Something I’ve noticed for years is that serialized narratives with a lot of complexity and moving parts have a tendency to bloat up: You look at the first season of a TV series or the first two dozen issues of a comic book and there’s a ton of stuff happening and a lot of progress seems to be getting made… and then a couple years later it seems like the pace of everything has slowed to a crawl and it takes three or four or five times longer for anything to happen.
Sometimes, of course, this is just because the writing has gotten sloppy: You cut some corners to make a deadline and release something that’s not as tight as you would like. You realize that nobody seems to have really cared about the sloppiness of what you released and so you give yourself permission to be a little more sloppy in the future.
But I’ve just realized that there’s something else going on here and it can be explicitly quantified.
Imagine that a given multi-episode plot thread in a TV series takes 40 minutes to resolve. Assume each episode of the series devotes 75% of its time (30 minutes) to the primary plot of the episode and 25% (10 minutes) to developing these multi-thread plots. Assume a new multi-episode plot thread gets introduced every 3 episodes and equal time is given to each one. What happens?
- EPISODE 1: Plot A +10 minutes.
- EPISODE 2: Plot A +10 minutes (20 minutes total)
- EPISODE 3: Plot A +5 minutes (25 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (5 minutes total).
- EPISODE 4: Plot A +5 minutes (30 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (10 minutes total).
- EPISODE 5: Plot A +5 minutes (35 minutes total). Plot B +5 minutes (15 minutes total).
- EPISODE 6: Plot A +5 minutes (concluded). Plot B +3 minutes (18 minutes total). Plot C +2 minutes (2 minutes total).
- EPISODE 7: Plot B +5 minutes (23 minutes total). Plot C +5 minutes (7 minutes total).
- EPISODE 8: Plot B +5 minutes (28 minutes total). Plot C +5 minutes (12 minutes total).
- EPISODE 9: Plot B +4 minutes (32 minutes total). Plot C +3 minutes (15 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (3 minutes total)
- EPISODE 10: Plot B +4 minutes (36 minutes total). Plot C +3 minutes (18 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (6 minutes total).
- EPISODE 11: Plot B +4 minutes (concluded). Plot C +3 minutes (21 minutes total). Plot D +3 minutes (9 minutes total).
In actual practice, obviously, some of these plots would be ignored for several episodes and then given more screen time when they come back. And the actual amount of time devoted to each plot would vary. But you can see what happens: Early on there’s a limited number of focal points and they rapidly accumulate the time required to resolve them. But because you’re introducing these arc-plots at a rate slightly faster than they can be resolved, the number you’re juggling gradually increases over time (which further reduces the rate at which they’re resolved).
The key thing to understand here is that the bloat isn’t the result of the writing on a series changing: The bloat was there the entire time. It just took awhile before the symptoms of the disease became noticeable.
One TV series that seemed to largely avoid this problem while also enjoying the benefits of arc-plotting was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The technique they used seems relatively straight-forward: They limited the number of arc-plots they introduced in each season and made sure that most or all of them were resolved by the end of the season. As a result, when they launched season 6, for example, they didn’t have any more balls in the air than they did when they were launching season 3.
A few days ago my Ptolus campaign had a 100 Session Review to reorient the group as we get ready to launch into the next hundred sessions. In reviewing our campaign journals for the first hundred sessions, however, I noticed once again how much the PCs seemed to accomplish in the first dozen or so sessions of the campaign and how everything seems to take much longer in the more recent sessions. But when I drill down and actually look at any given session, it’s not that there’s less stuff happening: It’s just that there’s more balls in the air.
I don’t know if I would necessarily change anything in the current campaign. But the example set by Buffy in controlling the pace at which new arc-plots are introduced in the campaign is something I’ll be keeping in mind for the future.
Most TV shows are brought to life via plural design by committees and competing interest. Sub-plots and side plots are added ostensibly to appeal to various segments of the audience (to build it up) and functionally pushed forward by various interests in the studio. Behind the scenes politics also are a major influence on the developing story, for instance – There was a major character destined for a long life in a multi-season show, she had an enormous ego and a couple other prominent people on the show threatened to quit, rather than deal with her. Character was murdered at the season finale, in effect firing the actress portraying her. Talk about story getting away from the creator.
Of course, there are prominent literary authors, who thrive on bloat. Alexandre Dumas didn’t keep track of his dozens and hundreds of characters, once brought a dead character to life, and as an aide – he created a paper doll for each character in his world and kept them on his writing desk. When a character got killed, he crushed the paper cutout and threw it into the fireplace. Then you got modern literary authors, such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, who believed in massive tangled storylines no pop writing instructor from writers digest would advocate, John Barth, at least, made it look like he was rambling, but in reality kept a very detailed accounting of all the sub plots and side stories, and weaved them into massive manuscripts the way Iranians weave Persian rugs. Don Delillo, belongs to the same bloat school of writing. His Underworld did not do much for me, but it got critical acclaim.
Another good example of this phenomenon is the Wheel of Time series.
It starts out with a relatively simple plot and then begins introducing new ones left right and centre. The end result was that the number of books needed to finish the story grew and grew and each book became less satisfying as you had to wade through so many plots that there wasn’t much sense of progress.
I feel that the Song of Ice and Fire series is hitting a similar point with similar results.
I hadn’t thought about it in such defined terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why breaking things up into “seasons” is such a common thing to do in serial shows and even games.
I could stop my self while reading your post to make a parallel with your Node Based Campaign/Scenario Design.
The conclusion I see, to prevent the bloat is to simply add Funnels in your Layer Cake.
Each Funnels would act like Buffy’s End of Seasons mile stone to tie up loose ends and prepare for the next “season”.
I feel like, largely by necessity, the Pathfinder adventure paths are pretty good at this. Because the authors are working simultaneously off an outline, any new plot thread you introduce can’t be carried over into the next author’s book.
It ends up working a lot like Buffy, with most plot threads getting cleaned up by the end of a given volume.
Cheers!
Kinak
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