.

Honestly I treat it like a TV series. Something akin to Supernatural or Buffy (not in tone or setting, but in set-up - a series of self contained episodes interspersed with moments driving the main events forward, with the occasional "big bad" encounters). The player characters are operatives for The Ministry of Occult Research & Defense, which provides the excuse for sending them on "missions", and occasionally jumping into adventures in media res.
 
I only had one campaign that was highly episodic in the way you are describing, and it was weird.

Honestly I treat it like a TV series.

Both of these pretty much describe what I've been doing. It's "weird" partly for artificial reasons. We're only using 8 pre-generated characters, 4 men, 4 women, some of whom are already dead or "retired" from the anti-paranormal entities organization. The theory is that once all characters are either dead or retired, the campaign is over. But this will probably mean that male players may have to on occasion play a female character. I know, it's all pretty unconventional (I think).

But I love the idea of having many players rotate in and out of the campaign. This is what I was going for early on, but since it's a VTT game, it has been hard to generate player activity in that fashion. So, we have a couple regulars, and occasionally someone else joins to play a session.

Thus, a TV series is indeed what it we have become (X-Files). I personally like it, but I'm trying to find ways of making character growth and recurring themes more a part of the campaign. Things right now feel a little too "Ok here's the next mystery to solve!" and my guess is that that could get boring after awhile.
 
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@ TristramEvans TristramEvans beat me to it- television format works well. I have used it to run a successful long term Savage Worlds Hyborian Age campaign that was episodic, much like the original tales by R.E.H. I also have also used it for shorter games like Call of Cthulhu where six sessions might cover the span of a decade or so. The best thing about the television format is that it is not only perfect for self contained adventures but it's a simple matter to include a "main storyline" and recurring characters.
 
Things right now feel a little too "Ok here's the next mystery to solve!" and my guess is that that could get boring after awhile.
Yeah, you definitely got to mix things up keep the players on their toes. Or they start acting like players and not their characters.

A couple ways I like to spice things up:

1)The mystery turns out to be something completely mundane, nothing supernatural at all.

2) Bring in real-world consequences - in one adventure, one of my players was playing a countess, a character she'd just created and she joined this other longterm adventurer while investigating the estate of a recently deceased aristocrat. In the course of that adventure, her character died, killed by (IIRC) an interdimensional centipede that resembled a jewel. Her body was crystalized to serve as an egg host.

Anyways, play goes on as normal, the other player doesn't think much about it, as mentioned, characters die all the time. But the next play session he returns to his apartment to fid the door broken in and voices inside, and he readies his weapon, charges inside...and is promptly arrested by the French Police who are investigating the sudden disappearance of the Countess, with all evidence pointing to this weird guy, (whose apartment is full of weird occult stuff), having murdered her - and him not being able to tell the truth.

So then we get a prison break adventure, etc.

3) switch up genres - I've done pure horror survival horror, locked room mysteries, ghost stories, comedies, holiday-themed adventures, pulp action, war tales, chases, exploration, court room dramas, ethical dilemmas, political thrillers, etc. all in the course of a ten year campaign. There's no reason to follow a "formula" - these are character's lives, and like everyone's lives, it's a little bit of everything, just in the case of gaming, turned up to 11. I've adapted adventures from everything from Call of Cthulhu to Lamentations of the Flame Princess to Traveller. One adventure took place entirely in a dreamworld. Another was a World War I spy thriller. For WW2 I have quite a few war stories planned. I've used everything from aliens to faeries to a village in Eastern Europe inhabited entirely by sentient wooden puppets.
 
I try to switch it up. I'll probably do a holiday themed adventure once we get to closer to that time (the campaign "season" is essentially the current day). Would love to do something like a chase or a zip across town mission. Probably wouldn't do comedy or court room drama.

Real world (legal) consequences are always a possibility though, but so far players have been keen to avoid them. Again, I also insert employment consequences upon "failure" of missions, depending on the circumstances.

But yes, one concern I have is that players have probably started acting like themselves during sessions and less like their characters. Maybe this just goes hand-in-hand with episodic play. Since you always "re-set" your character in a new environment and there's not a whole lot that has changed about them other than XP from the previous adventure, you're more likely to act like the character is just you, back for another week of play. (Also, one of the players is less experienced when it comes to role playing, and she tends to not act out as her character would but as she would.)
 
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One of my tools for getting players to respond as their characters rather than themselves is NPCs. Especially NPCs that are somehow important to the characters. What is their boss like? does (s)he have favorites among the crew? Is there an NPC who might want something from one of the PCs? If there is an investigation, is there someone else investigating, and if so, which of the PCs do they think needs to be questioned for interfering in "their" investigation?

And then approach a PC in character as the NPC, and engage. It doesn't always work, but it's something to try.
 
One of my tools for getting players to respond as their characters rather than themselves is NPCs. Especially NPCs that are somehow important to the characters. What is their boss like? does (s)he have favorites among the crew? Is there an NPC who might want something from one of the PCs? If there is an investigation, is there someone else investigating, and if so, which of the PCs do they think needs to be questioned for interfering in "their" investigation?

And then approach a PC in character as the NPC, and engage. It doesn't always work, but it's something to try.

Indeed, I need to do more involved NPC interactions. In fact, I've got an adventure coming up where players engage with a local paranormal investigators group who, in theory, are important for how the adventure turns out, and aren't simply window dressing. I need to find ways of playing them more effectively. Since it's a VTT game, I tend to be so involved with just trying to keep everything humming along without screwing up, and when I'm running NPCs I have to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible ("You need my help, great, here it is"). I need to remember that NPCs are just as much an adventuring tool as anything else I have at my disposal.
 
What do you mean by new setting every few sessions? Like a new location? Is there like a home base or town?
It's a new location and adventure pretty much every time out. Tracking down a ghost one day, in the jungles of Mexico for a few weeks, fighting a vampire the next week, etc. It's the same modern-day campaign setting, we're just in a different place with a different mission each time.
 
It's a new location and adventure pretty much every time out. Tracking down a ghost one day, in the jungles of Mexico for a few weeks, fighting a vampire the next week, etc. It's the same modern-day campaign setting, we're just in a different place with a different mission each time.

Okay, gotcha. I was going to recommend really establishing the supporting cast. Harder to do when things are global like that, but not impossible.

I think generally you want to have a solid framework….a core concept (global monster hunters or investigators), consistent supporting cast, that kind of thing. That kind of persistent element helps highlight the changes each episode.

However, that may be harder to do, depending on the specifics of your campaign.
 
Honestly I treat it like a TV series.

On the topic of treating an RPG campaign like a TV series, I came across a very interesting blog post or web article about how TV series are put together: How to Write That TV-show Bible, Finally, by Allen B. Ury. It includes a check-list of thirteen items that have to go into the design of a TV series and be done before the pilot episode can be approved. I found it thought-provoking to consider which items on Ury's list apply to an RPG campaign, which don't, and which reflect something that is important in an RPG campaign but that is done differently or at a different stage. It's worth combing that list for pointers and reminders, but a lot of the time you are obviously going to run into the fact that GMing is not series creation and is not show-running. When you do, take a moment to ask yourself "what should a GM do instead?"

Not quite coincidentally, Allen B. Ury is also the earliest source I have been able to find for the insight that whereas dramatic stories require dynamic characters (who resolve their conflicts by changing), there exist also procedural stories that require iconic characters (who set right disorders in the world by executing a schtick). (See Your Hero: Dynamic or Iconic, by Allen B. Ury.) If you are running a strongly episodic campaign in which there is a sequence of self-contained adventures and not much current of continuity through them — in short if the player characters are going to go again and again on adventures and come through them suitable to go on another — then the PCs can't change too much on each adventure. That means that the adventures can't be dramatic adventures about dynamic characters resolving their conflicts; they have to be procedural adventures about iconic characters that repair disorders in the world by doing the thing that no-one else does, without fundamentally changing. Characters can develop over a series, for instance if it has an overall dramatic arc¹, but if you do that it becomes less purely episodic, and I assume that's not what the OP wants.

To run an episodic campaign you have to put aside what you might have been told in high-school English or other literature courses about change being the heart and soul of drama — because drama is not what you are aiming for. Present adventures as disorders in the world outside the characters, not as internal conflicts. Give some thought when designing each adventure to it being solved (in at least a handful of ways) by the PCs or their group executing their or its schtick, and not in a dramatic crisis.

Let the players know before they design or as they are designing characters that you intend an episodic campaign of procedural adventures for iconic characters, and if necessary point out that essay of Ury's for them to read, or one of Robin D. Laws' passages about iconic characters in RPGs. They might need a hint not to design the sort of dynamic character they are used to from dramatic stories, surrounded by and laced with unresolved conflicts and with room to mature and grow. They might need a hint that each PC should have a schtick, a thing they they characteristically do to set things right when something is wrong. They might need to co-ordinate their design efforts or be guided by the GM to contrive that the character's several schticks be distinct but complementary. That is, it's best if no character's schtick is redundant in the presence of the other characters, and if you don't too often leave any character superfluous because the group is approaching the adventure in a way that makes their schtick unusable.

That last bit is not so unfamiliar to roleplayers. It's the way we have been accustomed to doing things since fighting-men, magic-users, clerics, and thieves first hit the gaming tables. Just don't be drawn off by any misguided parallels with dramatic fiction: "character growth is good and episodic stories are bad" is bad advice, even from Aristotle.



¹ If you are very keen, there is the possibility of trying something like what Stephen Bochco pulled off the the character Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue. Sipowicz had a long series of procedural adventures (literally: they were police procedural mysteries) spanning about twelve years, during which he gradually changed, resolving his interior conflicts and turning out at the end to be the dynamic hero of a 200-hour drama. In each adventure Sipowicz performed as an iconic hero, executing his schtick to solve a case, but his schtick gradually changed from episode to episode until after 260 episodes he was a healed and much greater man. I am not so ambitious. Besides, that's not an example of a completely episodic series.
 
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Great thoughts. I'll have to keep "character schtick" in mind. I'm not sure either of my PCs has developed anything like that, but they do each come across as distinct personalities born in part from their character bios, so maybe that's as close as we've come to what you're describing. The male PC acts as a thoughtful, caring and selfless investigator, while the female PC is knowledgeable, dogged, and supportive. (Again, it has been running much like The X-Files and only partly by design, although the male is a French Canadian backwoodsman in his 30s recruited into the agency, and the female is a woman in her 50s with a background in paranormal investigations, so it's not a clear-cut Mulder-Scully dynamic.)
 
Now that "Season 1" of my campaign has come to a close, I wanted to return to this thread to review how things went.

Running sessions like TV shows really helped. Moving things along, ending on cliffhangers. That kind of advice is the best.

NPC interactions ended up being more important than I imagined. Players start looking for more involved experiences as the weeks go by instead of just the "same old same old" monster of the week format. So, being prepared to engage them with NPCs as much as possible is key, even if it ends up taking sessions into divergent territory. I need to get better with that.

Related to that, having an additional player join your regulars as often as you can is key to relieving monotony and boredom. Players need to feel excited about new episodes and have someone else to share them with. If it's just them every week, the game can start to wear them down. This is exactly what I was worried about earlier and is probably the hardest part of running this kind of campaign.
 
One of my tools for getting players to respond as their characters rather than themselves is NPCs. Especially NPCs that are somehow important to the characters.
Tangible rewards like skills, XP, character oriented toys for playing the character helps keep players character focussed. Even for episodic rotating players/characters.
 
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