Incidents or anecdotes vs adventures

All

I've never formulated this quite this way before, so it seemed significant when I backed onto saying it on Facebook. Here it is, with more waffling and watering down.

One of the things, it seems to me, that separates an incident from an adventure is that the players try something in an incident and either succeed or fail, and then go on with their lives.

A lot of random tables are like this. “On the road, you meet (rolls) 1d6 robbers who take your weapons and your gold.” Then the PCs go on, now poor and weaponless, because the real objective is to get to Riverden. Maybe the PCs later meet and trounce the robbers because they recognize a weapon or something, but it's largely kinda anecdote-ish. When they write their memoirs, the PCs will not assign it any particular significance except as a throwaway sentence: Because robbers took my money, I arrived in Riverden with nothing but the clothes on my back.

In an adventure and your commercial fiction, the incident is elevated; it becomes part of the whole try-fail cycle. The robbers take the gold the PCs need to hire the cleric to deal with the illness and yadda yadda yadda.

Part of that try-fail cycle is consequences—in one case, the theft leads them to arrive in the new city penniless; in the other, it impedes what they're trying to do. If they don't have a goal, you can't really block them on that, so how can there be a meaningful failure?

One of the ways you deal with giving something significance in improve is reincorporation. The PCs find the robbers; the villain returns. Something like that. So having something recur is a tool you can deploy (as a GM) to make something more memorable, but that doesn't really give it significance.

Now, you can give things significance even if they didn't start that way. Let's use a superhero example instead. The heroes have to rescue a cat from a tree. Even if the cat is odd—it's a leopard escaped from a zoo! It's a phase-shifting cat that resists any attempts to grab it!— that doesn't make it more significant to the evening. However, if it's part of something bigger it becomes significant. Maybe the leopard escaped from the zoo as part of microtremblors that Earthquaker is causing in the area on the way to the bank/scientific lab/alien embassy. Maybe the phase-shifting cat is a foreshadowing that the evil Empire of Ghosts is invading our dimension.

I've mentioned this sort of thing before: if they vanquish the enemy too quickly, the encounter loses significance (We've still got two hours left!) so you can give it significance back by making it part of a larger event.

This has bad personal implications for me because I suck at the continuity between sessions and picking up the threads that are left behind, so I have to think about how to record the dropped potential threads in such a way that they're easy to pick up and reincorporate in the future.