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You do realize that Legacy of the Stonelords is a Special, intended to be run as a large scale event with multiple tables working toward a common goal? There are far more encounters built into that scenario than a single table will ever see, so that each table can choose its own path through the adventure. This is definitely not the scenario to base your feel for PFS on.
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Often the optional encounters have to be tossed out for time constraints in the games I've played in. I also find the 7-11 scenarios usually take longer then the lower lvl ones. But most scenarios are subjective and can take different amount of time depending on both GM and players at any given table. A heavy combat group could plow through one scenario, while a heavy RP group could take twice as long for the same scenario because of choices or options etc. It's not exactly a precise formula how long a hame should take to play.
Instead of asking Paizo to change thier scenarios to accommodate on the time of play, perhaps it's better to remind the gm & players to use the game time wisely and stay on task, focused on the game etc.
Developer
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I am aware that scenarios have been creeping toward and sometimes over the 5-hour mark. I've started by being particularly vigilant when developing Tier 7–11 scenarios, whose combats can be very long indeed. I believe that the upcoming #6–04: Beacon Below is written in such a way that the adventure should fit into a more reasonable timeframe—barring any hard-to-predict complications or unorthodox tactics on the players' part.
In general, my impression is that the higher-level adventures and several of the roleplay-heavy scenarios are the main ones that tend to go over time the most. These are the ones that I'm watching most carefully.
Venture-Agent, Florida–Altamonte Springs
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It depends on what the players do.
I've had adventures last 2.5 hours. Library of the Lion had no combat due to player actions, and they completed it in that time.
I've also had an adventure I played in go 5 hours and the bbeg got "diplomacized" due to the fact that the game was an hour past the time the store closed and we were just starting that fight.
I agree with Tony though the specials are not intended for everything to be encountered. When I printed off *Siege of the Diamond City" then printed off the provided creature stats for the level I was running I had a stack of paper that was almost a half an inch thick. When I ran it, my table did not clear every zone, they did clear a lot, but we were running from encounter to encounter until the VC in charge called time. I look forward to running stonelords at the next convention I attend.
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6-00 definitely had a time crunch; unless you had an exceptional group you would almost certainly miss out on half the content. Your GM might have been pushing you forward because some of the rewards are determined by how much you accomplished. There are a couple of Specials (the multi-table events and Bonekeep scenarios) that are notable for trying to cram as much as possible in a 5 hour time slot.
That said, the majority of non-Special Scenarios tend to fit within the 4-5 time limit. There are some outliers; a couple of Season 5 scenarios have a runtime of 2-3 hours whereas 5-01: Glass River Rescue was a disastrous 7 hour run when I played it.
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Instead of asking Paizo to change thier scenarios to accommodate on the time of play, perhaps it's better to remind the gm & players to use the game time wisely and stay on task, focused on the game etc.
+1. Scenario length can mostly be mitigated by GMs having control over the flow of the game, and encouraging players to be attentive and plan their actions in advance. There are a couple of other table procedures that can be used in order to make the game go faster, such as having people with lots of iteratives roll their attacks in advance, having the GM track PC AC values, etc.
There are also some scenarios that have conditions to help fit them in the 4-5 hour time slot. Bonekeep has a hard 5 hour time limit. And from what I understand, 6-03 has some built in instructions for initiating the final combat if time is running short.
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Ways to speed up the game:
Assume that the party is a group of semi competent quasi trained murderho..ermm. intrepid explorers with the common sense that saranrae imbued a can of spam. Get their standard operating procedure at the start of the trip or dungeon, and have them do it the entire time. Assume that when entering a place that screams "Death traps here" the party stops and takes the time to look for them.
Searching a door takes 3 seconds. Do no have all of the parties hour per level (or even 10 min per level) buffs wear off before someone looked at a door.
Do not hoard information. Players should not need to announce perception checks or sense motive checks. The latter can be excused by not wanting to metagame, but there's no excuse for the former. You are the players eyes and ears into the world. If you look and listen at a door you shouldn't need to specify "looking for the traps" and "listening for the heavy breathing of something wicked on the other side of the door."
Same goes for the knowledge checks at the start of the game. As the dm you know what kind of knowledge check "the pillars of the sun" calls for. As the player it might be local, history, geography, or even arcana.
Knowledge checks do not take an action. Don't make the player guess what kind of knowledge they should have to use to identify the monster. If its really top secret information , ask them for a d20 and take a look at their character sheet. Remember that the player invested a fair bit into those knowledge skills: make the information as useful as you can. The fist thing a fighter learns about a skeleton is "hit it with a club" not "it took 50 gp of onyx to make this"
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+1 to BNW's advice.
The best thing a player can do to speed up play is PAY ATTENTION! Know what you want to do next, observe what everyone else is doing, and act accordingly. I have very little patience for players who are not looking at the table or are otherwise distracted. As a GM I will put them on delay after 3 minutes or so, unless they are new.
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Top 5 things you could do to save time:
Print out all maps and creature statistics, as scrolling through a pdf or rummaging the nth 6-page Frost statblock for an ability dc is a major time hog. I like to make my own statblocks wherein I include only such info that pertains to the encounter at hand. Ac, saves, buff durations, diplo dc's. No "yes, this golem too is immune to mind-affecting" or the lenghty explanation why that particular death cultist fights to the death.
Preroll a whole lotta dice, particularly d20's for opposed checks and mark the results in the scenario. This saves time in having you not stop gm'ing to roll stuff, let the players do the rolling instead! Definitely don't do this for combat.
Roll the dice openly in combat. That both promotes a bond of trust between you and the players and makes the encounter roll faster. When everyone can see it's a 19, people can process it there and then and react accordingly - use any immediate actions, go "holy crap, wasn't that a keen heavy pick!?", agree that it hits/saves since the 14 earlier did, etc.
Fill out any chronicle sheets beforehand and just call out the gold/pp when handing them out. Naturally this assumes there's no boons etc to check! I like to live on the edge and trust my players to not cheat.
Finally - and this is big - cut the crap. Try to stay with the game and make sure your players do so too. Tell your friend to stuff it with the latest irc gossip, politely ask the Greyhawk veteran to not repeat the invisible tauric duergars with polearms anecdote and especially forget about spewing crap yourself: That's a death sentence for the session, particularly if you make it into a conversation. I've found that off-game stuff can really cut into a session and waste up to an hour at its worst.
Some tl;dr musing below. Not really time related but efficiency involved, I guess.
In a con special last summer I realised that I had made a mistake with a victory condition(this, I later found out, did not matter all that much) and spent some time checking my papers. One player later mentioned that I seemed to mostly read those papers rather than gm and it stung. But that's a lesson. We are there to provide a good experience above all and everyone assumes that we hold all the strings. We don't, of course, but that's not the point.
Rather, a gm should endeavour to run a coherent game. Rise above the mess of prep, the little mistakes, and the mountain of inconsistencies the editor and/or writer left behind and just run with it. The players are there to catch you and if it isn't a life or death situation(to avoid messing these up, prep them a bunch), forgetting to, say, run a pit trap, ask for a Diplo check etc, losing your cool just makes for a worse session. I've been on both sides of the tables where this happens and I loathe it when it happens.
Regional Venture-Coordinator, Baltic
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I've played 6-00 Legacy of the Stone Lords twice now. Once at PaizoConUK and once at GenCon, both at the highest tier.
At PaizoConUK it was just the playtest (about 2/3 of the adventure was written at the time) and we were having a hard time to finish all encounters and this did feel like a missed opportunity. (Gamers tend to have this urge for completeness)
I decided that if I'd organize this special I'd just reserve an 8 hour slot for it. This might be too long for the lower tiers, but then they can do more roleplaying and socializing. :-)
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Movement: For reasons i don't understand, people seem to take forever to move.
You can try to get people to pay attention when they're on deck. Have a kush ball or something similarly innocuous at high velocities and toss it around to the player that goes next.
Warn players about reach and attacks of opportunity if they're obvious to the character. The player is, at best, seeing a rock, die, or half painted gnoll mini thats sitting on an intersection instead of in a square. at worst they're seeting the top half of their neighbors pile of books and a mini sitting in the middle of the line. Their character on the other hand is seeing an ogre, or an ogre with a pole arm and should know how far they can go without getting smacked in the face.
If someone is melee and there's only one place they can possibly go give them a nudge.
A charge lane can vary between somewhat subjective and head scratchingly weird because you have to envision the base of the character moving in a strait line over a grid. Asking a player "Do you want to charge?" gives them a reminder of the option and spares them the awkwardness of asking permission to do so.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I've played 6-00 Legacy of the Stone Lords twice now. Once at PaizoConUK and once at GenCon, both at the highest tier.
At PaizoConUK it was just the playtest (about 2/3 of the adventure was written at the time) and we were having a hard time to finish all encounters and this did feel like a missed opportunity. (Gamers tend to have this urge for completeness)
I decided that if I'd organize this special I'd just reserve an 8 hour slot for it. This might be too long for the lower tiers, but then they can do more roleplaying and socializing. :-)
Oooh, we gonna play another special soon? :)
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(Adding some ideas to BNW's wonderful list)
For me, combat always takes the most time. Here are some techniques that I've found help speed things up:
Roll your attack and damage dice at the same time. Then it if hits, you have the damage ready to go. If you have different damage types, use different colors or styles of dice to sort them out.
If you have multiple attacks, use color-coded dice and roll them all at once. My husband and I played teamwork two-weapon fighters, and around 6th level, we adopted the following pattern: Tell the GM our full attack plan with contingency, e.g., "I start by attacking this guy--if he drops, I five foot step and switch to this guy. If he drops, I hit that guy. Attacks go red-purple-blue-black-gray." Then I'd throw 15-25 dice into a dice tower and count down the attacks.
If you are attacking a single creature with multiple attacks, announce your lowest attack roll first. If it hits, you can usually assume the rest hit and stop doing math.
Add up your attack bonuses before your turn as much as possible. Announce them before you drop the dice, e.g., "With Bless, Inspire courage, and flanking, Red is at +15, blue is +10." That way, you don't have to go through the "Miss? Wait! I forgot Bless!" dance. Also, if your brain hiccups when you look at the dice, the rest of the table can help you out.
For the GM: tell the players the result of the attack. Don't wait for them to ask, "Does it look like I hurt him? How badly?" If there's visible damage, say so. (Be graphic and specific, if you like--it's much more fun to carve a huge gash in a monster's shoulder than to just do 10 points of damage.) If not, say that, too.
Overall:
For gods' sake, take 10 whenever possible.
When I GM, I assume the players are taking 10 on their perception rolls, and if their take 10 beats the DC, I just tell them what's in the room. This is my implementation of BNW's standard operating procedure and "don't hoard information" advice, and it works pretty well.
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I decided that if I'd organize this special I'd just reserve an 8 hour slot for it. This might be too long for the lower tiers, but then they can do more roleplaying and socializing. :-)
I wish I could be there to retire my Life Oracle on that one.
Maybe she would actually run out of resources for once. :)
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I decided that if I'd organize this special I'd just reserve an 8 hour slot for it. This might be too long for the lower tiers, but then they can do more roleplaying and socializing. :-)I wish I could be there to retire my Life Oracle on that one.
Maybe she would actually run out of resources for once. :)
You should try playing Siege of the Diamond City in the highest tier if you haven't already.
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Another time saving tip for GMs: Tell the players not to do any math unless you ask for it.
I've seen lots of people sit there and spend 30-60 seconds adding up their attack bonus, temporary buffs, flank bonus, etc every single turn before they roll the d20 to see if they hit. Half the time, they roll so low or so high that it just doesn't matter. Have them roll, and if it's really obvious that they'll hit/miss based on the die, then the details of the math become irrelevant.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I recently had to step up my game with regards to to-hit math. Used to be, the number on my character sheet got influenced by 1-3 buffs/debuffs. But at some point, every level you go up the amount of different buffs increases. Also, you're not always playing with the same people so it's not always the same buffs.
However, during a session, round after round, you might be doing the same math. "I normally have a +11 to hit, but I've been Hasted and Blessed, so that's +13. But I got cursed for -6 Str, so that's -3 to hit and -something to damage... let's see, my Str used to be 18, now it's 12, so that's -5 to damage..." This takes forever, and doesn't actually get easier if people are looking at you excitedly/impatiently.
So now I just put a second piece of paper next to my character sheet and list all the things that make up to-hit and damage and sum them. If an ally of enemy casts something and another condition modifies my to-hit or damage, immediately adjust the sheet.
Then, when it's my turn, roll the dice, add the number on the paper, and announce the results. Saves a lot of time.