#episodic storytelling

[tohakumaru]

(previous chapter)

stillness, like an unbroken curse. your trailing limbs cut a line in the sand like a cruel finger over milky adolescent skin.

the walk seems endless. the sun never comes up and the nomad maintains an impossibly even rhythm. after a while it feels almost too natural, too comforting, as if this is exactly what you're born to do.

---

and you know, darling? you're so beautiful. you wear death like an angel drowning in a sea of stars . have i told you i love you today? love you. love you. love you.

love you when the flesh falls off your bones and your soul leaks from the cracks in your skull.

---

you don't notice it, but the nomad starts to hum, softly at first, then louder, enough for you to make out that it isn't a melody but an airy cacophony of ringing, like bells on a fishing line in winter. and then you can taste it in the air, a pungent yet pleasant smell of burning that fills your lung with warmth. you arch up your neck to see a field spanning as far as the eyes can see. it is lined with perfect intervals of clothing lines, on which thousands of blankets hang burning, tongues of flames licking up at the dark sky as if reaching to swallow the stars in their grasps. there is no smoke.

the nomad signals you to stop, and takes off its cloak. you observe that its body is small and smooth, like that of a child, but proportions slightly elongated and with just a hint of deformations at the joints, like a bird ripped of its wings and forced to stand. you linger on the nape of its crooked neck, and find it strangely endearing. unperturbed by your gaze, the nomad leaves its belongings and raft by your side, and continues alone into the field of the burning blankets.

like a good dog, you lay down in the sand, waiting. your eyes glued to the fires, as their crackling smoulders soothe a fever you don't realise you have.

---

the sacrificial lamb pulled its mottling wool over your eyes dressed you in white linens and crossed your hands over your heart. lamentation is for those who can afford it, but that's alright now. lies don't hurt when you're dead. you lay your head on the altar it was the best sleep you'd ever had.

---

when the nomad returns its skin smells like coal and eyes glitter like diamonds. now it gazes at you, quietly. against all odds, you feel your heart break. you want to pull it into your arms and hold it against your chest. but i won't let you do that. mine. mine. mine. you shan't hold another being unless i allow it, and i only want you to hold me.

but there is no need for us to bicker. the nomad puts a stop to all that by gently placing a light sheet over your shoulder, careful to place the flesh and entrails and are constantly spilling from you inside the fabric.

this feels ceremonial, this feels like love.

read the full story up to date here

[maaruin]

Eight episodes per season works well for shows with a continuous plot, but not for episodic shows. I noticed that with the first season of The Mandalorian: It has three phases - episodes 1-3 is the setup, episode 4-6 is the status quo of the season, and episodes 7-8 are the conclusion. But in that configuration, setup and conclusion combined are longer than the status quo, which doesn't feel right. I think the status quo of an episodic show needs to last at least twice as long as setup and conclusion. So The Mandalorian Season 1 would have needed 15 Episodes.

Atla Book 1 has 3 episodes setup and 3 episodes conclusion, so it would need at least 18 episodes - it has 20.

In Atla Book 2 is somewhat difficult to parse in that system, because there are significant changes to the status quo at several times, which sort of counts as both. One possible counting: 1 episode setup (establishes Aang needs earthbending teacher and master avatar state, Zuko and Iroh leave the Fire Nation, Azula introduced), conclusion 2 episodes, and 3 status quo changes (The Blind Bandit - Toph joins team, The Library - Appa lost, invasion plan formed, Ba Sing Se as new destination, City of Walls and Secrets - Ba Sing Se works according to different rules); which makes 6 setup and conclusion episodes again, and the Season has again 20 episodes. It feels right in length.

Atla Book 3 has 1 episode setup, 2 episodes status quo change (Day of the Black Sun pt. 1 and 2), and 4 episodes conclusion. That's 7, to feel right it would need 21 episodes and that's what it has. However, the second half feels to short, and I suspect that this is because there are too few episodes between the status quo change and the conclusion. Those two things have 6 episodes in total, with 6 episodes in between.

I see a similar phenomenon in The Mandalorian season 2: 1 episode setup (or maybe only the first scene of that episode), 1 status quo change (The Tragedy), 1 conclusion. Setup to status quo change feels right, but status quo change to conclusion feels too short.

So how long do you need between status quo change and conclusion. Atla Book 2 works with 3 episode change+conclusion vs 4 episodes in between. But Tales of Ba Sing Se may count as more, since it has 6 mini-episodes. Atla Book 3 second feels too short with equal length, but one of the in-between episodes is a two-parter which might only count as 1 episode feelings wise.

I do think The Mandalorian season 2 needed at least 3 episodes between The Tragedy and The Rescue. So currently I would say the phase between a setup-change, change-change, change-conclusion needs to be longer than the setup/change/conclusions on both its ends. Two-parters in that phase may count as only 1 episode, anthology episodes may count as several (though miniepisodes are probably not equivalent to full episodes).

The minimum season length for a tv show would be 6 episodes, if setup and conclusion can be completely handled in 1 episode each.

Does any of this make sense?

[mysticdragon3md3]

Oops No Plot: The Raw Power of Episodic Storytelling by LocalScriptMan

Plots come from challenging characters' beliefs.

[shorthaltsjester]

watching the sdcc panel and i am just very :) about how sweet their answers to “what are some of the micro moments from the game that have stuck with you the most over the years?” are. taliesin saying what the fuck is up with that which was the first like The Party Gets To Know Each Other moments of c3. travis saying asking his wife if he could kiss her in campaign. marisha going way back to the cannonball competition in campaign one. ashley choosing the beauyasha date but also just the silly goat noise matt made. liam adding onto that to compliment matt roleplaying grass so well and then saying his favourite moment was writing a story for laura and reading it to her as caleb for jester. and then matt saying that was his answer, and that his favourite moments of the game are when they find ways to give gifts to each other whether tangible or not. and sam saying his favourite moments have less to do with the story and is more so when he can just. see his friends across the table from him. when marisha perches and when laura and ashley are (badly) drawing dicks and liam saying he loves when sam sneezes and ashley tells him to stop it and just. yeah. they Are an extremely popular online powerhouse, but i’m so happy that they’re also friends building a world together out of gifts to and love for one another.

like i Am so enamoured with the characters and the world of exandria but the moments when you can feel the love that those people have for each other reach out from behind the stained glass of their performances (to steal a metaphor from brennan lee mulligan) are so extremely special and i am endlessly grateful that they decided to share their silly little home game with the world.

[elvyn]

Shinji because his scenes in the last episode were so damn cool

[dogfennel]

* 😚😳 *

[pulsingvoid]

not negating anybody's experience i know black sails is outstanding regardless of how or when or how quickly you watch it. but also, as a gay person who watched it in real time, you really had to be there. they introduce anne bonny and you know your pirate history so you KNOW she's a girlliker. she has a moment with max but youre not sure where it's gonna go. because it's 2014. you wait over a year for 2x01 and she and max fucking obliterate you with the sword drop kiss scene. all anybody is talking about in the tags is vaneeleanor. a few weeks later 2.05 drops and flint is not only textually gay and kissing a man but he is waging war on england, on all of civilization for taking away his male lover. you find this out after investing fourteen hours on this show that have spanned over a year and a half in your real life. not to mention the miranda stuff and silver's arc and mr scott and madi and the death march that seasons 3 and 4 feel like when you have no inkling of how it's gonna end. but you stick with it regardless because it's good and besides it's 2014-2017 and the only genre show with gay people in it is fucking... the 100? lol anyway. more gay people flock to black sails between seasons and the tag becomes more about the gay shit than vaneeleanor, thank fucking god, finally. you all dread the last season. you brace yourselves for the worst. you thank the stars this show airs weekly because watching even just two episodes together is too overwhelming. 4.08 airs. you cry. 4.09 airs. you cry. 4.10 airs. your life will never be the same. you cry so hard you catch a fever and have to stay in bed all week to recuperate. you know this was a once in a lifetime experience never to be repeated again but you can't help but hold every other show to this impossible standard.

[theweeklydiscourse]

Some Atla fans are deeply unwilling to engage with the fact that their beloved series may bear the marks of being written by two white men in the early 2000s. They can’t conceive that the show might’ve been anything less than perfect and that there are certain problematic elements within it that are consistently overlooked by the fandom at large.

[star-trekster]

Have you ever danced with the devil

In The Pale Moonlight?

[lottieurl]

the house. it watches every move you make

julia armfield, our wives under the sea / shirley jackson, the haunting of hill house / rainer maria rilke, rilke's book of hours / @kayleerowena, gravehouse / danez smith, quoted by saeed jones in how we fight for our lives

[navree]

i will say, john apparently having memory issues is genuinely putting me in arthur's headspace in a way nothing else has yet because i feel blind now too. i can't trust john's descriptions as factual, i can't know that we don't really know who noel is and that he's just a newcomer (and harlan voicing literally every character doesn't help at all), i can't even have a firm idea of what's going on, because the person i'm relying on to be my narrator, the same person arthur's relying on to be his eyes, is demonstrably no longer reliable (and for me as a listener it's actually worse cuz unlike arthur i know john's lying about something and that he's got an ulterior motive due to his deal with kayne that arthur is entirely unaware of). it's very good, and it also creates a sense of unease and dread which is good for a horror podcast.

[its-your-mind]

HEY. HEY.

HEY @re-dracula WHAT GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO HAVE JONATHAN ACTUALLY READING THAT PASSAGE OUT LOUD BEHIND SEWARD DESCRIBING THE SCENE, HUH? WITH THE TEARS IN HIS VOICE AND THE PAUSING AND THE SHORT LITTLE INHALES AND THE VOICE CRACKS? WAS IT TRULY NECESSARY??? I WAS ALREADY CRYING. I DIDN'T NEED THIS TOO. WHAT THE FUCK.

[2012throwback]

the Architects calling it the prophidian theodicy rather than the prophidian heresy is such a small amazing detail that delayed my second of remembrance/realization of what Matt meant just enough to make the reveal hit even harder

[centaurianthropology]

Why C3E51 worked so well (a DM’s perspective)

I have seen a lot of absolutely bananas critiques of C3E51 (thankfully not nearly as many around here, far more on Reddit, which I should not have visited).   And the ongoing theme of those critiques is that Matt should not have imperiled former PCs, and if he brought them in should have either done lengthy side-bars with those characters or let them win the fight against Ludinis and have a chance to take him out themselves, since they’re ‘god tier’ or ‘high level’ and that makes ‘logical sense’.  What these critiques really boil down to, IMO, are people who were really invested in the former campaigns upset that their faves didn’t get to do cool things, treating it more like a TV show than a game.  But even as a TV show, that would have been disappointing from a narrative perspective.  Because even in a TV show, this is a sequel spin-off show, starring new characters.  The story is about THEM.  And more importantly, the game is about the players and about telling their story.

So let’s break this down from a DM perspective.  How do you build a Kobiashi Maru situation for your characters?  For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Kobiashi Maru is a Star Trek term for a scenario designed from the jump to be unwinnable (Kirk beat it by creativity, but later admitted that he missed the point of it).  In Star Trek this was done to test what a future officer would do if faced with certain failure.  In a D&D game it’s a little more complicated.  Part of it is to set up the BBEG, put their plan in motion, and set the stage for the next leg of the game.  But it’s also to give your players, who are clearly into it, a darkest-hour scenario.  Not every player group is going to be into facing down the Kobiashi Maru, and it’s clear from the aforementioned critiques that a lot of them are on Reddit.  Power-gamers who always want to win are not going to enjoy this sort of storytelling, but players who are really into RP and working through difficult times and failures will eat this stuff up.  And this is absolutely the sort of table playing on Critical Role.  There is a level of trust there that can only be built after years of working together, and this was finally the moment when Matt could pay off years of planning and campaign-spanning set-up.

Matt carefully plotted the structure of this episode out to give maximum agency and impact to a party of dramatically under-leveled characters.  And they knew going in they were under-leveled.  This wasn’t a surprise, but a potential suicide run by people who knew they weren’t the heroes they needed to be, but were the only heroes in the right place at the right time to try anything.  So they came up with as good a plan as they could, and executed it fairly well, all things considered.  

They knew they couldn’t take on Ludinus directly (and this was a great way to demonstrate exactly how much he had planned and how long, to bring in elements from C2, hints we’ve had for years about Ludinis, only to reveal it went deeper than any of the characters could have imagined), so Matt gave them some winnable objectives.  This is a great way to keep the characters invested in an unwinnable scenario: the ultimate outcome may be beyond the characters, barring some insane genius or incredible rolls, but they can still help.  They can do something that will have a tangible impact on events and hinder the baddies enough to give them another chance at a rematch and a way to stop the apocalypse when they’re higher level.  So Matt gave them the batteries: take out as many as you can.  While this would not stop the ritual, I suspect that the more they took out the more Ludinis would have to drain his own power to make the key work, and the longer the process would take.  Knocking out the feywild key, as well as multiple power sources turned what would have been an instantaneous event if they had done nothing into a more drawn-out affair which, I suspect, could be stopped or even reversed.  It gave them a window to come back and demand a rematch.

Then we have the high-level PC allies, and how to play with those sorts of characters without pulling focus from the PCs.  Matt handled this very well, by having the players roll for their former PCs, taking the specifics of their actions out of his hands and letting the dice of the former players decide.  He also revealed that Keyleth’s involvement, and baiting Vax with Otohan’s permadeath poison, was key to Ludinis’ ritual, which was why she couldn’t just dive in and clean everything up.  But again, because of this story, it ties less back to Keyleth and more back to Orym.  That was the point of the attack on Zephrah, to get her attention by getting her to look into who did it and then coming to get some payback, but the little guy on the ground has always been caught in the middle.  Orym has been Ludinis’ unwitting pawn from the off, his family’s deaths merely a means to an end, and that is vicious and amazing set-up for character growth for him.  

Beau and Caleb had to be there by the logic of the story.  It didn’t make sense that Caleb would sit out a world-ending event orchestrated by a Cerberus Assembly member after spending years trying to take them down.  Beau would obviously go with him.  It also made sense that they would be the only two there, because they were scouting when Ryn got taken down, and after that were trying to keep a low profile.  Shit accelerated too fast for them to call in reinforcements.

Which is the in-story reason for them to be there, but isolated and vulnerable, making them useful allies and wildcards (who likely could have been more useful if ultimately failing as well, but failed early thanks to Liam and Marisha’s rolls).  But they were still outmatched.  I have no idea what the challenge rating of Otohan, Leliana, and Ludinis are, but we know Otohan was considered ‘beatable’ back in Bassuras.  That indicates she’s the lowest CR, particularly with the glowing weak-spot on her back.  But she can still wreck a level-20 PC if she gets the jump on her, which she did.  And that meant that she remained a massive threat.  Caleb and Beau were playing it smart, keeping to the shadows, but still got caught by Leliana.  Between dice rolls, careful planning, and some great enemy design, Matt really set up a team that could take on high-level players and win.  And he made it clear that Ludinis did not leave this to chance.  He has the best people he could muster after 1000 years of planning.  Nothing short of a miracle could have truly stopped them.

Which is why we cut back to Bells Hells.  Because ultimately this particular story isn’t about Keyleth or Vax or Caleb or Beau or any other former PCs.  This is about the current party being caught up in events much larger than them and having to rise to the occasion.  This is the story of the schmucks sent in to take out the batteries, but who have personal beef with the big bads.  Ludinis orchestrated the plan to attack Zephrah to bait Keyleth and draw out Vax, and Otohan carried it out.  And he used Orym as a pawn throughout all of it.  This makes taking them down, but especially taking Otohan down, the cornerstone of Orym’s personal quest.  Letting an NPC take her down would be taking away a critical part of his motivation and goals, which is an absolute no-no for a DM.  NEVER bring in a god-tier NPC and take away player agency or story beats.  Especially never have them resolve important player goals and backstory events!  Every NPC, even the powerful ones, are there to support the story the players are telling.  So of course Keyleth wasn’t going to take out Otohan.  Of course she wasn’t going to stop the ritual.  Beau and Caleb might have been able to do something more if Liam and Marisha hadn’t rolled so badly for them, but ultimately, they had to get caught or fail in another way.  

For the sake of gameplay, Bell’s Hells had to be the only functional team.  They had to be the ants that were beneath Ludinis’ notice long enough to really accomplish something.  And as much as it feels like they failed, they had minor victories: Laudna and Ashton took out more batteries, making Ludinis drain his own power to kick off the apocalypse.  They only failed to take out Otohan’s backpack by 2 HP, which showed them that she was an achievable goal in the future.  If they had rolled a little better, they probably could have taken her out entirely, which would have felt like a big accomplishment for them.  Imogen made her mother pause in her assault before doubling down.  This leaves open very interesting future beats for their interactions.  Can she ultimately redeem her mother or would she have to take her out?  Every step that Matt set up in this episode, from the reveals about Ludinis’ plans and Orym’s past, to Imogen’s interactions with her mother, to Chetney and likely Ashton finding themselves staring down their own backstories after the party split, was focused on this party, on getting them ready to step out of low-level play and advance.

And that’s the point of E51.  It’s not a climax of the story, but the ultimate set-up.  It’s putting all the pieces onto the board in a way that all the characters can now recognize.  Yes, unless the players came up with something genius, the apocalypse was going to kick off, but their actions slowed everything down to a place where it could be combatted.  Yes, the god-tier former PCs were always going to get neutered, because this is Bells Hells’ story, and you cannot have NPCs fix PC problems.  They might have been able to do a little more before this happened, but the dice rolled.

And it’s honestly good for the PCs how things turned out.  They have a clear objective, but are split up.  This gives them great incentive to level up, explore character backstory, deal with their personal shit, get stronger, and then come back to kick the asses of all three of these villains (or possibly redeem one, we’ll see).  Their powerful allies are now temporarily side-lined.  Keyleth is badly hurt and will need time to recover.  Caleb is collared and will need time to get that removed.  Beau is likely up and moving now, but will need to safeguard Caleb for a while.

The Bells Hells are on their own.  The Darkest Hour has come, and it’s time for them to rise up and go from nobodies to heroes.  This is their true call to adventure.  And as a DM, it was so cool seeing how Matt set up all the pieces over the campaign, only to pay them out in such a satisfying and motivating way in this episode.

[taikanyohou]

"To be honest, this whole time, his small facial expressions, his mannerisms, the way he seems a bit happy when I say something, his kind voice when he says it'll be a sunny day, all made me feel like an idiot. I hated how I felt I was the only one whose heart was racing every day."

MY PERSONAL WEATHERMAN (2023). Episode 3.

[amihyperfixatingagain]

As someone who went to school for theatre production and focused in scenic design, I just want to point out this moment in episode 5 of The Last of Us that just made my heart sing. I am a sucker for anytime scenic elements help tell the story. This is fairly early in the episode, when Henry is looking out the window and spots Joel shooting back at the KC Resistance members. 

It is just a reflection on the window but its placement portrays Henry as wearing the same superhero mask that he painted on Sam...

It’s fast and probably easy to miss if you’re not thinking about it, but it’s a moment of absolutely elegant visual storytelling. While Henry is unaware of the mask he’s wearing, Sam sees him as his hero all the time. And Henry is his hero, in so many ways despite “doing bad guy things”.

Again I’m a complete sucker for visual storytelling, especially moments like this, so fast, so subtle, and yet such an important look into the characters, without having to say anything.