A friend of mine recently had a post about the standard 13/26 episode formats in anime, and it’s something that I think is applicable to campaign design too. Note that this is from the perspective of GM-as-scenario-writer, where the PCs have agency within the framework of a general plot, but the tacit assumption is that they’ll tend to go along with it. This is far from the only way to play, but it’s the one I have the most experience with. It also assumes a Narrativist creative agenda – if you’re just dungeon-crawling, killing things and taking their stuff, the rules are different.
The standard five-part plot is introduction, rising tension, complication, climax, denoumont. The most obvious example is Babylon 5’s five seasons, which neatly illustrate the theme. But how does this tie into an RPG campaign? RPGs have a number of things that make them wildly divergent from other forms of plotting: the necessity of hooking characters into the game from the start; the group dynamic, including the various forms of authority held by everyone at the table; the tendency of PCs to do unexpected things in unexpected ways; and the desire to involve everyone at the table in as many scenes as possible.
The easy way out, and the one I’m using right now in Trinity, is to set up a situation where characters have a pre-existing duty to some authority. In other words, someone who can call them in, give them a mission, and send them off. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it works. It worked in the Mutants and Masterminds X-Men game I played in a while ago, it worked in my (short-lived for other reasons) Orpheus game. Then, as the players get comfortable with the mission-of-the-week setting, start raising the stakes. Introduce a complication, and you’re well on your way to a full-on plot. This is similar to what Seth and I call the Trigun progression in anime – short, episode plot segments to show how things hang together, then a good kickoff event to break everything up and start the longer, more interesting plot.
More difficult is working with characters who you can’t easily map onto the A-Team. Exalted, for example. The way the my last Exalted game worked was a pretty typical resolution to the issue – get the characters together somehow, have someone employ them for one mission, then take advantage of the aftermath to introduce your complication and ride that up to the plot. Whether you get the PCs all thrown in prison together, or they happen to be the group of Plucky Lads and Lasses in the arms locker when the terrorists raid the building, or they just happen to be the last survivors of some catastrophe, shared disaster is an easy ticket. Even better if you have a few pre-existing links between characters. Super bonus if you can use those links to provide additional complications.
Though: try to keep the PCs from each others’ throats. Unless it’s, y’know, Amber.
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