Reorienting campaign design

I run a pretty fast and loose, dramatic rules-light game. In the past, I've used novels as my model for designing the story, how I was introducing characters, and (of course) the pacing. This meant that the campaign was spread out over 20-ish sessions, each dropping more and more information and drawing the players deeper and deeper into the plot. By the middle, the players had a fairly lengthly glossary of who was who and what was where, and a great deal of character development had occurred for each. The final session was normally a massively important climax, followed by a little "hey, the world's still here" denoument.

That's not going to work anymore.

Right now, I'm a little too far away from the players to have such long games - if I want something to finish properly, then I need stories that get to the point swiftly and resolve swiftly. Still, they have to feel important, the room for character interaction has to be there - and the players have to care. Thus, instead of using a novel as a structural base, I'm going to try to use the feature-length film as my model (plays and so forth are fine for source structures as well).

Has anyone done this and have tips on how to proceed? Does anyone know of good articles for writing campaigns - not just adventures - that are highly self-contained and resolve properly?

I did a similar campaign plan once. I essentially broke it down to 3 movies for the whole campaign. 3 acts per movie, 3-5 scenes per act. Each scene would usually take anywhere from 30 minutes to over 90 minutes if it was combat heavy. Probably 2/3 of my scenes involved either overcoming an obsticle or combat and 1/3 straight roleplaying. Each "Movie" and it's "sequels" were connected but self contained. My group finished up at around 12th level and moved on to a new campaign. It was great fun, I would suggest watch a couple of movies to identify the acts, or better yet get a hold of some scripts for movies and look at the structure. You should be able to find some online. The first 3 Star Wars movies are a good barometer for structure.

rycanada said:

Has anyone done this and have tips on how to proceed? Does anyone know of good articles for writing campaigns - not just adventures - that are highly self-contained and resolve properly?

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Stargates work well for this kind of thing. You basically need some kind of bungie cord to snap your players back to the starting point at the end of every game. Then it's pretty easy to link the self-contained adventures together in a more traditional manner.

I considered stargates / starship travel / etc, but I think it would have more of a "weekly episode" feel. I"m hoping for something with a little more impact - and without so much "my character is X cool now, I want him to be X+1 cool for next episode"

Just keep the story arcs small. Three games to a mini-arc. Three mini-arcs to a main story arc.

Yeah, I have a similar problem. I am used to nice complex games, but we don't play enough and my more encyclopedic players moved away...

Right now, I am just trying to simplify during my up front design. Where before I might have made 10 things that needed done to resolve a story arc, I try to cut a third of them out and make another third coincidental or obvious.