[copeab]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I view an RPG story not like a movie or book plot, more like a well-crafted TV series. Each session, more-or-less, stands alone, but there is a thread that ties them all together. As they reach the end of the arc/season, what the players have done and seen is shifted into more focus and little things that they’ve encountered make more sense.

I did this in a campaign set in my cyberfantasy* setting about 15 years ago. It was structured like a police drama** with a certain number of sessions constituting a "season". There were arcs for the season, the series and, most importantly, individual characters.

This works because hindsight is better than foresight. Having time between sessions allows me to review my notes and view things with hindsight, as well as, foresight. It’s then easier to tie together random events into important events that may not have been important at that exact moment, but maybe in the next session, the players discover that one of the prisoners actually knows something because they didn’t have time at the end of the last session to interrogate them.

I believe in minimal adventure planning. This is mostly because I found out early on that the more work I did on an adventure, the more I tried to force that content into the adventure.

At times, i have started a session with only things written down being the protagonist (rarely in any detal) and what he wants to accomplish (and why).

This also allows the players time to think about events and come up with their new plan of attack. It also gives them time to reflect on their characters and decide how they want to continue their story.

I've had players (especially in my Weird WWII campaign) mail me suggestions of things (person, location, or object) they'd like to see in the campaign (an advantage to running an alternate history campaign) and further develop.

As for the dice, I think they add suspense, not drama. While a very bad or very good dice roll might be memorable ***, it's not a story either. I have also rolled dice at times, frowned at the result, then continued on without comment, to see if I can get players worried.

* Inspired by Shadowrun, but less cyber and more horror

** Given that the PCs were police detectives, it seemed appropriate

*** I remember four over 35 years, including a mage getting a critical success (create fireball) and critical failure (throw fireball) on consecutive rolls.