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I'm curious as to how long people spend playing through an adventure. So how much real time (not in game time) does a group take to do an adventure from Dungeon say?
To give a bit of background, I'm currently running a party of 5 PCs through The Three Faces of Evil from Dungeon #125. We play regularly on a Friday night spending about 4 hours gaming. So how many weeks would you expect that adventure to take?
Four gaming sessions of about 4-5 hours each. This is with a standard 4 PC group who doesn't an unusually long winded or over enthusiastic "roleplayer" who wants to haggle the local merchants down from 335 to 250gp for his new masterwork crossbow...
This also assumes the players have a decent grasp of the rules outlined in the PHB. I have found that new players take about 50% longer from the pulling out of rule books and discussions of whether its logical for the Troll to climb that tree to reach a PC. "Can he do that?"....
just my two coppers,
-Roth
Four gaming sessions of about 4-5 hours each. This is with a standard 4 PC group who doesn't an unusually long winded or over enthusiastic "roleplayer" who wants to haggle the local merchants down from 335 to 250gp for his new masterwork crossbow...
This also assumes the players have a decent grasp of the rules outlined in the PHB. I have found that new players take about 50% longer from the pulling out of rule books and discussions of whether its logical for the Troll to climb that tree to reach a PC. "Can he do that?"....
just my two coppers,
-Roth
This approximates my estimate as well. About four gaming sessions...
One game to infiltrate the mines and to get the players to the temple below... And one game for each of the three branches of the temple.
That's about how it went down when I sent my players in there.
Ultradan
It kind of depends. If I've written the adventure myself, it may only take a session or two, since I tend not to do too much dungeon-crawling and my plots are generally pretty straightforward. For a Dungeon magazine adventure, I tend to get about three to four sessions on average.
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It kind of depends. If I've written the adventure myself, it may only take a session or two, since I tend not to do too much dungeon-crawling and my plots are generally pretty straightforward. For a Dungeon magazine adventure, I tend to get about three to four sessions on average.
Wow... our group is pretty different from what I'm seeing here. I write all my own adventures (haven't run a module yet in 12 years of playing) and our average adventure runs for about 10-12 sessions. I've had a couple run over 20 sessions for a single plot arc.
Wow... our group is pretty different from what I'm seeing here. I write all my own adventures (haven't run a module yet in 12 years of playing) and our average adventure runs for about 10-12 sessions. I've had a couple run over 20 sessions for a single plot arc.
Well, my group (I guess former group now that we're all finishing college and moving on) only met over the summer and even then inconsistently, so the plots had to be quick and punchy or else we wouldn't get anywhere.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Timely post, I've been thinking about this issue more lately. Here're the rules of thumb I'm working with:
Adventure Hook: Even the cleanest adventure hook takes 10-5 minutes to bait, and it's not atypical for this portion to take 30 minutes to an hour. PC's waste a lot of time investigating dead ends, deciding they need equipment, and generally pissing around trying to get to the adventure itself.
Combat Encounters: A fast simple combat encounter with a single takes 15 minutes. Add 5 minutes per additional foe, 5 more minutes if they can cast spells.
Traps/Secrets: Anything that requires a skill check to discover takes at most 10 minutes.
Roleplaying Encounters: These are always tough to predict. PC's are more likely to take and interrogate prisoners at the beginning of an adventure and at the end. I'd say add on about 15-30 minutes, more if you have a specific roleplaying encounter in mind.
Other: Resting, arguing about who will check the door for traps, recording loot & xp takes about 10 minutes per encounter.
These are all rough rules of thumb, but I'm finding they inform my planning more and more. End of the day, I'd say I can run about 1 encounter per half hour.
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I'm like... the slowest DM in the world.
A combat with a single foe takes 10-15 minutes. I rarely use single-foe encounters, however, and most often use groups of creatures which employ tactics against the characters. These mass combats (usually) take 1-2 hours.
Rolplaying usually eats up the bulk of our games. The characters will make maximum use of every single minute of downtime. If they stop at an inn to rest, they almost never 'just go to sleep.' One character will stay up most of the night analyzing maps while another one goes over tactics with him. Two other characters will talk idly with bar patrons, the barkeep, off-duty guards, or anyone else they can find, and one character (usually a spellcaster) will go immediately to bed while their player goes to the bathroom or busies himself reading new spells from the Complete Arcane or whatnot.
Our average gaming session is 5 hours. Occassionally, we'll run a game on a Saturday that lasts 7 or more. On rare occassion I will run a solo side-scene for a player that takes 2-4 hours.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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The above is really more about how I run modules (which is most of what I have been doing). I think the accuracy of my guidelines depend heavily on how much you structure your own adventures like modules. If you have a series of small isolated encounters and then one big boss encounter, the rules of thumb are fairly accurate (for me).
I'm like... the slowest DM in the world.
A combat with a single foe takes 10-15 minutes. I rarely use single-foe encounters, however, and most often use groups of creatures which employ tactics against the characters. These mass combats (usually) take 1-2 hours.
Usually I find that in a reactive dungeon where room A alerts room B alerts room C, you get a 1-2 hour mass combat. However, in general, if I divide the time taken by the number of foes encountered, I get the 10-15 minute rule. There is definitely a diminishing amount of time taken for additional foes, up to a certain point, because there is normally 5-10 minutes of bookkeeping at the start of any battle (initiative, players usually have to figure out their attack and damage modifiers based on terrain, light sources, etc).
Rolplaying usually eats up the bulk of our games. The characters will make maximum use of every single minute of downtime. If they stop at an inn to rest, they almost never 'just go to sleep.' One character will stay up most of the night analyzing maps while another one goes over tactics with him. Two other characters will talk idly with bar patrons, the barkeep, off-duty guards, or anyone else they can find, and one character (usually a spellcaster) will go immediately to bed while their player goes to the bathroom or busies himself reading new spells from the Complete Arcane or whatnot.
Oh man, you're playing the game all wrong! ;-) Seriously though, when I run my own stuff, I tend to do more roleplaying and less rushing. The adventures in Dungeon are built to level a party of four characters. For that reason, they almost always require 2-3 forays and chances to rest. I tend to build my own adventures around a set piece that contains 1/2 to 1/3 of the encounters found in a typical Dungeon adventure. I have all sorts of reality issues with camping during a dungeon raid, and try to scale my encounters to avoid that issue. When I get into my groove, games normally involve 30-75 minutes of rolepalying up front, the aforementioned centerpiece, and then possibly more roleplaying and another centerpiece.
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Interesting. It looks like my group are a little slow (for a supposedly experienced bunch of players) but not as slow as I feared. There's a fair bit of roleplaying involved but I think combats take a long time.
I do find that 3rd ed D&D seems to make combats take more time. I'm sure in 2nd ed they were quicker. (Though I've found that using minis slows things down even though it reduces confusion.)
But thanks for the input everybody.
My game is running pretty slow. I've been running Age of Worms since September and I'm still on the first magazine issue out of twelve.
I do find that 3rd ed D&D seems to make combats take more time. I'm sure in 2nd ed they were quicker. (Though I've found that using minis slows things down even though it reduces confusion.)
It definitely slows things down. In 2nd edition players location and monster location where often somewhat vague. Probably you mostly assumed that the guys in front could probably all hit each other. So the players portion of the round could proceed like lightning. Each meat shield rolls - a miss is nearly immediately followed by the next player in line while a hit only takes a few seconds longer as damage is rolled. Basically speaking the only longish part of the round is the arguing with spell casters. The fighter types always hit the same monster until it died and even the spell casters generally had a pretty good idea what they where likely to do. Furthermore inititive was often followed only in a pretty loose fashion. The players had to do things in order except when it was not going to really matter - and a lot of the time it was not really going to matter.
Occasionally I invoke a '2nd edition combat time' in my current campaign. Generally when there is nothing but a single minor combatant left who himself has no fancy tactics. At this point initiative is irrelevant everyone rolls at the same time then the monster rolls after which all the players roll again. Generally the players play along with this and they don't do anything fancy - just stand and deliver full attacks. Needless to say once this starts up the combat will be complete within the next 3 minutes at most and that's assuming bad luck on the players part.
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I'm like... the slowest DM in the world. A combat with a single foe takes 10-15 minutes. I rarely use single-foe encounters, however, and most often use groups of creatures which employ tactics against the characters. These mass combats (usually) take 1-2 hours. Rolplaying usually eats up the bulk of our games. The characters will make maximum use of every single minute of downtime. If they stop at an inn to rest, they almost never 'just go to sleep.' One character will stay up most of the night analyzing maps while another one goes over tactics with him. Two other characters will talk idly with bar patrons, the barkeep, off-duty guards, or anyone else they can find, and one character (usually a spellcaster) will go immediately to bed while their player goes to the bathroom or busies himself reading new spells from the Complete Arcane or whatnot.
Not true, Fatespinner. My group also takes quite a long time to finish an adventure, and no matter how long I expect them to take, they usually drag it out a bit more. Now, I do have seven players, which extends combat and roleplaying time requirements, but my experience is similar to yours.
With my current campaign, I attempted something similar to the adventure paths published in Dungeon; I separated the whole plot arc of the campaign into twelve sections and roughly described them, then broke them down into specifics and wrote my read-aloud text as the characters went along. Each of the twelve adventure-segments completed (two so far) have taken anywhere from four to seven sessions of 9 hours each. So, my kids go kind of slow too.
Inn and other roleplaying scenarios are similar as well (though my players seldom, if ever, discuss tactics in character). One or two get drunk (I'll never understand what about pretending to be drunk is so fascinating to my fellow college students), one or two go to sleep, one goes off to steal stuff, and the rest take care of the shopping or gather information. In general, though, we all have a good time, but I can see already that my "adventure path" is going to be at least two years in the playing. Such is the life of the DM.
We play Thursdays from 3 :30 ( Some of the players go to school ) to about 11 : 30
And we play Fridays From 10 : 00 to 4 am Saturday from 7 to 4 am and Sunday from 12 : 00 to 10 pm
For a good – rounded 34 hours a week…
One guy quit his 2nd job because it got in the way of D and D ….
One week is enough to get through about 3 Dungeon magazine adventures or One Massive mega adventure of my own design…
http://www.dmtools.org/resources.php?nav=advs
I also do a lot of snow boarding in the winter and hiking , camping and sword fighting in the summer… so Im no cloistered away Gollum… I also do not watch TV or play and computer games , so this frees up even more time…
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We play Thursdays from 3 :30 ( Some of the players go to school ) to about 11 : 30
And we play Fridays From 10 : 00 to 4 am Saturday from 7 to 4 am and Sunday from 12 : 00 to 10 pmFor a good – rounded 34 hours a week…
One guy quit his 2nd job because it got in the way of D and D ….
Wow... I used to have that kind of free time back in college. No longer.
I suppose quitting your SECOND job to get more D&D time isn't so bad if you weren't desperate for the money. Quitting your PRIMARY job for such pursuits is probably the sign of an unhealthy habit, though.
I used to have a second job... WORKING IN A GAMING STORE. Those were the days. Eventually I dropped it so that I could see my wife more often (and curb my M:tG addiction).
We play Thursdays from 3 :30 ( Some of the players go to school ) to about 11 : 30
And we play Fridays From 10 : 00 to 4 am Saturday from 7 to 4 am and Sunday from 12 : 00 to 10 pmFor a good – rounded 34 hours a week…
One guy quit his 2nd job because it got in the way of D and D ….
One week is enough to get through about 3 Dungeon magazine adventures or One Massive mega adventure of my own design…
http://www.dmtools.org/resources.php?nav=advs
I also do a lot of snow boarding in the winter and hiking , camping and sword fighting in the summer… so Im no cloistered away Gollum… I also do not watch TV or play and computer games , so this frees up even more time…
Ever seen a bear turn green from envy?
I am so totally jealous.(rushes out to buy more lotto tickets)
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Owner - Johnny Scott Comics and Games
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We play Thursdays from 3 :30 ( Some of the players go to school ) to about 11 : 30
And we play Fridays From 10 : 00 to 4 am Saturday from 7 to 4 am and Sunday from 12 : 00 to 10 pmFor a good – rounded 34 hours a week…
One guy quit his 2nd job because it got in the way of D and D ….
One week is enough to get through about 3 Dungeon magazine adventures or One Massive mega adventure of my own design…
http://www.dmtools.org/resources.php?nav=advs
I also do a lot of snow boarding in the winter and hiking , camping and sword fighting in the summer… so Im no cloistered away Gollum… I also do not watch TV or play and computer games , so this frees up even more time…
Holy Moley! I'd kill to be able to do that! My group's lucky to get together once a week.
Can a lich turn green with envy???