D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[Charlaquin]

Why would you think I didn't know about Cleric spells when I've been running the game since 1989? Are you confusing me with someone because of my weird new avatar? Do I need to change back?

Avatar changes do be throwing a girl off sometimes…

When I used to spend as much time on the Onyx Path forums as I now spend here, we had a The Changing of the Avatars thread in the off-topic forum so people who wanted could follow the thread. It wasn’t mandatory to post in the thread when you changed your avatar, but it was a much appreciated gesture. Not sure if such a thread would be as useful here, since it’s a larger community than the OP forums were, but might still be a worthy experiment.

 

[MerricB]

Now I've blogged about it. A campaign of short, published adventures

Which one take of is "it's rather odd to complain about a lack of short adventures when there are more available than at any time in the past"...

(Also: published short adventures make people not realise they can create their own adventures, and other complaints I've heard over the years).

Cheers,
Merric

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Also a big part of the problem is that serialized narratives are hard to follow when there are long gaps between installments. That’s why episodic series were the default for network TV until streaming services made serials “bingeable.” If you’re lucky enough to be able to play D&D with the same group several times a week, an epic mega-adventure will probably be great for your group. But for most of us, we’re lucky if we can consistently play once a week, and we accept that occasional absences will be inevitable. With a schedule like that, the chances of running into the dreaded “wait, what are we supposed to be doing here again?” moment are very high, and that is a major investment killer.

Is that really the case? Babylon 5 got the "pre-written ongoing plot" thing going back in the early 90s, and it was both pioneering and highly successful, particularly given DS9 did essentially the same thing on a parallel run (albeit with less of a firm, specific sequence.) Followed up by a variety of TV shows in the late 90s and all through the 00s, like CSI, and what I have heard of shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Mad Men, etc. Even children's shows got in on the game, what with Avatar: the Last Airbender, and most folks know how beloved its long-term writing and payoff is. (It takes two and a half seasons for Zuko to get the redemption arc everyone knew he was being set up for, and it is totally worth the wait, even for a child.)

Streaming didn't make long-form narrative suddenly viable. It had been viable for 15 years or more. Streaming just provided a new avenue of approach.

There's always been a place for both things. Further, the reception of things like Lost shows how people truly wanted "an epic" as has been defined in this thread, and got very disappointed when all that build-up culminated in a hollow payoff, because the writers were writing it effectively module-style, by the seat of their pants, and could never generate a payoff that would match the hype they'd built. That is, it's quite possible for a group to be disappointed by a lackluster attempt to achieve synthesis and closure from a disparate pile of smaller adventures if what they really were hoping for was a well-executed long arc.

If folks show up for monster of the week and get metaplot (especially if it's badly-executed metaplot), they're liable to get bored or even annoyed that they can't do what they want to do: consider the negative response to the 2e Dark Sun metaplot. Conversely, if people show up for long-form narratives that pay off in satisfying fashion and instead get scattershot monster-of-the-week stuff with no linking thread beyond "these are the things we did, in the order we did them," again people are liable to get bored or annoyed that their experience feels like filler arcs and dicking around.

Are you confusing me with someone because of my weird new avatar? Do I need to change back?

You certainly don't need to change it back, but I did need a moment at first. And I already knew it was you because I had followed a reply notification! That sort of thing happens every time someone familiar changes their avatar though. At least two other users come to mind that have made a change and I was mentally discombobulated. Such is the way of the (digital) world.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Babylon 5 got the "pre-written ongoing plot" thing going back in the early 90s, and it was both pioneering and highly successful

It wasn’t the first though. JMS admits to having been influenced by Blake’s 7, and Doctor Who did it’s season-long Key to Time arc in the 70s.

Pretty sure the idea that people can’t remember what happened a week ago was never more than a myth.

 

[Charlaquin]

Is that really the case? Babylon 5 got the "pre-written ongoing plot" thing going back in the early 90s, and it was both pioneering and highly successful, particularly given DS9 did essentially the same thing on a parallel run (albeit with less of a firm, specific sequence.) Followed up by a variety of TV shows in the late 90s and all through the 00s, like CSI, and what I have heard of shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Mad Men, etc. Even children's shows got in on the game, what with Avatar: the Last Airbender, and most folks know how beloved its long-term writing and payoff is. (It takes two and a half seasons for Zuko to get the redemption arc everyone knew he was being set up for, and it is totally worth the wait, even for a child.)

Streaming didn't make long-form narrative suddenly viable. It had been viable for 15 years or more. Streaming just provided a new avenue of approach.

I did say episodic was “the default,” not the only way it was done. I mean, soap operas had been doing the serialized narrative thing for decades. But even shows with serialized narratives usually wove those threads into otherwise mostly-episodic formats. There were always exceptions, but long-form didn’t become the predominant structure for TV series until streaming services dethroned cable.

There's always been a place for both things. Further, the reception of things like Lost shows how people truly wanted "an epic" as has been defined in this thread, and got very disappointed when all that build-up culminated in a hollow payoff, because the writers were writing it effectively module-style, by the seat of their pants, and could never generate a payoff that would match the hype they'd built.

Even Lost probably wouldn’t have taken off like it did if it had come out before the proliferation of DVR. And, a big part of the reason it ended up the mess that it did was because the showrunners never expected it to get renewed for a second season. They were writing it hoping it would end up remembered as a Firefly-esque cult classic canceled before it got a chance to really shine, but accidentally made it too good and suddenly had to scramble to make good on story promises they never expected to have to keep.

That is, it's quite possible for a group to be disappointed by a lackluster attempt to achieve synthesis and closure from a disparate pile of smaller adventures if what they really were hoping for was a well-executed long arc.

If folks show up for monster of the week and get metaplot (especially if it's badly-executed metaplot), they're liable to get bored or even annoyed that they can't do what they want to do: consider the negative response to the 2e Dark Sun metaplot. Conversely, if people show up for long-form narratives that pay off in satisfying fashion and instead get scattershot monster-of-the-week stuff with no linking thread beyond "these are the things we did, in the order we did them," again people are liable to get bored or annoyed that their experience feels like filler arcs and dicking around.


You certainly don't need to change it back, but I did need a moment at first. And I already knew it was you because I had followed a reply notification! That sort of thing happens every time someone familiar changes their avatar though. At least two other users come to mind that have made a change and I was mentally discombobulated. Such is the way of the (digital) world.

Sure. To be clear, I’m not saying epic campaigns are bad. I’m just saying that epics aren’t well-suited to being the default format for published D&D adventures. It’s good that they’re available, but bad that shorter-form are generally not very available outside of digital platforms. Same thing Matt is saying in the video, basically.

 

[Charlaquin]

It wasn’t the first though. JMS admits to having been influenced by Blake’s 7, and Doctor Who did it’s season-long Key to Time arc in the 70s.

Pretty sure the idea that people can’t remember what happened a week ago was never more than a myth.

It’s not that people can’t remember what happened a week ago, it’s that you couldn’t count on most viewers to have caught last week’s episode. That’s why series with serialized elements usually seeded them across several otherwise self-contained episodes.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There were always exceptions, but long-form didn’t become the predominant structure for TV series until streaming services dethroned cable

Need to add “in the USA” to that. And that was down to TV exec groupthink, not the audience.

 

[Charlaquin]

Need to add “in the USA” to that.

Sure

And that was down to TV exec groupthink, not the audience.

Ehh, I think there was good reason to lean more heavily on episodic content over serialized narratives given the structure. Again, it’s not that serialization wasn’t viable, but it wasn’t well-positioned to be the standard way to produce TV.

Now streaming services have taken things too far in the other direction. There are good reasons to lean more on serialization for streaming content, but there is basically no new episodic content being produced for those platforms now, and I think it would be better to have both styles available.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The issue with long PRINTED campaigns has nothing to do with the ability of players to follow the plot, they demonstrably can. The issue is each chapter has a fixed start and end point that has to be passed though, nailing the players to the railroad. If you string modules together, then when the players do something unexpected (and they will) you just switch to a different module. I.e. it makes it easy to change direction as you go along in response to the players.

This is why the DM wants a good stock of modules, so there is a plan B, C and D.

 

[Distracted DM]

The issue with long PRINTED campaigns has nothing to do with the ability of players to follow the plot, they demonstrably can. The issue is each chapter has a fixed start and end point that has to be passed though, nailing the players to the railroad. If you string modules together, then when the players do something unexpected (and they will) you just switch to a different module. I.e. it makes it easy to change direction as you go along in response to the players.

I'd say half of my players struggle to keep track of "how all this lines up together," and then they inevitably forget things which fall by the wayside. Actually now I think about it, most of these players that have trouble with this have diagnosed or undiagnosed ADHD. I quite literally only realized this connection while I was writing this . Object permanence is an issue with most of us.

You can be three sessions into a big dungeon, and these players have forgotten why they came into the dungeon in the first place- much less why this dungeon figures into the overarching storyline going on outside. It's almost been a month in real life!

"I almost died, why are we even here?!" "We came in here for the Eye of Traldar!" "Oh, right.. why do we need that again?" "Because the witch of the wood that we befriended said it could help us unseal the gate to the cursed kingdom!" "...?" "The cursed kingdom WHERE YOUR CHARACTER IS FROM." "Ohhhhhhhh."