Pacing a multi-session adventure or campaign isn’t as easy as “like a session, but longer”. Yes, there’s still a need for crests and troughs. Yes, the same principles generally apply to creating exciting moments and downtime between them. But an adventure or campaign needs to ramp up as it goes, and that creates some interesting dynamics.
Originally in my notes for this post, I wrote that pacing “should slowly escalate, like a JVM with a memory leak”. The idea is that the pace of anything vacillates back and forth around some central line or curve. In a session, it’s fine to have that line be straight and flat, where the overall pace of things at the beginning of a session is roughly the same as the pace at the end, and you have exciting points that rise above and downer points that dip below. But for a campaign, things should rarely end at the same place they started. The central pacing line needs to ramp up as well, meaning that the overall feel of a session at the end of a campaign is more exciting than the feel of a session at the beginning.
(This is probably best described by the chart referenced in the Extra Credits about pacing, viewable here. In general, it’s a good video about pacing, though it’s not 100% relevant to an slower-paced, interactive medium like D&D.)
Since this buildup covers the entire adventure, it needs to start early to put the adventure in a knowable place. This is especially true if the adventure or the campaign is short, about two to six sessions long. Introducing the problem or villain early gives the players some directions and gives them a reason to be there and a goal to focus on. I’m not saying that you can’t have a mystery villain who is only revealed at the end, but if the players don’t even know what they’re doing for the first session of a three-session adventure, you’ve lost out on a solid third of your pacing escalation.
In a longer adventure or campaign, it’s okay to start the real plot a bit later, but there’s additional responsibility in presenting it. The final session, fight, dungeon, or encounter (preferably all of the above) should be climactic and foreshadowed. Take, as an example, the Final Fantasy series. There’s a reason everybody gushes over Kefka and Sephiroth but ignores Zeromus and only tangentially remembers Chaos; the former two were introduced early in the plot as significant enemies that the players wanted to defeat, and the later two literally appeared out of nowhere in the last 10% of the game. Pacing should be continuous rather than discrete, and an abrupt late-adventure shift, unless handled very well, can make players feels like they spent all their time chasing nothing.
In adventures, crests are big fights, important plot reveals, or other significant moments. That is, while a kobold ambush is a fine crest for a session, it’s barely a blip on the radar in terms of the overall campaign. Now, if one of those kobolds is carrying an ancient artifact that the players need, or if the ambush occurs while the players are fleeing a rampaging dragon, the fight can certainly contribute to the crest. But not every encounter counts as a peak on the pacing of the campaign overall.
(I suppose this isn’t as true in a campaign like the one I just ran, which had an average of one fight every two sessions. But I think the players would generally agree that the fight in a church against the mafia enforcer was more of a crest than when they got attacked by dinosaurs in the middle of a jungle.)
Troughs have to be a bit more extreme as well; if a fight isn’t really an escalation in the overall campaign pacing, then the healing period afterward doesn’t count as a rest. I like using shopping and leveling as troughs, because it lets the players bask in the rewards of their efforts and engage in some meta-discussion around the table. In a long enough campaign, you can also use breather episodes as troughs, and you can devoid the campaign into smaller adventures where the gaps between them allow players and characters to rest.
It’s important to note that not all slow-paced discussion is a trough, especially if the players are discussing something particularly plot-relevant. If the party spends three hours talking about the best way to sneak into the enemy fortress and free a prisoner, the planning is actually the escalation and the execution is the crest. This is true even if the plan goes awry (and it usually should) and the players need a session in the fortress to sort things out. It just means that there’s an opportunity for short-term pacing in the middle of your long-term pacing.
In looking at pacing overall, keep in mind the abilities of your characters and the wants of their players. In general, each character should have some shining moment in a campaign where they get the starring role, where their abilities save the day and their powers are at the forefront. Sometimes this is done by basing an arc around their backstory, and sometimes it’s as simple as making them the plus during a boss battle. Even if the player hates the spotlight, it shows them that their character design was good and their choices paid off, which is a crest in general and a particularly high one for the players.
At the very top of your pacing curve, at the end, should always be your climactic foreshadowed encounter and a satisfying conclusion. In the same way that players should walk away thinking they didn’t play in a “nothing” episode, they should feel that their adventure had changed the world in some way. For the players, maybe they get a nice reward or maybe they just get the satisfaction of knowing they saved the city/kingdom/world (or at least didn’t ruin it). For players, they should feel like they were part of (not just observers to!) a story that made sense, built from start to finish, and ended in a way that was worth the trouble.