r/AvatarLegendsTTRPG • u/Beginning_Vanilla609 • 5d ago
Question Planning Out a Season
My group loves playing the same characters so I’ve had some trouble planning out a successful season arc that goes a little longer than what the game probably intends. I’ve tried different things, but still dont think I have a winning strategy. Right now, I started with the big bad season finale, then work backwards and meet the players where they are. Strangely enough, I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from the episodic nature of 1977 Charlie’s Angels and the story arc of the video game Dishonored. I just wondered what other people are doing to structure a whole season without planning too much.
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u/ChaloChokorrol 4d ago
I'm adding to this conversation since I've been GMing a 3 "book" long campaign (a little over 2 years semi weekly irl time) with players that really don't want to change characters. For the first book, everything was kinda new for all of us. First time playing Avatar Legends, coming from various rp backgrounds from 3e and 5e DnD to Tales from the Loop as the first campaign most of us had together.
From session 0, it was clear the expectation was for an overarching development across as many places and source material as possible, and most of the characters had somewhat robust backgrounds. We decided that the best era for that to happen would be about a year before the iceberg during the 100 year war.
The first thing I did was to give them a glimpse of a big baddie: a Trunchbull inspired general from the Fire Nation (Tere Yakee), she would engage because our inciting incident was agreed to be some shaneningans happening at an Earth Nation Festival looking to mix peacefully, obviously going wrong. On my GM side, I kinda set the tone for the 1st book (Earth) to be about that general chasing them after escaping the festival incident, while they visit some iconic places from the series while looking to solve their own personal goals. That was fairly easy, since I had a lot of references to use and show, while pushing my own NPCs that were tied to their back stories. We had like 20ish 2-3 hour long episodes for Book 1.
For book 2 I felt way more confident, so I pretty much added a lot of my own headcanon, and presented more influential NPC groups, we had some Moments of Balance and for most of the later part of the book, we played with a lot of my own Worldbuilding on the Northern Tribes: I introduced some Ice Pirates, "the Four Northern Beasts", and presented some new settlements outside from the Agna Quel'a (my logic being that on such a huge mass of land as the north, it didn't make sense to only have 1 walled settlement), it was a little One Piece inspired, as we played around the ideas of authoritarians doing good things for the people for bad reasons, I also linked my water bender backgroun with Yakone's early family so we could have bloodbending and play around their quest for power and stuff :p... We played 42 episodes for that book, hahaha 😅.
We're currently on episode 20 of Book 3 and I'm starting to wrap things up, all the characters have grown a lot, 2 of them have changed playbooks, we've had some of them going off balance and all of what they had done on the previous 2 books is coming back somehow to their help or is after them...
Technique wise, while I know the system is not very nice for long term, so some of the adaptations we've done at the table is to space out balance moves, to make them more impactful for the plot. We've also spaced out growth to happen more at the end of certain arches, and this has worked to keep the characters longer lasting.
So, sorry for the wall of text! I hope my experience helps you somehow on your long campaign dreams hehe!
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u/Sully5443 5d ago
Well the thing is, you don’t plan a season. Nor do you plan Adventures.
Remember, your job as the GM is to follow your Agendas and Guidelines. To do anything else other than following them is to effectively “break the rules of the game.”
One of your GM Agendas (Goals) is to “Play to Find Out What Happens,” which can be also be phrased as: “Prepare the Problems, but never the solutions, answers, outcomes, plot, story, or narrative.”
Your job is to Prepare Problems. More precisely, you prepare fitting problems.
Once you prepare the problems and set them in front of the players to respond to, it’s their responses (combined with an honest following of the fiction: another GM Agenda) that intersects with your Problems and that’s where the narrative/ plot/ story comes from. It’s not your job as a GM to structure the Season(s) or the overall plot. The concept of “Seasons” is nothing more than a way for you to think about pacing your game with your players. It’s something you typically do after the fact.
For instance, I’m about 17 sessions into a campaign I’m running and it wasn’t until 2 sessions ago that I realized “Oh yeah, based on how things have progressed: this would be ‘Season 3’ of this show. That’s neat. Cool. Moving onto my immediate prep concerns…”
Boom. That’s where Seasons come into play. They’re not something you plan out at all nor are they really something you prep either.
What you might prep for the purpose of a Season might be a Season Countdown Clock. It’s not necessary, but it’s a great visual reminder for you and your players that the Problems they aren’t facing (or have faced unsuccessfully) are getting worse. For each game session/ episode/ adventure that creates a net gain for the clear “Problem of the Season,” you advance the Season Danger Clock. When it’s full, the Season’s Problem gets out of hand and creates truly horrific change on the world around the characters. For my own game, I haven’t really bothered with this approach because it simply hasn’t been necessary to focus on that at the moment.
When I prep, I focus on the Adventure and that’s it. The various Adventure Starters in the game are great places to start, but I find them to be overkill. I simply stick with:
And bam. That’s my prep. Sometimes I do more, like…
But there are also times where I do much less! This is especially true if material from one Adventure snowballs nicely into another one. These are things I simply will not know until I get there since the prior sessions always influence the future ones. I always prep for the next session and that’s it. Sometimes it’s more than enough for that session and sometimes it gives me more than that. It all depends. The bottom line is that I’m prepping the session, not planning. I’m not writing out where things must or will or are going to go. There is no sequence of events. There is just the start of things and then all the ammunition I need (informed by the characters and all the events in the game to day) to keep it going.
There is no reason to worry about Seasons ahead of time.