Episodic Play

It's probably obvious that I've been on a bit of an Old School kick lately. The vast majority of my recent posts consist of dungeon tiles or play reports from my Old School-style Mythic GME/Risus game. If that's not enough, my blog roll features many iconic voices of the OSR community. But here's the thing: while I'm in the midst of an Old School crush, I still love playing in the New School mode. And by New School, I'm referring to cinematic-episodic adventures with heavy GM involvement in the plot, where pacing is everything, and featuring a definite beginning, middle, and end to stories.

This past Saturday's session of Slaying Solomon was a perfect example of everything I love about episodic play. While I'm dipping my toe into the sandbox format in my Gurps: Knights of the Astral Sea and Risus Pirates vs Vampires, Slaying Solomon could never be run in such a manner. I'm a firm believer that a roleplaying game based on a TV show should be structured like a TV show - right down to the classic Teaser + 3 Act structure. When preparing for the session, I started (as I typically do) with how I wanted to conclude the episode. In this case, I was aiming for a harrowing dungeon crawl inspired by Willet's delve beneath Joseph Curwen's farm in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Though I started with the conlusion, I do want to be clear that I didn't script the scenario in rail-road fashion. Other than setting up a definite Teaser scene to kick things off with a bang, I had only vague ideas of how the party would reach my desired end-game. I had a list of clues and interesting encounters in my head that I could activate as needed to gently (nor not-so-gently) guide the characters in the right direction. I also had a  motivated NPC running around in the background persuing her own agenda. By looking at the clock (our game sessions are four hours in duration), I could tell when to initiate an act transition or push towards the final confrontation.

I realize that this is not typically how things are done in the OSR. That's cool since I'm only an OSR groupie anyway. The key thing about episodic gaming, though, is that it is perfect for self-contained one-shots. I use this style of play for convention games that I run and for games (like Buffy) where each session should tell a complete story. As I contemplate more experiments in Old School play, I wonder how my skill at running New School games will prove beneficial. Almost certainly, I'll probably wind up with some kind of hybrid style.