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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (part 5)
🕑 Added 2022-12-22 10:20:44 +0000 UTCOf all the things I think we've gotten better at doing in making this show. The one thing that constantly eludes me, is having a sense of how long a movie will run. I envisioned TMNT as a two-or-three-parter and here we are speeding past five. I generally think that longer movies have more opportunity to be unique and interesting and go deeper into the world and lore, and explore the characters more fully. So I'm certainly not against long runs. But on the other hand I appreciate the efficiency of a shorter run movie and the opportunity to get through more movies if the actual movies are more compact. Probably the right call is to have a mix.
But ultimately the one thing I don't like to do is force a story to be short if it hasn't found an ending yet. What makes these stories engaging is that they're truly improvised. I don't know what the players are going to do, I merely lay out a world for them to find a story in. There is certainly some skill to be had in telling these stories efficiently, but that's actually quite a difficult thing to do without curtailing the agency of the players or without cutting the movie short.
So I'd love to hear your take. Do you think we should be doing more to keep the stories compact (the 2 or 3 parter), or do you like the more expansive stories? Or do you like a mix? Or do you not really care about the lengths of the movies. Give us your throughts!
Comments
Rory
I like the mix of short and long episodes, I wouldn't mind a few more 2-3 episode campaigns in the mix though. Occasionally it feels like a movie is just spinning its wheels rather than getting on with the plot. As much as I love the riffing I feel like if Jon hadn't brought the aliens into the movie early we'd still be listening to the cast explore LV426. Whereas Jaws hit all the major beats from the movie in 2 episodes.
Shawn Hlebasko
I like both kinds of episodes. Some like Speed or Adventure Time are quick and concise, but still tell the tale intended, but I I can't imagine any of the five or six part epics being any shorter. They're definitely seems to be a correlation between table size and episode length, but that just means that all players get time to shine. Except for Joz in speed. As someone who re-listens a lot, shorter episodes are nice because I don't always want to commit to listening to something super long if I only have time to listen for a few hours. Basically, a better mix of short and long series would be appreciated, but not at the expense of story.
