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Chekhov's Gun and the Hickman Revolution- What Type of Campaign Do You Run?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8852073" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I've run both episodic games and adventure paths, and both styles have their advantages. </p><p></p><p>The main advantage of an episodic game where there isn't a strong overarching story, just a series of largely unrelated adventures, is that the players and player characters are under no time pressure. They are free to pursue their own stories, and in particular this gives you as the DM more opportunity to pull on the hooks in the player backstories. </p><p></p><p>However, there are limits to that. As the size of the party increases, the less fun it can be to have player's pursuing their own goals because the rest of the group may not have buy in on the individual player's story, since well, it is about that player and that player will take the lion's share of the spotlight. There is also a big chance you end up with a split party which can be a real headache. There are ways to handle that and I've been in a campaign that did, but it's an enormous amount of work for the DM - more than most DMs can handle. </p><p></p><p>The main advantage of an adventure path is it keeps everyone on the same page. It's also much easier to prep for than a true sandbox, though probably not that much different than an episodic game. Also, for the most part it makes for much bigger and more epic story beats than all but the longest running most epic episodic games where you eventually find the adventure the players all want to have. If you follow him, you can see that in Matt Mercer's games he gets to fire off his well-planned Chekov's Guns. Well, I've fired off my own well-planned Chekov's Guns and when you get the story beats right it's amazing for everyone involved. They can out magnitude the best planned episodic story beats ("Come here... cutter.") just by the amount of interaction you've had with NPCs prior to pulling your story twists. You can see that by how well received Dragon Lance was when it first came out.</p><p></p><p>The problem is that if the players/PCs believe that they are "saving the world", they really never have anything better to do. You don't have as much opportunity for side quests and players pursuing their own goals. And of course, the other problem is that it takes at some point a lot of skill to run an adventure path that doesn't at points feel like it's on rails.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8852073, member: 4937"] I've run both episodic games and adventure paths, and both styles have their advantages. The main advantage of an episodic game where there isn't a strong overarching story, just a series of largely unrelated adventures, is that the players and player characters are under no time pressure. They are free to pursue their own stories, and in particular this gives you as the DM more opportunity to pull on the hooks in the player backstories. However, there are limits to that. As the size of the party increases, the less fun it can be to have player's pursuing their own goals because the rest of the group may not have buy in on the individual player's story, since well, it is about that player and that player will take the lion's share of the spotlight. There is also a big chance you end up with a split party which can be a real headache. There are ways to handle that and I've been in a campaign that did, but it's an enormous amount of work for the DM - more than most DMs can handle. The main advantage of an adventure path is it keeps everyone on the same page. It's also much easier to prep for than a true sandbox, though probably not that much different than an episodic game. Also, for the most part it makes for much bigger and more epic story beats than all but the longest running most epic episodic games where you eventually find the adventure the players all want to have. If you follow him, you can see that in Matt Mercer's games he gets to fire off his well-planned Chekov's Guns. Well, I've fired off my own well-planned Chekov's Guns and when you get the story beats right it's amazing for everyone involved. They can out magnitude the best planned episodic story beats ("Come here... cutter.") just by the amount of interaction you've had with NPCs prior to pulling your story twists. You can see that by how well received Dragon Lance was when it first came out. The problem is that if the players/PCs believe that they are "saving the world", they really never have anything better to do. You don't have as much opportunity for side quests and players pursuing their own goals. And of course, the other problem is that it takes at some point a lot of skill to run an adventure path that doesn't at points feel like it's on rails. [/QUOTE]
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