This is from my own blog. I’ve had some ideas kicking around in my head that I needed to get out, but more than that, I wanted to get them in front of other experienced game masters to get further insights. Consider the post as the result an argument I’ve been having with myself.
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Good stuff!
I think there’s a third option that is definitely not as common as either (and rarely overtly supported by most games): a long campaign that is effectively made up of one-shots.
Balancing the two is really a plate-spinning act though. Go too far in one direction and your individual “episodes” don’t actually feel episodic, more like acts in a single story. Too far in the other direction and it’s just a series of one-shots with no coherent big-picture tying them together except for the recurrence of certain people/locations.
I think we’re equally short on good examples of this in other media (probably because it’s not actually easy to do!). Serialized films like Star Wars (at least Lucas’s original vision) might be the biggest example. Some TV shows like Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 did okay at it for at least some of their runs, but it can be hard to continuously thread the needle without drifting towards one or another pole. (It’s not lost on me that these examples are all war dramas; there might be something to that in the way we narrativize wars and their individual battles and the way they relate to each other. Food for thought, at least.)
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I appreciate your thoughtful response! There is so much variety in how games and game masters deal with the pressures of long adventures. The episodic adventure series is another means of mixing the advantages and disadvantages of long and short adventures. Another framework with similar results are short-medium-long character arcs, or A-B-C plots. I know this best from its use in the Star Trek TV series. Depending on how they are managed. An episode might be more horror themed, taking on the consequences and benefits of a one shot, but probably not safe to send the highest ranked officers. I personally would consider running a more Westmarches style adventure with multiple characters per player, sending in the red-shirts for some shorter adventures. For me, the point is to make sure the mechanics, story, and group understanding all align instead of fighting each other.