Running Roleplaying Games as Anthologies

This classic post first appeared on August 21, 2009.

A few years ago I got an idea in my head that I tinkered around with, but I was never able to make it work. Rather than doing a typical campaign, with ongoing stories about a group of characters, I wanted to run adventures modeled on a short story anthology format, where each story is connected by some sort of theme. Each story has Cthulhu, for instance, but one story might take place in the ancient past, another in the far future, the rest in different historical time periods. Maybe all the stories take place in Waterdeep, with different characters exploring different aspects of the city, or in different periods of its history. Maybe there’s a contrived plot device that holds all of the stories together, like the little girl and the Loc-Nar in the Heavy Metal movie.

Each story would be short, a single session or maybe even two adventures in the space of one session. Players would get to carry over experience points and even certain items and skills from one story to the next. They might be the same archetype from one story to the next, a city guardsman in the past, a cop in the present, space station security in the future, things like like that. That was the part that I couldn’t make work. While it could be fun to do a variety of settings and genres held together by some central conceit, I couldn’t figure a way to keep players invested when their characters changed for each story. I didn’t want to do a time-and-dimension hopping series, where the characters stay the same while the setting changes. I wanted to do an honest-to-goodness anthology.

For a while I considered doing a cap system, to let the stories move between game systems, but there was gamemaster prep to consider. I thought about writing a system to handle it, and took a stab at it, but the player investment problem kept arising. I’ve finally decided that if I ever do anything like this I want to use Primetime Adventures. Plan out a 5- or 7-episode series, assume that the players are using the same actor in each episode and have them create the actor, not the character, and then have that actor play different characters.