I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty and prematurely bald Lex Luthor.
The character creation mechanics for Smallville (the game) are unlike most roleplaying games. You can't just sit up in your bedroom rolling dice until you get the perfect badass, or even sit up min-maxing point allocations to design the perfect badass. Oh, there are powers and skills to be bought, but the process that took Brian and Tom and myself three or four hours with a big sheet of paper is the mapping of relationships among the main characters, important minor characters, and places in the setting.
In Smallville the Gamemaster doesn't create adventures by coming up with a new "Monster of the Week" for the players to confront; instead he picks one of the relationships on the map and figures out how to stress it. In short, Smallville is a soap opera roleplaying game, which just happens to involve people who are bulletproof and can fly. This is an interesting new dynamic for roleplaying game design, and it got me thinking about how we create stories for serial media.
There are two main paradigms for any kind of serial fiction (comic books, TV series, etc.). You can either do Monsters of the Week, in which the characters remain (relatively) static in their personalities and confront outside dangers. Or you can do Soap Opera, in which the characters mostly interact with each other. Monster of the Week series typically have a small cast of heroes, sometimes no more than a single protagonist. Soap Operas have much bigger casts, to allow for more interactions among them. Roleplaying games are mostly heroes facing Monsters of the Week, although the arrival of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade introduced Soap Opera elements which Smallville now places front and center.
I have been struck by the difference between 1960s fantastic dramas and modern shows on the same lines. On the original Star Trek, Wild Wild West, The Invaders, and even Lost In Space, episode summaries all began with the words "[The heroes] encounter a man who . . . " Indeed, they almost functioned as anthology shows, presenting a self-contained story which was resolved by the closing credits. This also meant they were great showcases for guest stars. Character actors like Alfred Ryder, Roger Carmel, James Gregory, Malachi Throne, Arnold Moss, Gene Lyons, William Campbell, Morgan Woodward, William Marshall, Michael Ansara, and dozens more would show up for an episode and chew the scenery.
Contrast that with modern fantastic dramas like Lost, Heroes, or, well, Smallville. There may be a monster of the week, but the important thing is the unfolding of the relations among the characters. (This also means that the modern series depend heavily on continuity, whereas the older shows could be run in random order.)
Is one style better than the other? I don't know. On the older shows the inability of the main cast to change, either as individuals or in their relationships, did put severe constraints on the writers. Every episode had to end with the "reset button" putting everything back the way it was.
But the newer shows have the same problem that the long-running afternoon soap operas faced: sure, characters and relationships change, but they tend to cycle back to a standard configuration and consequently whole plot arcs become essentially closed loops. Comic books went through the same evolution a few decades sooner: from single-issue stories to ongoing A, B, and C plots.
I'm not sure there is "an" answer to this problem, or if it's really a problem. People consume serial fiction because they are attracted to the characters, their relationships, and the setting. Changing that risks destroying the very thing that draws in readers and viewers. But audiences get tired of repetition, too.
Ultimately, I suppose, whatever keeps 'em coming back for more is the "right" answer.
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