Two people stare at a scarred moon over a gothic background

Let’s start from the beginning… what is the primary BBEG in all gaming tables? We all know that is scheduling. So the moment one of your players fails to come to one of the games, you know you will have to get the player up to date on what happened and give an explanation to why they weren’t present during the previous session with the players. What if I told you this could be easily solved?

A plethora of games already use it as the default way to handle sessions, but still, so many of us shy away from it for some reason. Several TV shows (especially cartoons, anime, and sitcoms) are episodic (with one or two chapters every once in a while having a “To be continued…”). Why is it that they did that and why might we want to apply it to our home games?

Episodic Narrative

Similar to a one-shot or a stand-alone movie, episodic chapters in some cartoons, TV series, animes, and more use a format of beginning, climax, and end. They are auto-conclusive, any episode can be seen without having seen the previous one and, in most cases, you should not have any problem understanding the narrative. In the mostly dead era of regular television, people would often just watch whatever was being aired on TV. If the chapter from the TV series being aired was too difficult to follow if you hadn’t seen the rest of it, most people would just change the channel and watch some other thing. In the streaming era we are in right now, that concept is pretty much dead by this point.

But why would we want to do this in our TTRPG sessions? It is a fact that if you end a session on a cliffhanger, not finishing the narrative, people will be excited to come back to the next session. I am not denying that. However, being the adults we are, it may often be difficult to find a good time for us to all be able to meet for one session. When you make your sessions episodic, you can allow for someone to miss a session and there is nothing wrong with it. You can even tie one person not being there into the narrative!

Episode Structure

Episodic structure refers to a narrative composed of loosely connected or self-contained incidents. Essentially, each scene stands alone as a distinct unit, while still contributing to the overall storyline of the work. Episodic structure is often utilized in television shows, where each episode tells a self-contained story while still advancing the larger series plot.
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The image features a graph showcasing how tension rises the more it approaches to the third act, to finally go down into a conclusion

Three Acts Narrative Structure

If we structure our sessions in three acts, it will look something like this: the first one is the exposition, where a villager or the mayor of the town gives us a mission to take. Then comes the rising action or climax, in which the characters are sent to investigate a farm that appears to be haunted, only to find out there is a secret lab filled with traps below it. Lastly, for act three we reach the falling action, or finale, when we find evidence that the lab belongs to the town’s police officer’s daughter, and you have to chase her down in an epic chase concluding the story with a final epic fight. Sounds rad, huh?

This format is studied to easily hook the viewer, gamer, or listener, and that’s why we find it across all media. You can use it in all your sessions to achieve great success. However, doing so can lead to railroading the players and needing to do much more preparation. The GM needs to have great management of the flow of pacing in the game to achieve these (see Jennifer’s great article on how to handle time for running games at cons or an old article of mine for guidance on these). Running multiple one-shots can also help you get the hang of it, as one-shots are made to work like a single episode. Lastly, several games facilitate the whole episodic format way better: the Kids on… series of games, Brindlewood Bay, Agon, and Cantrip, just to list a few, excel at this.

The Larger Series Plot

Series that follow an episodic format still usually have an overarching plot going on in the background. Unless it’s something like The Simpsons, or South Park where a character’s death rarely means anything, there usually is a story going on in the background. Supernatural, or Gravity Falls, just to list two episodic series I am watching at the moment of writing this, follow that same format, with the overarching narrative having me come back again and again willing to know what is going on. However, at the same time, I know that if I pass 2 weeks without seeing a chapter I can easily jump back into the narrative without the need for a recap.

Brindlewood Bay has mechanics for the game work exactly like that, with the grandmas solving small cases, but encouraging the GM to have at least 2 details of the big plot happening involving Lovecraftian secrets or conspiracies to be thrown per episode. You can do this with any game if you plan ahead enough, and I can guarantee there is great fun to be had from it, coming from experience. It can also be a fun minigame having the players name the episode at the end of the session.

Conclusion

As stated, episodic narrative has a bunch of benefits, and can be a fun change from the usual style you are used to. Grab a one-shot adventure, tie it into the overall narrative, and get your players to play in a series of self-contained episodes leading to a bigger narrative. You can have a “To be continued…” thrown every once in a while, but as a personal challenge, why not try giving an episodic campaign a chance in your game of choice?

 

Have you ever run an episodic campaign in your home games? What are your thoughts on it? Do you have any additional pros or cons about them that I didn’t list here? Let me know in the comments below so we can keep the conversation going!