Lessons from a TV series bible. #7: Episode format

Role-playing games
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Continuing the discussion from How to write a series bible:

Item seven on the checklist is “Episode format”.

  1. Episode format . Every show has its own style, rhythm and structure. What does a typical episode of your show look like? What does a typical episode of your show look like? How does it naturally begin? How does it progress? How does it end? Does it regularly make use of stylistic flourishes like flashbacks, cutaways, voice-overs, or fantasy sequences? If so, what are the rules for their use? If you’ve created a game show or competition-style reality show, what are the rules? How is the game played? How are the players judged, eliminated, and/or rewarded? You need to include all these details not only to sell the series, but to provide a guide to writers and showrunners if and when it goes into production.

RPG campaigns offer perhaps two analogues to the episodes of a TV series: the session and the adventure.

Organising the sessions (i.e. arranging a schedule that the players can all commit to, finding a real or virtual assembling-place where everyone can be comfortable and insulated from distractions, and getting them all to the place at the time and in a convenable mood) is neither unimportant nor trivial. But it’s not related to Ury’s point and it is somehow in a different sort of sphere than the rest of the items in this series. So, without implying that scheduling and hosting are anything less than the sine qua non of running a campaign, I shall let this go by with but a plaintive wail: “why does this have to be so difficult?”

What does a typical episode of your show look like? How does it naturally begin? How does it progress? How does it end?

What Ury is talking about is not the broadcasting schedule but the format of content of an episode. This is strongly influenced by #3: Structure. If you have a single continuous thread running through a long adventure or an indefinite but continuous campaign, then the breaks between sessions will divide it into chunks or perhaps even acts or chapters. There might be good places and bad places to make those divisions, but the chunks might not have any structure, and the acts though possessing structure are unlikely to share a common one. I think that if you are planning a miniseries campaign as a long adventure in multiple acts it is best to decide what those acts will be and how to kick each one off. Only if you are planning a completely episodic campaign or a campaign serial adventures with an overall arc are you going to need or use a template adventure.

That said, template adventures are terrific things, and a lot of the success of the big successes in RPG publishing is down to the fact that they explicitly or implicitly offered an obvious template adventure. Acting as a really specific Y in the formula “PCs are X who do Y in setting Z”, a template adventure helps the character-players to design a group of characters who will engages with each other and with the campaign’s material, not refusing adventure hooks for want of a suitable motivation. Knowing what the template adventure is empowers the character-players to work out what to do to get and keep things going, especially in the early part of an adventure before the GM has yet revealed a lot of the situation.

The template adventure that D&D offers is “the PCs go into a dungeon, deal with traps, solve riddles, kill monsters, and loot the rooms and bodies”. The template adventure that CoC offers is “the PCs investigate a strange and weird or horrible event that they have found out about. They encounter horrifying monsters or magic inspired by Lovecraft’s fear of foreigners and seafood, and either they are destroyed or they fight it to a temporary victory depending on whether the campaign is in pulp mode or purist mode”. In one of my police procedural campaigns the adventure template is “the PCs are called to a crime scene or such for the exposition of a crime. They search for physical evidence, canvas for witnesses, question the victims (if not a murder) and their family and associates, and investigate records to try to find evidence of financial motives, grudges, quarrels, or criminal associations. The investigation is not straightforward: they may face opposition, or have to persuade or coerce a witness into giving up information, or have to trick an unknown perpetrator into revealing themselves, or trick a suspect into revealing themeslves or evidence. Some criminals might not go quietly.”

Does it regularly make use of stylistic flourishes like flashbacks, cutaways, voice-overs, or fantasy sequences? If so, what are the rules for their use?

I’ve never seen any of these stylistic flourishes put to good use in an RPG. Not even flashbacks, which have an expository function in conventional fiction and are not [always] mere flourishes.

{There is one stylistic device in television that I would like to make more use of, which is the hard cuts in Law & Order that eliminate not only all the routine transitions but also the routine matter of getting into a scene and out of it. I waste too much time and kill too much momentum with that buffle. But that’s a technique thing, not a campaign-development checklist thing.}

You need to include all these details not only to sell the series, but to provide a guide to writers and showrunners if and when it goes into production.

That’s something that does translate from TV series to RPG campaigns.

  1. We GMs don’t have to sell our series to the studios and networks, but we do have to attract the participate not just of sufficient character-players, but of the right character-players, the ones who have the inclination to enjoy the campaign and the skills to make it work.

  2. We have to provide a guide to character-players as to what characters they ought to generate with their co-developer hats on, and what actions they ought to take in character with their co-writer hats on.

  3. We need to get a clear idea of a template adventure in our own minds (a) to be sure that we have a workable campaign idea and (b) to help us maintain a sufficient degree of consistency that the character-players are able to keep up the collaboration and recognise the cues when we are switching things up.

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Hmmm. It seems to me that the primary decision is like that in biology between segmentation, where an animal’s body is made up of self-similar units, and a unitary body plan, where the whole body is a single unit.

I’ve run a number of campaigns with various forms of segmentation or serialism:

  • Every session leads up to the player characters being involved in a conflict, as in my current Dragon Pass campaign, where the conflict is a fight
  • The campaign is divided up into two-part adventures, in each of which the first part is exposition and investigation and the second part is a big confrontation, as in Pulp Heroes, where again the big confrontation was a fight
  • The campaign involves multipart challenges, as in Whispers, where each challenge was a case for the PCs’ private eye firm to investigate, and the climax was the reveal or anagnorisis

“Serial” seems to be a somewhat ambiguous word, though; it can refer to a series of installments published at intervals, in which each installment is one episode in a larger story that has a cumulative plot, as opposed to a series of independent stories that could be read in any order. A lot of my campaigns are serial in that sense.

Music theory distinguishes through-composed and strophic works, which may be somewhat analogous.

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My general feeling is that sessions shouldn’t have any existence within the game, which may be why I dislike “per session” abilities. But Robin Laws has suggested that, for example, every PC should have a moment of awesomeness each session.

That said, I find it more satisfying if the session ends at what might be a scene break, particularly if it’s when the PCs are wondering what to do next. I’m not such a fan of cliffhangers.

Shadowrun’s template unofficially became “the PCs are hired to do a job, do it, get betrayed, then have to go after the original patron to clear their names”. It got common enough that players made jokes about it.

Gregor Hutton’s indie game 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars used flashbacks, as I recall it effectively as a sort of deferred character generation. You meet a problem in the “now”, and you invoke and narrate a flashback to explain how it is you have the ability to solve that problem. (There’s more to it than that.)

Indiana Jones had the red line across the map. That’s not a terrible approach to travel, unless something’s going to happen during said travel.

I’d add a point 4: at least some of us write for publication, so we need to explain for other GMs the sort of adventures that we see as likely to happen in this particular campaign setting.

The TV model would distinguish “serial drama”, with continuing plots, which for many years basically meant soap operas, from “episodic drama” in which each episode is a story in itself. (I agree, those aren’t necessarily clear terms, but they’re the ones people use.) As I trace the history of TV, Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer forced buyers to accept that non-soap-opera drama didn’t need to be episodic, didn’t need to be just as comprehensible if you show it out of order or try to catch a random viewer who’s scanning across the channels.

(Do people still do that? My model has always been “I want to watch X, I watch X, I decide what do to next” rather than watching whatever’s on.)

So even a fairly modern show that’s basically procedural and episodic tends now to have something like a season big bad or other through plot giving it elements of the serial nature. I think that’s the model I tend to use: there needs to be some sort of immediate resolution every session or three, but there should also be an ongoing story which some of those immediate resolutions tie into.

Classic D&D dungeon-bashing tends to make the only continuing element the PCs themselves: another day, another dungeon. But of course one can build out from there. I’d argue that Call of Cthulhu is at its best in the one-shot, where there’s no need to keep characters alive or functional.

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Hold My Order Terrible Dresser, the deep dive history nerd podcast of WKRP in Cincinnati observed that the writers were aiming at an audience “pleasantly stunned by beer”. There’s also discussion of TV guide from the position of a regular reader at that time.

I think what’s happened is that it’s gone from very hard to deliberately consume broadcast television (plan with a print product, record to VCR eventually) to slightly easier (plan with DVR record with DVR) to completely different format (stream sometimes starts the next episode when you don’t want and it takes effort to stop it).

I think a power of rpgs is they can proceed at a consensus pace for the table. I think many problems with railroading are the gm wanting the game to go at their pace and ignoring the rest of the table. Sometimes folks want to burn down content. Sometimes folks want to interrogate an npc that catches their eye.

This may be why the “casual gamer” discussed occasionally in the typology is a puzzle. Having someone at the table just enjoying being there is tough to grok for the folks there to take lead off the board, through combat or moving a communal or individual PC narrative.

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Pacing is really hard. I’ve read a lot of GM advice that says some variant of “keep things moving, don’t let the players drift off into conversations about other things”, but sometimes that’s just what the group needs, especially after a moment of high tension. And some groups simply like to go faster than others; the Wednesday-night Cambridge group, all of whom are experienced role-players and know each other’s styles fairly well, will burn through material about twice as fast as a pickup group at a convention.

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Your general feeling my be more purist than practical. There is a certain force to the argument that every game session ought to give every player something worth coming back for another dose of.

That said, I find it more satisfying if the session ends at what might be a scene break, particularly if it’s when the PCs are wondering what to do next. I’m not such a fan of cliffhangers.

Nor am I. They are especially awful when players cannot or will not commit definitely to attending every session.

I’d add a point 4: at least some of us write for publication, so we need to explain for other GMs the sort of adventures that we see as likely to happen in this particular campaign setting.

Fair enough. I have not been thinking of such a wide scope for this discussion.

The TV model would distinguish “serial drama”, with continuing plots, which for many years basically meant soap operas, from “episodic drama” in which each episode is a story in itself.

Steven Bochco compromised that distinction about 1980, in Hill Street Blues and other series following its success.

So even a fairly modern show that’s basically procedural and episodic tends now to have something like a season big bad or other through plot giving it elements of the serial nature. I think that’s the model I tend to use: there needs to be some sort of immediate resolution every session or three, but there should also be an ongoing story which some of those immediate resolutions tie into.

This is I think what Ken Hite calls “the dread Bochcoisation”.

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Yes, but on the other hand one of the well-known causes of writer’s block is that conflict is aversive, and that writers become averse to dealing with scenes of crisis. This is also a known cause of unwarranted flashbacks. I have noticed the same tendency in role-players, that they often tend to drift off into irrelevancies and indecisively circular arguments as a way of procrastinating scenes of intense conflict.

The group may need conversation about other things after a moment of high tension, but in the approach to a moment of high tension they need you to hold their feet to the fire.

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That is analogous to the proper use of flashbacks in conventional narrative, which is deferred exposition of character. The right time to flash back is when a character is about to do something that is not consonant with their character so far established, and which for some reason you cannot edit in to an earlier point in your draft (such as because it took place before the initiating incident of the plot).

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Yeah, I think I must have missed the episode in which he actually explained why he thought it was a bad thing.

Fair, though sometimes they’re simply enjoying the fantasy shopping and I don’t like to push against that.

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