Our current zeitgeist in storytelling are epic, longform adventures that span entire book, television, and film series… think Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lord of the Rings, ACOTAR, and the MCU. And while these epic stories are incredibly engrossing, are they the best default for our gaming tables?
In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question asking for our advice on running episodic adventures, which serves as our jumping off point to an excellent question by TTRPG influencer and Running the Game Dungeon MASTER, Matt Colville, of “How long should an adventure be?”
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3:40 DM Tony’s lead-off question… what is your table hungry for?
5:25 The classic Monster of the Week theme and DM Chris’ love of The X-Files.
7:25 Episodic Adventures can easily become a railroad.
8:25 How epic, longform stories are the current zeitgeist and how that affects the adventures we create.
10:15 Whether a longform campaign or a one-shot, every adventure needs to be self=contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
20:05 The issue of players remembering ALL the lore and information gleaned over longform adventures.
22:45 The adventure should be as long as it needs to be to feel complete.
27:40 The level of prep needed between short and longform adventures.
30:50 Creating episodic adventures even in longform adventures, like DM Tony’s Storm Kings Thunder and Journey to Ragnarok campaigns.
40:30 Final Thoughts.
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Having played Strahd once and DM’d it twice now, I disagree a bit that it is not a railroad adventure. It is really the ultimate railroad adventure – once you get to Ravenloft, you can’t get out! Sure, you can choose to go anywhere you want in Barvoia, but if you do that at 1st level you’ll just get your PCs killed. The trick with Strahd is how the DM force-feeds the group the very mandated path through the mod, while making it feel like they have choice.
This is very true, and something we’ve talked about many times. The problem comes when we look at “Sandbox” and “Railroad” as binary choices, and place value only on one and use the other in the pejorative. With something like CoS, it absolutely has the railroad feel by locking the doors behind you when you enter Barovia. But, it then offers a sandbox through the multiple adventures and choices that players make as they explore, Vallaki being a good example. One is not better than the other but it does require 2 things: player buy-in to the adventure you plan on running and player agency to approach the adventure as they see fit.