Give Everyone A Spotlight: Lessons from Heroes

In my partner's continuing quest to expose me to all of the TV shows that I completely missed as a child, I've recently been watching the first season of Heroes. For those, like me, who were previously unfamiliar with the show, it is 1) very good, and 2) about a bunch of people with superpowers whose lives intersect over the course of the season when they try to stop a nuclear explosion from destroying New York. The show has different groups and shifting alliances between the various point-of-view characters, as each character tries to understand their new abilities and accomplish their personal goals as they're drawn towards this cataclysmic event. And except for the fact that our characters are mostly not together as a whole group for very long, this structure sounds a lot like the premise for a TTRPG. So today, I'm going to talk about my key takeaway from Heroes as it applies to your game table.

The Benefits of an Episode

In my multi-year hex crawl campaign, I adopted the system present in a lot of RPG campaigns: a continuous story, where we break sessions as needed due to real-life time constraints. This is the style of game that I played under in my first ever D&D campaign as a player. When GMs run published adventures, this often happens as a matter of necessity, as the plots laid out don't necessarily align with the specific length of session that you have with your group. You might wrap up a scene or a combat and call it quits for the night.

But most of my campaigns, as well as the structure demanded by a West Marches structure, and which was introduced to me originally in a Star Trek campaign that I played in during college, follow a structure that is much more episodic.

An episodic structure still should have larger, "season" overarching narratives, but it involves prepping a single session with a self-contained story for that episode. These should be shorter than the average D&D "quest," because you are trying to have something that can be wholly resolved in a single meeting. Maybe that means a section of a dungeon that has a sort of storyline to it, separate from a larger dungeon crawl; or maybe, it means that your dungeons need to be a little smaller to get it done in a single session.

Regardless, focusing each session as if it were a TV episode unlocks other benefits. It makes it easier to handle when someone is gone for a session, since you don't need to explain why someone was here in one moment and gone in the next. It helps keep your pace driving forward, and gives you as the GM something to push for in a session to keep your group "on track" more.

This does not mean that your players have no options or choice. It means that major decision points can hit at a climax of a session, giving you time to then plan how those decisions impact next week, instead of major decisions accidentally falling naturally a half hour into your session and then scrambling for the rest of your time slot (this does still happen from time to time, of course, because players can and will shake your plans, but in my experience, it does happen less when there's a narrative structure with rising action, climax, and falling action to an individual session).

There are plenty of other blogs that have covered this topic in depth, including articles from some of the biggest hitters that I read like Sly Flourish, Gnome Stew, or the Alexandrian, so I don't want to spend too many words talking just about the concept of an episodic campaign structure. Instead, I want to talk about a particular type of episode that you should run in your episodic game, as inspired by Heroes.

The Spotlight Episode

Lots of TV shows have spotlight episodes, where a particular character gets special focus. We might see a moment from their backstory, or we might simply focus on an experience that they have somewhat solo. Avatar: the Last Airbender does this really well, even poking fun at the fact that each character gets to have a "life-changing solo trip with Zuko" in the third season.

But something that I think Heroes handles really well with this structure is the way that other characters are not frozen out of the narrative. Having character-specific episodes in a collaborative table can be tricky, since you want to both give one player a chance to shine and explore something personal, while not making the rest of the table sit around and watch the focal player roleplay alone with the GM.

Spotlights are Twinned

It is rare in Heroes for a character to have the spotlight for a whole episode, but the different storylines definitely come to the forefront and then recede. For example, the episode "Six Months Ago" is almost entirely the story of Hiro and of Sylar, our villain, with only brief diversions to other characters.

We can take this as advice for our TTRPGs. Find interesting overlaps between your characters. Maybe two PCs met in the past or they know the same key NPC. Maybe they just have opposite views on an issue. By centering two characters at a time in these sessions and referencing their backstories or issues of particular importance to them, you can both spotlight more people at once and create interesting dichotomies. It allows you to create interpersonal drama within the characters of your group as they have different reactions. Plus, if you don't always keep the same pairs, it can lead to fun interweaving, helping flesh out the relationships between your entire party instead of focusing just on one dynamic.

For example, one of my favorite sessions that I've ever run was in my pseudo-American Revolution campaign. The party was trying to persuade the church to endorse their revolution. We only had one particularly religious character, a paladin, so he was obviously a focal character. Another, however, was adamantly anti-church, a sorcerer who had previously committed all sorts of unspeakable magical acts that had gotten him an official condemnation from the established clergy.

These two characters were selected to be highlighted in this church-focused episode. The priest who had condemned the sorcerer, who was also a mentor figure to our paladin, was spearheading the church's council that would be deciding whether to endorse the revolution that our party was involved with: obviously, he was an important character to both PCs. When another NPC, a supporter of the revolution, therefore offered to assassinate the condemning priest in order to steer the council towards endorsing the revolution, the sorcerer was obviously on board and the paladin was not. What followed was a very fun debate over what cost was appropriate to pay for the revolution, a new tension between the two PCs that would be explored and played out over the next several months of sessions, and ultimately an interesting combat (with distinctly alternate win conditions than "kill the bad guy") where the party was essentially trying to keep the two NPCs from killing each other. When the sorcerer took a risky move and failed, endangering himself and the life of the condemning priest, that made a great narrative beat when the rest of the party got to ask the question "is this intentional sabotage to see this priest be killed?"

All characters were involved in this session, but the moral crux and the involved NPCs were particularly targeting two of the party. This helped give the session direction and clarity, and turned the moral screws on these two players specifically.

Everyone Gets Spotlights

More importantly, however, is ensuring that everyone does get to be that focal character. Heroes handled this really well, as each character's plotline gets a full treatment with twists and turns. Sure, there's some that I find boring, but none of them feel completely underbaked in comparison to the others.

If you want to have character-specific spotlight episodes at your table, you need to build a trust with your players that everyone will get a turn. Giving everyone a turn to be a focal character means that players can--or should, and if they don't, you as the GM should talk to them about expectations--take a step back from the limelight when it is clearly someone else's turn to be central that week, knowing that they'd want the same permission to be the center of attention and help lead the party's interactions with this NPC from their backstory when it becomes their turn. If this is not abundantly clear to the players, then they might try to horn in to a session where they aren't focal, and that can kill the vibe – I've had it happen, and it completely neuters the structure of the episode.

So if you're going to run any spotlight episodes, make sure that everyone gets spotlight episodes, and in roughly the same amount. It doesn't need to be perfectly even, necessarily, but it should be approximately even.

And you should not have big gaps between these episodes! Cycle through your party so that everyone gets a turn within a couple of sessions, to help make sure that everyone sees that they're getting a turn. If it takes two or three months for me to get my turn, that feels bad just like not getting a turn at all does.

Conclusion

In short, if you are running an episodic campaign, take a lesson from TV shows: overarching plotlines are definitely important, even in a monster-of-the-week style of episodic campaign, but so too are "character work" episodes. Giving the spotlight to one or, better, two PCs for a session lets them delve into the nuances of their character, making your party richer and deeper in their dynamics, personality, and even sense of morality. Making sure that everyone gets a turn in the spotlight keeps your party invested, and helps them feel comfortable taking a back seat when it is not their turn to be highlighted.

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