Do you prefer your adventures to be episodic or contiguous?

[Arilyn]

Buffy the Vampire style.

Mostly episodic. With occasional contiguous runs that pop up with some degree of regularity, allowing for fun at individual sessions but with occasional deeper plotlines that allow for character development. And every once in a while something/someone pops up from a couple years ago that you completely forgot about.

Exactly this.

 

[Gannaeg]

I prefer contiguous but my players are not crazy about campaigns (and the commitment it requires). So I play episodic and most of the time, my adventures are one-shots with different characters / players, taking plac ein different places at different times.

 

[overgeeked]

It’s most commonly referred to as episodic vs serialized.

Mixed but mostly episodic. Going serialized seems to push players towards doing slice of life, which is the single most boring thing I can think of. I din’t mind that occasionally in fiction from professional writers, because they know what they’re doing, ¿but around a gaming table? No thanks.

 

[Velderan]

It depends on the people involved, I guess. Continuous games work great when you have a table that can commit to playing on a regular basis so they can remember what the heck happened the last time they played and remember why they're supposed to hate the enemy they keep running into, but episodic is better for a table that might not have the same players each night.

When I first got back into playing 5e in a Curse of Strahd campaign, we had a few players that showed up at best every other session and aside from knowing Strahd was the bad guy, they often were confused about why someone was either our enemy or friend. This led to some weird roleplaying if they missed a session where an enemy helped us or someone we thought was an ally turned out to be an enemy. It made it harder for them because we typically played once a month for 6-8 hour sessions so a lot happened each time we played.

 

[Reynard]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer style.

This is, IMO, the perfect RPG method. Strong mosnter of the weeks stories, tied together with longer arcs, all contributing to a massive narrative.

Of course, with RPGs, much of this should happen randomly, procedurally, and organically based on everything from die rolls to player choices to GM mood swings.

 

[Umbran]

I like the idea of episodic campaigns but I always seem to slip into a continuous stream. Don’t mean to, it just seems to naturally fall that way.

I like both.

Some games, like, say Ashen Stars, are explicitly episodic in their design, and even give you rules for what the PCs do between episodes. The system was built specifically to model episodic fiction like Star Trek, so that makes sense for them.

Some games, like, say Shadowrun, are not so mechanically episodic, but with the mission-based approach to adventure design, tend to fall that way.

Other games are not written with an expectation, and can be episodic or not, or elide from being episodic for a while, into a continuous phase, and back again.

Can anyone name a game that is explicitly continuous, in which the GM skipping over "dull time" between episodes is strictly not a thing?

 

[The Soloist]

It depends on the genre:

For fantasy, it's contiguous. I'm beholden to the wilderness travel style, but the distances between point A and point B on my maps have gotten shorter over time. I no longer do 14-day wilderness travel treks. Two or three days is long enough.

For modern, it's episodic.

For sci-fi, it's a mix of both.

 

[Celebrim]

I've done both. Episodic has a huge hidden advantage of allowing more room for PC's to pursue their own stories, but not every group is really interested in that and linear stories do have nicely big stakes and can build up to very dramatic scenes.

 

[delericho]

The adventures and campaigns I write myself are always contiguous.

For published adventures, I want them to match the advertising: if you're selling me an adventure, I prefer it to standalone; if you're selling me a campaign, I prefer the segments to be contiguous. (Anthologies of adventures, such as "Quests from the Infinite Staircase" fall into that first category.)

 

[Breaking Star Games]

Maybe its just from all the TV shows I loved in the 90s and early 2000s, but there is definitely a special place in my heart for episodic with those season(s)-long stories. My profile pic gives a hint but Cowboy Bebop and Firefly are the stellar examples for me. It really does fit nicely with TTRPGs where you can't exactly binge multiple sessions easily - scheduling 3 hours a week is already tough! And you can more easily run the game when a player is absent without throwing out important plot points set up from last session. As an aside, how do you guys deal with it? Do you prep backup just in case? Or always have stuff for all players and just pivot the focus on what prep you use?

So having some mission that can be the main objective while we have other storylines and character development happening during is my favorite. I say all this but am champing at the bit to run Urban Shadows 2e and get more experience on more player driven and continuous storylines. US2e gets past the prep issue cleanly by just not prepping much at all and the GM just have a nice suite of tools for improvising.