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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1316971" data-attributes="member: 63">I was inspired to post this thread after watching last night's episode of Angel and discussing it here and on the boards.  See, last night's episode was the first in six weeks, and it was one of those quirky episodes that looks at the show from a different angle.  Instead of focusing on the main cast, it focused on a side character, and pushed the leads into the background.Now, what my friends and I have decided is that, if this had happened next week, we wouldn't have minded, but because it came after a long hiatus, we were generally disappointed in the episode (not me, actually; I loved it, but most everyone else was peeved).  See, when you come back to a serial story that you've been away from for a little while, you want to come back in on something familiar, but cool.If the show's a comedy, you don't want to come back on a serious episode, though having one such episode during the season isn't such a bad thing.  If the show has a sexist womanizer and lots of hot chicks, your show's regular viewers are probably interested in hot chicks, and they will watch the show primarily for that.  If you have several episodes with hot chicks, and then one without any (but for a good reason), the audience will probably trust you, because they know that even if this episode isn't what they're used to, eventually, the hot chicks will come back.  When they're relaxed, they're more likely to accept something that's different.This works just the same for RPGs as it does for television series.  I just got back from Christmas vacation, and I'm going to have my first D&D session of the new year.  Now, this particular campaign tends to have lots of fighting, villains with great powers who threaten the world, and sorcerous bad guys who get taken down a notch or three by the mostly non-spellcasting party.  Thus, I'm going to have all those things in the first session, assuming the party doesn't completely throw me a curveball.This is the third season of the campaign (each season being about 4 months of games, or 10 to 12 episodes), and I tend to wrap up the campaign at the end of Spring because I and many of my players are graduating.  I know this is my final season, so this first episode has to set a strong course for the rest of the games.  I need to stick close to formula, but throw in enough cool stuff to make the campaign really kick into high gear.I think I've got it handled, but I just wanted to know if anyone else here has insights or advice on the overall pacing and style techniques in campaign-long storytelling.  I hope this thread doesn't die off quickly like my last attempt at something deep.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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