|
My crew have been playing regular campaigns using a few systems (mostly D&D 3+) and then we got introduced to Pathfinder and then shortly after, Pathfinder Society.
Pathfinder Society sessions usually last about 6 hours.
We play online, and until then, we'd only used chat instead of chat + voice. This meant each scenario would last 2 or maybe even 3 sessions. We use voice now as well, and it's only 1 session that lasts 4-8 hours generally.
Before PFS, we'd only been playing 3-4 hour sessions as a rule, because it felt like a comfortable amount of time. On the rare weekend, we'd play a "double session" that would last 6-7 hours.
I've been playing PFS for about 3 years now, and I've noticed that between playing and GMing, it has really begun to grate, and it seems that the cause of it is that it's the constant 6 hour "double-sessions" that might be the reason.
It's not just an online thing either, because it's the same at cons - by the end of each day, or even sometimes in the middle of the day, I'm often feeling exhausted.
Obviously if you play PFS, you're likely doing the same thing, but if you don't play PFS, how long do you usually play for, per session?
My home group plays for 5-6hours (officially, 2pm to 7pm with an hour of 'overage time' to 8pm if need be).
However, we try to take a 15min break in the middle.
My Roll20 group plays about 4 hours (7pm to 11pm officially).
- Gauss
We usually play 11-5 with a one hour break for lunch in between. But since we're all good friends a substantial amount of time goes off track, between that and people showing up late its probably more like 3.5-4 hours of actual play.
Not meaning to derail the thread or anything, but since its kind of on topic does anyone have any tips of keeping the game going without a massive jarring halt because of jokes or breaking character?
We only play a few times a year, so when we do get together we'll usually play pretty much all day (usually about 12 hours with a few breaks). Other games I've played in are usually 6-8 hours though.
ive had marathon games that last 17 hrs, 3 days back to back ;-0
most currently that i've played games lasted bout 6-7 hrs, with a break in the middle.
Heck, if we didn't have jokes at my table we probably wouldn't play. A lot of in-game role-play gets turned into out-of-game innuendo and ribald humor. We love it. The three girls in my weekend gaming group are worse than the three guys.
- Gauss
I play with my three best friends, who are all new to roleplaying. We play for 2-3 hours every couple of weeks. As they are all ready indulging MY hobby i don't want to push them for more :P
Even this time involves a lot of 'out of game chat' and joking around as we all have families and don't get to see each other much any more.
The groups I game with usually meet up either at 13:00 or 14:00, and we wrap things up either 21:00 or 22:00.
Sometimes one of us has to leave early, or then we need to wrap a certain scene up and finish the session a bit later.
Also, if we play at a friend's house, we usually take a 10 min coffee break in the afternoon before getting back in the game.
Back in the day we'd do Friday afternoon through to Sat lunchtime, have a break, then go again Sat night through to Sunday afternoon. Sessions up to 24 hours long were common.
Although they were also beer & pizza fuelled extravaganzas.
These days we have the odd 10 hour, but 5-6 including chat and relax time is normal.
I tried a Friday nighter, but then it just went long as people were late after work :p
Oh, and I play only at weekends, because I have work from monday till friday.
We play mostly weekends, but occasionally squeeze in a weekday session. those ones are for obvious reasons only about 3-4 hours, but our traditional weekly or bi-weekly weekend sessions are from 1PM to 10-11 PM, so 9-10 hours, with pizza being ordered and eaten as we go.
We've given up pizza, now we chuck a few snags on the barbie.
4pm-10pm once a week when we can manage it
7ish to about 10-10:30 on Wednesday and Thursday nights after work. We have two games going. I'm DMing one game, one of my players DMing the other. Mine will end in another few seasons, so another player is planning on picking up that time slot.
6-7hrs dinner served, mostly on a weekend
My groups generally play 3 different home games for 4-7 hours. We use a public game store space, so our time is dictated by closing.
Sort of on topic... how does anyone get a PFS session done in 3 hours??? I've seen that all over the boards here. 3 hours to me seems like enough time to set up an adventure, talk to the important people, and have like 3-4 fights. Is that all it takes to finish?
I ask b/cause I downloaded one of the First Steps modules for the start of a new campaign. I was toying w/the idea of crafting my own homebrew Society complete w/factions, so I looked to this adventure for inspiration/ideas.
You start out as GM setting up a scene at a party. The players roleplay this scene for contacts and information (ripe for distractions) and then head of to a dungeon. Finally said dungeon has like 12 rooms. How does THAT take 3 hours to complete?
3-4 hours is usual for me, though longer games sometimes run over to six. Anything longer than that feels painful to me, personally.
how does anyone get a PFS session done in 3 hours??? I've seen that all over the boards here.
Some of the individual missions are shorter and sometimes a group just happens to blow through them. Never been against a short mission myself. Some people downplay the talky portions and other people spend an hour arguing about how to handle a hallway.
These days we play around 3 hours pretty much every Wednesday. We all have jobs/wives/children or a combination thereof so that's all the time we can spare.
We started with 4-6 hour sessions back in the day(before most of us had families). But now, our main sessions last around 2-3 hours, weekly.
When I started running my own games, my little brother(who was still in school at the time) was playing and we needed to be done early, so our sessions were only 1-2 hours. I had to learn how to keep the game fast and eventful, and got it down to a science. In a 2 hour session, we typically had 2 or 3 encounters, story-elements, RP time, down time, etc. Short games became my MO. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to run a longer game than that.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We started with 4-6 hour sessions back in the day(before most of us had families). But now, our main sessions last around 2-3 hours, weekly.
When I started running my own games, my little brother(who was still in school at the time) was playing and we needed to be done early, so our sessions were only 1-2 hours. I had to learn how to keep the game fast and eventful, and got it down to a science. In a 2 hour session, we typically had 2 or 3 encounters, story-elements, RP time, down time, etc. Short games became my MO. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to run a longer game than that.
Just once before I die I'd love to attend one of your games live. You are the master of horror on these boards (or at the very least ONE of them) and I can't even begin to conceive how to pull off a memorable, horror-themed game my players would sink into in just 2 hours. The gods of gaming must have reached into your crib and delivered their wisdom to you as a child.
Just once before I die I'd love to attend one of your games live. You are the master of horror on these boards (or at the very least ONE of them) and I can't even begin to conceive how to pull off a memorable, horror-themed game my players would sink into in just 2 hours. The gods of gaming must have reached into your crib and delivered their wisdom to you as a child.We started with 4-6 hour sessions back in the day(before most of us had families). But now, our main sessions last around 2-3 hours, weekly.
When I started running my own games, my little brother(who was still in school at the time) was playing and we needed to be done early, so our sessions were only 1-2 hours. I had to learn how to keep the game fast and eventful, and got it down to a science. In a 2 hour session, we typically had 2 or 3 encounters, story-elements, RP time, down time, etc. Short games became my MO. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to run a longer game than that.
Thanks! I'm really not that good. I've had so many games fall apart I barely know where to start anymore. Although;
I started watching R-rated horror movies when I was around 4 or 5 years old. My mother is a big horror fan, and nobody else would watch movies with her, so I was inducted early. Also, spent time living in a few haunted houses. Not the carnival ride kind, but real houses haunted by real entities. Fun stuff... Not.
Horror is actually easier to do in a shorter time frame. It elicits very specific stimuli and responses from players, and you can't drone too hard on those for too long or you burn people out. It's why most horror movies are only around 90 minutes; viewers can only be scared for so long before they just want to leave or get bored.
Basically, you get in quick, grab the players attention, shake them up, and drop a cliffhanger to reel them in for next week's session.
"Traditional" (read; normal) RPG campaigns are much, much harder to do in shorter sessions(at least for me). Horror games typically focus on a small, singular location or event, whereas a normal RPG campaign has much more adventuring going on; bigger, more drawn out encounters, bigger dungeons/adventure sites, more time spent traveling, more general down time, etc.
I'm still trying to get the hang of running a normal game, I've done horror so long, it's my default mindset, so I'm trying to broaden my skills and break out of my comfort zone.
One 'friends' game which is after work: 6:30 - 10:00 (4.5 hours)
One 'friends' game on the weekends: 5pm - 1am (8 hours)
Pick-up games at the FLGS, usually around 3 hours
Currently I'm in two groups; one meets bi-weekly on Fridays. We typically don't get started until 7-7:30, and play for anywhere between 3-5 hours; most often we're finishing up around 11pm.
Of course, like many long-time groups, we've known each other for years, so keeping the game on track can be problematic at times, especially when one of the players is in a chatty mood.
The second group is a little more serious because it's not a group of friends (some of us are friends; others are acquaintances brought to the table). This group plays on the first Sunday of every month regardless of who can or can't make it; I switched this policy recently because there were several people that I just tired of working around their schedule after the game was delayed for 2 months and then they forgot.
We're scheduled from 1-6 and typically start by 1:30 (there's always one in every crowd who's habitually late, and Murphy says it's almost always the cleric). We don't have a hard stop at 6pm, but I try to wrap things up by 5:30 so I can give out XP and the like before people start to disappear.
I have two groups, one that meets Saturdays and one that meets Sundays. The Saturday group starts around 7pm and goes til 11 pm. As all groups, we do have our distracting moments. The Sunday group varies depending on work schedules, but we tend to go longer. Sometime we start at 11 am and go until 10 pm, other times we start at 430 pm and go until 10 pm.
We play at a FLGS which helps us to have a definite shut off time, which is midnight. We try to get started by 7 pm, give or take. So somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 hours per session.
4 hours.
5 or 6.
Although higher level games may be drastically short due to encounters ending quickly.
|
My home game runs from 6:00 pm to 10:00pm but there is a lot of chatter from all sides, including me, the GM. We tend to play very loose and may get one or two encounters out of the way in a session.
On certain holidays, if the employment gods all align, we may play from noon to 8:00, again with various breaks for food or to visit the necessary.
The Skype game usually runs four hours. Technically we probably manage about three hours because there's inevitable hiccups in getting everything working. However, I'm getting better at that and now that I'm using roll20 along with Hero Labs I'm finding things are far more efficient. (Though I will admit, if Paizo comes out with their own online program for the maps and modules, I'll very likely purchase and use it.)
The tabletop group will likely run 4-5 hours, not including setup time and pre-game snacks. I've been forcing that one to become more efficient as well because nothing was getting done.
Back when I was running AD&D and then 3rd ed. D&D, the games usually lasted eight hours, but we'd stop halfway through for pizza and there'd be breaks for various parents to take care of changing diapers on their kids or the like. Still, I prefer the shorter games because it's less stressful on me.
PFS sessions usually run 3 to 5 hours, depending on party makeup and scenario selected.
My new group has committed to gaming every Thursday from 6 to midnight. We'll see how that works, and the first hour probably won't count as it will be people finishing dinner and settling in with admin stuff.
My previous group ran a respectable six hours for the beginning, with the aforementioned caveats. After children and marriages cropped up, we cut down to 3 hours, and I finally had to cancel when players wanted it even shorter. Not when I was driving an hour there and back.
Before that I had a really great group that met pretty regularly on Saturdays for at least six hours. Sometimes we'd get started at noon or 1PM, and keep going past midnight. I miss those days, despite the lack of plot.
Toz, I recommend Skype. It allows the game without the drive. ;)
I'll admit when I'm doing the tabletop group, if I hold it at my place (usually) then two of my players spend the night more often than not, as it's an hour drive each way. I've run it from their place as well, but to be honest my house is better situated for the game (more room and less fuss really).
But the Skype group is actually the group I enjoy most; probably because of the lack of needing to set up these days. It's amazing how useful and handy online maps and the like are and how much they speed things up.
I find Roll20 to be superior. :)
I use roll20 with Skype actually. I paid for Skype for a year (for group video conferencing calls) so I'm going to make full use of it! ;) That and I know Skype and it runs on everyone's computer while roll20 won't run on one of my players' old Apple laptop (fortunately I can use my webcam to view my own computer monitor so she can see what's going on).
Tangent101, please contact me on Roll20 regarding the Apple laptop user. I would like to troubleshoot the problem to see if we can get her up and running.
- Gauss
Sort of on topic... how does anyone get a PFS session done in 3 hours??? I've seen that all over the boards here. 3 hours to me seems like enough time to set up an adventure, talk to the important people, and have like 3-4 fights. Is that all it takes to finish?
All that in 3 hours? I wish my Pathfinder group could do all that in a session... with 6 people not including the DM, plus the fact that most aren't terribly optimized (and take forever on their turns) means a single fight just drags on and on.
We play in a local game store and have to be done when the store closes. We used to start right at 4 and go to 8, but new employment for some people means that we don't end up starting until at least 5-5:20 and then we have to be done exactly at 8. We sometimes end up in the awkward position of us being in a dungeon but it's 7:30 so we can't start anything else and have to call it. Not nearly enough time at all it feels like.
On the other hand another Pathfinder game I'm in has only 4 players, but one barely makes it. It's amazing how fast fights can go when you cut the number of players in half.
It's amazing how fast fights can go when you cut the number of players in half.
This is true. The 1-2 hour sessions I mentioned upthread only had 3 consistent players. We'd occasionally have extra players show up as "guests" for a few sessions(people in between semesters at school, in between jobs, etc), but the main game really revolved around only 3 players.
Honestly that's something I've never understood, and maybe this is another thread or it's been talked to death, so I apologize. I run a game, once a month on a Sunday. 3 players, well optimized characters and one player isn't big on roleplay so "talky" bits tend to be weeded out. We play for 6 hours, though after BSing and breaks its more like 5.
Anyway, last game session I ran a homebrew adventure, one I thought was very brief and straightforward. The party is on the verge of 6th level. A bunch of goblins had attacked a fledgling wizard out in the hinterlands of the town on the orders of a new fey I created. They stole his book o' spells with the intention of burning it as a sacrifice to their deity.
Long story boring, getting though talking to the wizard's widow took an hour. Getting to the guy's cabin, attacking some goblins and a fey on the way there and then figuring out his book was missing took another hour. This left me just under 4 hours to run the meat of the adventure: a meager 6 room dungeon hack. They didn't make it all the way through.
I figured by making most of the fights APL w/2 at APL +1 this thing would've gotten cleared up quickly. I don't really understand how 2 goblins, in an open field, with a third adept riding an enlarged goat familiar could possibly take 44 minutes (I remember jotting that note down for reference) while the investigation of the scene after the fight must've taken another 15-20.
It's all about the party dynamic. Some groups tend to drag their heels and make every step of the game take forever, and some groups work like a well-oiled machine. I was blessed with my old, small group; the three players were focused and open-minded. We didn't get hung up on rules questions very often, encounters were much more spontaneous and less "chess-like." I've tried to run the same campaign with other groups and it's been a trainwreck almost every time; that old group was one-of-a-kind.
My current PF group tends to take long turns, and encounters drag on. We have 6 players, and a DM who tends to get hung up on little details that could easily be glossed over. Just 2 sessions ago, a single random encounter took up our entire session. In one of my old games, we'd have had 3 encounters, RP time, and downtime in the amount of time this one battle took; don't underestimate the staying power of Incorporeality + DR...
There's also the need to force the group to stop going off on tangents. By eliminating reminiscences you can often reduce by half the time wasted. Or to put it another way... it took four games to reach and finish with the Lodge for Reign of Winter. The first had the party go to Helgren, finish with some business, learn about the kidnapping, and start into the frozen region (ending with winter fey I believe). The second had the group end after the frozen river. The third was a random encounter, a small group of bandits, and then a blowup that wasted 30 minutes of game time in plotting an assault on the Lodge. The fourth was one encounter that went entirely too long and then stuff back at Helgren, but ended with the group just about to be attacked by the first encounter over the Bridge.
Then there was the last game. They blew through everything, there was intense roleplaying, four combats, three other encounters... all in four hours. They are just shy of the Winter Portal (one encounter prior to the Portal encounter). I have no idea why this time things went so much faster... though I half-suspect the fact I was using roll20 may have helped (no need to draw out a map or the like).
If the GM is prepared ahead of time, and there is minimal setup time, then the encounter will likely move faster. In the last game, I had already designed several maps, loaded other ones, had icons loaded, and just had to click a couple buttons and that encounter was up and running. There was no time for the party to wind down and get distracted.
I could probably learn a lesson there for my job. ^^;;
6 hours; although most of the time is eaten up by people being late, bickering over rules, people not being prepared, and out of game talk.
There's also the need to force the group to stop going off on tangents. By eliminating reminiscences you can often reduce by half the time wasted. Or to put it another way... it took four games to reach and finish with the Lodge for Reign of Winter...
Spoiler:The first had the party go to Helgren, finish with some business, learn about the kidnapping, and start into the frozen region (ending with winter fey I believe). The second had the group end after the frozen river. The third was a random encounter, a small group of bandits, and then a blowup that wasted 30 minutes of game time in plotting an assault on the Lodge. The fourth was one encounter that went entirely too long and then stuff back at Helgren, but ended with the group just about to be attacked by the first encounter over the Bridge.Then there was the last game. They blew through everything, there was intense roleplaying, four combats, three other encounters... all in four hours. They are just shy of the Winter Portal (one encounter prior to the Portal encounter). I have no idea why this time things went so much faster... though I half-suspect the fact I was using roll20 may have helped (no need to draw out a map or the like).
If the GM is prepared ahead of time, and there is minimal setup time, then the encounter will likely move faster. In the last game, I had already designed several maps, loaded other ones, had icons loaded, and just had to click a couple buttons and that encounter was up and running. There was no time for the party to wind down and get distracted.
I could probably learn a lesson there for my job. ^^;;
I can't help but feel like this should all be behind a [ SPOILER] tag, for those who haven't played that adventure yet.
I thought it was sufficiently vague that it wouldn't really give spoilers. After all, the players know from talking to the guard who made it to Helgren about the Winter Fey and the bandits. I didn't talk about the Yeti Tribe or the Wendigo at all... oh, whoops? ;)