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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7419339" data-attributes="member: 29398">The problem with this is unless all the writing is being done by the same person or very few people (almost never the case in a TV series) or is mostly done as a block ahead of time (e.g. the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot) glaring inconsistencies are going to develop in both the backstory and the ongoing plot, and AFAIC this is unforgivable in what's supposed to be a professionally-written thing even though the end result can still sometimes be entertaining.X-Files was awful for this - by about season 5 as soon as you saw the writers' credit for an episode you'd know whether that episode would at least try to adhere to established canon and lore or throw it out the window.  And don't get me started on Star Wars...Can't speak to this specific series, as my sum total viewing of it might come to an episode and a half...maybe.Ignoring the bigger picture (overarching plot and-or internal consistency) in favour of the smaller (what's good for this episode), as it were.I look at it the other way: if the bigger picture is solidly nailed down ahead of time then it'll be much easier for the smaller picture to take care of itself on the fly.One difference between a TV show and a D&D session is that with a TV show it'll be edited down (or up) to fit an exact length of time.  In RPG play we don't have that certainty - we don't know how long each session might last and we also don't know how much will get done in any given amount of time within a session.This difference is big enough to almost make the comparison - not quite meaningless, as there's still something of use in it, but certainly way far from perfect.  We can't really look at a session as an episode, for example, as there's no way of knowing whether the plot-of-the-week will be resolved within one evening's play...or, conversely, whether it'll be resolved within a hour leaving the rest of the evening hung out to dry.One can, however, divorce episode and session.  From here, in traditional play one can then look at each adventure as an episode spanning two or ten or however-long-it-takes sessions of play; and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] suggests story-now can go the same way only substituting something else for "adventure".That said, I still don't see any of this as an excuse for internal inconsistency and bad (or no) plot continuity.Lan-"I wanna be in pictures"-efan</blockquote>

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