Scale of a story arc

How long can an Architect story arc stretch before it starts to weaken the story?

Obviously, that will depend on how well written the story is and how good the writing is at keeping your attention. Some arcs are tedious not halfway int othe first mission, whereas others could keep you going well into another continuation arc. Generally speaking, though, is there a point at which the sheer length of an arc is such that you start to lose interest in it?

I ask because I'm trying to plan out a particularly eventful multi-arc story. I can do it in two full arcs, but it will feel crowded, and likely limit many options. I could expand it to three to keep the interludes properly placed and give myself more kilobytes of breathing room, but somehow that just feels too long.

I really don't feel there is an exact formula, it's more a feeling. Also, experiences will vary depending on player experience and randomness (like where things spawn). Once I have a mission in an arc where I feel it should be I will play it through at least ten times. If more than one time through I feel I am wasting time doing any task I rework it and try again.


WN

Right. It seemed to me that I'd be able to make it as long as it had to be so long as I made sure every missions contributed in some useful way to the story's progression, and that none of the missions were any longer than strictly neccesary. That's probably the hard part, because while a long but packed mission right at the climax is either a good deal of fun if you're enjoying it or complete crap if you aren't.

[Warning: Personal opinion!]

A story should be as long as it needs to be, and no longer than that.
* Figure out what the plot of your story is in advance, BEFORE creating your missions.
* Make sure you have enough missions to tell your story. (How many are needed varies depending on the story.)
* DON'T make your story arc 5 missions long just because that's the max allowed.
* DON'T include missions that don't advance the main plot. (You're on a quest to get the Crown of Yaz, but first, a random Rikti attack unconnected to your quest.)
* DON'T include missions that are a near duplicate of another mission in the same arc. (Search Council base for Crown of Yaz...oh, it wasn't there. Okay, search Council base 2 for Crown of Yaz. Not there? Aha, you find it searching Council base 3.) (Search Council base 1 for left half of Crown of Yaz. Search Council base 2 for right half of Crown of Yaz. Search Council base 3 for top part of Crown of Yaz.)

A story should not be too long.
* Starting a story arc is a time commitment. A 5-mission arc is potentially a big time commitment. You may lose some of your audience before you even get started if your arc is dauntingly long.
* If your arc has to be really long, try to make each of the missions a little shorter (use a smaller map) and make sure your "hook" to get players interested (i.e., the arc description, the story arc's concept) is really good.
* If you're determined to make a multi-arc epic length story 8 or more missions long...good luck. IMHO, those are difficult to pull off effectively, and difficult to get players willing to play the whole thing. I don't recommend doing these.
* If you must write a story this long, make sure each story arc within your epic story is somewhat self-contained, with a natural beginning and ending, like a chapter of a book.

A story should not be too short.
* Story-oriented players may be turned off by "very short" arcs that are only 1 or 2 missions long, reasoning that there can't be much story in that much time.
* If your arc has to be really short, make sure there is a LOT of detail in your 1 or 2 missions, so that you can get your story across in the space you have.



All of the above is opinion and are not hard-and-fast rules. Personally, I feel the "sweet spot" for arc length is 3 or 4 missions, with a decent amount of detail in each. However, I do have two 5-mission long arcs and one 1-mission long arc. I've avoided writing multi-arc stories so far.

Hope that helps.

You also don't want to make each mission too long or too short either. A long mission with very few objectives gets boring midway through. A map with a single room and one very easy objective makes the player wonder why they bothered to spend the time even zoning into the mission.

Overall, I'd say that four medium missions are more tolerable than three long mission. Of course this depends on the number of objectives in each on, but sometimes a change of scenery will go a long way to keep the arc from running out of steam.

There's a lot of dislike of multi-arc storylines. Is there any particular reason, or is it just that they're not usually done well?

As it is, the one I'm working on pretty much has to be huge. Not specifically because of the story, but because it needs to feel massive. It's basically the player in a war to bring down Malta by any means neccesary, and managing to do that in four or five missions just wouldn't feel right.

• Multi-arcs are seen as a HUGE time investment. Your normal 5 arc mission will likely clock into a hour, so with multi-arcs players start seeing 2+ hours investments, that you can only take a break when each arc ends.
• The longer an arc goes on, any minor annoyances a player may have will only be magnified, as well as picking up any other annoyances to add to that pile.
• The longer your arc goes on, the bigger the pay-off players will expect at the climax of the story as well as the overall quality of the arc to validate that commitment. If after all that they come to a rather disappointing conclusion, or worse they only trudged through your arc out of stubbornness to see it through to the end, then feelings when it's time to rate your arc really isn't going to be great.
• Players are lazy. We don't want to have play an arc knowing we have to go search for the other half later, when we can just pick up a complete story within a single arc and get our kicks from that.

Don't let your preconceptions of your story before you even start to write dictate how long it takes for you to tell your story. The story itself will tell you how long it needs to be. If you start to labor to find things to write in the middle sections, then you're probably padding. If you think you're done, but another 3 or 4 things spring to mind, then you probably aren't done.

There's nothing hard and fast that says you have to contain a story to 5 missions. Arc length is an artificial construct. Most genre fiction is serialized. There are fantasy series out there these days in which one book seems to end in mid-sentence and the start if the next book almost finishes the sentence. Perhaps not to that extreme, but we can all agree that there are books that are incomplete and obviously a lead-in to the next part of the trilogy.

There is no reason that mission arcs cannot do the same thing, but remember that if you do so, you probably cut your audience down, up to the point where those who do play it say publicly, "Wow this is really great!"

At that point, if it really is great, most of those who normally wouldn't play a multi-parter will play it just to see what the hype is about. So what you're really doing is probably cutting the audience who would play it initially - not cutting the audience who would ultimately play it if it's good.

The funny thing about people is that even with all the rules they invent for themselves to cut down on the material they consume, ('I'll never read x because..., 'I hate defeat-alls,' 'I hate large maps.' 'I won't play x...,' etc), if they hear the material is good, most of those rules will fall by the wayside pretty quickly.

I tend towards brevity, myself.

I have one arc that is five missions long. It has a fairly elaborate premise that took a bit of setting up. Most individual missions in it are rather brief.

I have another polemical or proof of concept arc that has five missions. The first four are very brief, and there to set up a point made in the last mission.

I have two reasonably polished missions that are three missions long. These are both humorous or semi-humorous, and more would probably stretch the joke out too far. One has a fairly large plot twist in the second mission, and the first is quite short.

I have three single mission arcs. All of them have plots or at least characterizations that are quite adequately treated in a single mission. One is in Latin.

My last mission arc is currently a scratch pad that I use to still get tickets and inf while I test ideas. If I come up with something good enough, I'll call attention to it.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

I think you mistake my intention in making it huge. I know that needless padding is unbearable thanks to only recently playing through Heroside solo-only, and developer missions have vastly more power in arc creation. I'm not using length as a shortcut to an epic feel, because I already know that that's a sure route to failure. I want it to be long because I think that having more missions, so long as they aren't crappy, will genuinely bring to the player the feeling that they are fighting a massive war with one of the most powerful enemies in Primal Earth, as opposed to just showing up and suddenly winning. This is not me saying 'it's a big story, so I'll need lots of missions'. That two arcs are needed is something I've seen purely from working the missions themselves. Any other enemy group, it'd be fine, but to have Malta itself go down in four or five missions without feeling anticlimactic would take compressed writing of a skill level far beyond my own. I also know far better than to give players a drama blueballsing, because that infuriates me beyond anything else an otherwise-talented author can do.

As it is, I can break down the missions as planned into how neccesary they are.

There are three missions that cannot be taken out of the arc without the plot becoming impossible to sustain. Without these a total scrap-and-rewrite is not just the best option but the only option.

There is one mission that is not plot-crucial, but is the single most important mission in terms of its contribution to the quality of the arc. I could take it out, but then the arc would be useless. It is where the feeling of extreme significance of the events comes from, but involves events so drastic that it simply feels wrong to lead into it too quickly.

There also genuinely needs to be a lead-in mission, simply because the prior four are blatantly inappropriate to start an arc with and cannot be made otherwise without severely weakening the plot.

These five missions are the absolute core of the arc and cannot practically be changed.

There are three or possibly four other missions that I would like to include. They can be done without, but not without screwing badly with the pacing of the plot. Since they aren't strictly neccesary, I'm doing everything I can to make them mechanically fun. The purpose they serve is to actually make this arc feel like a war, and not simply the PC dropping out of nowhere and magically solving everything. The basic gamble of this is on whether or not I can make them fun enough to stop them from feeling like they draw out the arc. This is a gamble based mostly on how I think and feel about stories, and I know I'm not nearly representative of most players.

I suppose the real question I should ask is this: Is there a point in an arc at which you as a player, despite enjoying what you are doing at that moment in an arc, begin to feel put out by an arc purely because of its length, disregarding its quality?

Here's something I'll toss in to this discussion...

@LaserJesus has a series of arcs that parody old-style vampire movies; I think there are three of them now, maybe it's four, haven't played them all yet. Each one has a pretty well self-contained storyline, like any good series of sequels would. They may or may not be leading up to an "epic battle/ending of of epic proportions!", I don't know. But I've had fun playing the first two and definitely intend to play the rest.

I guess what I'm pointing to is that a really long story with no breaks that stretches over two arcs can feel like a slog that's too much of a pain to start. "A journey begins with but a single footstep, but dude look at those thousand miles before me, ouch!" But if the story can be broken up into say three fairly self-contained arcs with three or four missions each, then it wouldn't feel that way because you can always log off after one arc and come back to the next when you're ready.

Then again - if it feels right to make it a huge story that stretches out over two arcs and you can honestly say it all works after you're done, then it will come through and engage the player ("most players" anyways, no doubt you'll still get complaints) and make him or her want to keep playing so that's what you should do. If I only ever get five plays on any of my arcs but all five of those players "got" what I was doing, then that's what counts to me.

I suspect that most stories that stretch across arcs are not going to be as interesting to players as they are to the author. So I'd be in the camp that suggests cramming what you have into a smaller space.

If people need to play arc 1 before they play arc 2, chances are pretty good arc 2 is going to see very few hits.

It was suggested that you try to make the arcs somewhat independent. This is a good idea. Break it up so you have a complete story in each arc, but with continuing characters or a continuing milieu. That way when players play either of your arcs, if they like it, the experience acts as a teaser to prompt them to play the other one.

And I would say don't worry too much about order of events between the arcs. People read prequels about as often as they read sequels.

I think what's likely the best way to approach your story is in an episodic format. Make 2 or 3 arcs or whatever, have them share an overarching story, but have them all completely self contained. For instance, say your first arc is about you tracking down and bringing one of the top leaders of Malta to justice, and the arc ends with him in your custody and you turning him over to Crimson. That story is a complete story, with a solid resolution.

Then, your next one could start with that Malta leader escaping, with Crimson thinking there's a mole in his group. And the story arc of that one could be about you trying to find the mole, or even trying to find out if there is in fact a mole or not, or if Crimson's been in the spy game so long that he sees enemies in every shadow. Include a "Previously on" clue at the very beginning of the arc to bring the player up to speed if they've forgotten things about the earlier arcs, or if they haven't played them. (I've done that, and it really does make a difference.)

As for multi-part arcs, I think the main problem is with how MA missions are presented by the game. You have a maximum of 5 missions and limited filesize. (That one's been hitting me hard lately. When you're having to edit down a 3 mission arc due to filesize constraints, that's when you realize that you might be a bit longwinded. Also, custom enemies.) In addition, when a player starts an MA arc, that character's locked into it until they complete the arc, or quit it completely, losing all of their progress. There's a sort of unspoken promise the last mission of an arc will give the player closure because of that, since just by loading up a long MA arc, they're putting in a commitment to see it to the end. If they get to the end to see a "To be continued" they get upset, because they will likely have to play another 5 or more missions to get that closure.

This is made even worse when you've put up the first part, and the second part isn't done yet. Making an arc of high quality, especially one that's heavily story focused, is going to take some time. Now they have no feeling of closure, and not only are they going to have to play another presumably long arc, they have to wait for it to come out. And now the impetus is much greater for you to really deliver a quality arc, because they'll have to want to seek out/wait for your next story, and they're going to feel less impressed simply because of the lack of closure.

Speaking of delivering quality, and this is just something to keep in mind, but the higher you're shooting for in regards to things like scope, drama, and really complex stories, the harder it will be to deliver, and the more negative the reception will be if you fail. People will expect more out of the story, and who can blame them? You're trying to give them more. So when you don't, they feel let down.

Note: This is not me saying don't try. I wholly encourage any writer to try to write the best story they possibly can. Just be aware that you have a difficult task ahead of you.

And finally, for your question, I'd have to say that length, at least for me, has no point where in and of itself makes me begin to get annoyed, as long as what's filling that length is interesting. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people feel the same. If anything, length would just make it so people wouldn't want to start the arc to begin with because they're not able to invest the time. Which is fine.

Yeesh, that's a long post. Damn my tendency to pontificate.

EDIT: Clave_Dark_5: It's 4, and I have no plans for it to lead up to any kind of "Final Battle". I pretty much just make another one when I have a good idea for it. Hell, if anything I'd do a "gritty reboot" of the series to keep in line with the bad movie aesthetic before having any kind of definitive end.

I know better than to do both parts posted seperately. The only thing more enraging that when writers end series on cliffhangers is when they elect to die immediately afterwards.

As it is, the arcs could be broken up into fairly distinct sets. The first one basically consists of trying to get a mole into the high ranks of Malta by causing enough organisational chaos that he can get away with it and dealing a fat wad of damage to Malta interests at the same time, and ends with every Hero's dream of destroying the plant that makes those ******* Sapper sticks. The second one starts out with Malta's retaliation, driven to extremes because of how afraid they're getting of the character, works through that escalation until the PC drives Malta too far, and ends with that act turning global governments against Malta so they lose most of what makes them hard to kill.

I could likely work some more distinction into each arc so they work reasonably well as standalone stories, but by neccesity it's going to be very strange for a Player to start with the second one.

The effort involved is not an issue. I'm the sort of guy who'd rather spend a month of full days designing a weekend-long campaign to remember than spend an hour to make a day-long campaign everyone forgets. The hardest part is trying to change from a small format where you know your players well, have infinite freedom in your creativity, and can react instantly to work with the player's reaction to a vast and impersonal audience when you've got a painfully restrictive suite of tools to work with.