Recently on TT we’ve looked at the longest sessions you’ve ever run, and at some models for GMing short sessions on weeknights.
With session length on the brain, TT reader and frequent commenter Walt C. emailed me to suggest this two-part GMing question (thanks, Walt!): What’s your ideal session length, and what’s the shortest session you’d be comfortable running?
For my part, I love the four-hour session; six hours is a close second (but not five — why is that?). Just enough time to get a lot done, but not enough time to dawdle. As far as short sessions go, I could see running a single robust encounter in one hour, or a couple of linked encounters — for a demo, maybe — in two hours. I’ve never done that, though.
How about you?
(I’ll be in Michigan from Thursday, September 20th through Monday, September 24th. As always, I’ve cued up a post for every day that I’ll be gone, but I probably won’t be able to respond to comments or emails. Have fun, and I’ll see you on Tuesday! — Martin)
heh, my case was just the time u mentioned not your favorite, 5 hours. My reason is simple: Currently my sessions of gaming start at 5pm, to end 10. But even before, when started at 3 i would like to come home earlier. But anyway, ive been playing for many many years, and these day i cant stand for loong sessions like 12 hours anymore, and for experience i noticed that for me 5 hours is the border beteween “session ends funny all the time and looking foward for next one” and “I was lookin the watch, it is fun but i want to go home, this combat whould be ended soon”
Our gaming group runs two session lengths that for me are ideal. Wednesday nights run for 5 hours, 7 to 12. 5 hours is enough to really make some progress despite a bunch of joking. We play a combat-intensive game with a lot of long running battle so 4 hours is just not going to be enough.
Also once every month or two we pull out our high level characters from the old campaign and do a Saturday double session. We run from 11 AM to midnight. I am definitely drained after one of those, but we can deal with a major plot point and have two huge battles all in one day.
You add on an hour of post-game wrap up, chit chat, and 4th Edition speculation, and a solid night of fun has been had even if Thursday mornings are a little rough for me.
Since I asked the question…
I run three hour sessions on Friday nights and four hour sessions every other Sunday afternoon.
Personally, I think four hours is my ideal session length. This presumes about 3-3.5 hours of solid gaming.
My weeknight game has been as short (in actual play) as one and a half hours. I think that would be my “critical mass” although I definitely feel disappointed that we didn’t go longer.
Vaerdeger mentioned postgame wrap-up time. I’ve never had a true “postgame wrap-up.” Once the actual session ends, everyone heads for home. Thus, the “postgame” is usually a quick “I had fun” as someone is packing up, or a phone call between sessions.
A true postgame wrap-up is a kick-ass idea, but I’m not sure if I could get my players into it.
Another question I’d asked Martin is whether your group size has an impact on your ideal session length. For 5-6 players, I’d make a four hour session my critical mass.
Generally I like between 4 and 6 hours, but it is very much dependent on what is going on in the game. If stuff is happening and it isn’t hard to be engaged in the scenario, then I could keep going if we had time.
I think the answer to this is very dependent on whether you are GMing or playing. If I’m GMing I like to make sure that stuff is getting done, I want to see the plot points be hit, and I want to make sure the players are having fun and each have something special for their characters in every session. If that happens I usually prefer to end on a good note and try to make the next session as good.
If I am a player and I just had something kickass for my character, well then I want to keep going and going because it seems like stuff is just getting underway.
I think walt has a good point about the number of players affecting it too. Playing in a game with 3 players means that more stuff is going on, while playing in a game with 6 players means that the spotlight is getting shared more, and a shorter session doesn’t feel as rewarding.
As a university student, I’ve taken to running daily one-hour sessions in between classes. While we of course don’t get as much accomplished as I’m used to, it also means much less preparation for me (a plus for someone with little free time).
The shortest D&D games I have played in for awhile was 6 hours and I have to say 90% of all groups I have played with do 8hrs. One group even did 12 hr games every 2 weeks. 12 hours is a little much as they ran from noon to midnight.
Personally I always plan and run 8hr games and they often go to 9 or even 10 hrs. This could be do in part to only gaming once every 3 weeks and sometimes as long as 4 to 5 weeks between sessions. So once we can get players to the table we want to do as much ‘gaming’ as possible.
Also for my groups games all accounting and character leveling is done through our YahooGroup. This also includes all rule discussions. This is done so that the 8hrs we actually game is all gaming fun and not book or record keeping.
My Monday night game typically runs 4 hours. I try to encourage everyone to show up an hour early so we can start promptly at 7:00 PM. I’ve run Saturday one-shots that run 6-8 hours, but those are few and far between.
My group used to run ~6 hour sessions, which included dinner, but now we start after out kids are in bed and play from ~8:30 to 1am. It ends up being ~4 hours. In the 6 hour sessions, we probably played for 4-5 hours, with the shorter, later sessions, we generally play about 4 hours.
The ideal length really depends on how the session is going. I’ve had sessions that I wish ended in 2 hours, and other where we wanted to keep going…. Although, I’ve found that we normally get the next sessions rolling much more easily if we ended the last on a high note (duh.)
I always seem to GM four hour sessions, usually dictated by people’s schedules rather than a desire to quit. I played with a 6 hour group and I thought it went on an hour too long.
I think the ideal would be five hours with five players.
My Friday group has 4-5 players and we usually go 5 hours – 7pm to Midnight.
My Saturday group has 3-4 players and we try for 5 hours, but often end up going long. Some dynamics in the Saturday groups’ members sprouted a parallel “boys game,” where our sons play a separate game in an adjacent room. As they’re aged 10-14, we will be more strict about the cut-off time so they can get home and in bed.
Ideal session length for me depends on game system and how often we play, and pure logistics. Overall, I think my ideal would be 8-10 hours, but that’s not realistic these days. Generally, I think 4 hours is a minimum, less than that and the 30 minute socialization period and the inevitable 30 minute wait for a late player start to dominate the time.
I think a 3 hour session might work with a system that resolved things very quickly and had a small group of players (perhaps just 2-3 players plus GM). A 1 hour lunch session with co-workers might work, especially if it happens more than once a week.
Frank
Four hours is my target session length as GM. I find I can run 1-3 action encounters and 3-5 talking encounters (due to the fact that the rules in most games tend to make action encounters longer in real time) in an hour of play. This is about right for giving each of my players at least one spotlight encounter for their characters, and delivering the plot points needed to get the story from A to B.
my group usually starts playing from around 3pm to 5pm, depending on when we can all get together, and go until 11pm to midnight. so 6 to 8 hours, including an hour or two for dinner. it’s been working well for us for years.
Like Frank, I think this varies somewhat by the system. Universalis and Spirit of the Century work well in a 4 hour slot at the meetup, while 4 hours is the minimum I like for traditional games like Shadowrun or D&D. Of course, it’s somewhat dictated by the work week and people’s interest levels. I’d rather call it at a good four and the beginning of yawns instead of plowing through with semi-conscious people for another couple of hours.
Post-game wrap-up is an interesting point. With our longer sessions, my group is usally too wiped for much chit-chat after the game. We just tidy up and stagger home. With shorter sessions, though, I can see blowing off steam after the game being a lot of fun.
Mike Kenyon: One-hour sessions sound like a unique challenge. Would you be interested in writing a guest post about how you tackle that? If so, drop me a line: martin(at)treasuretables(dot)org. 🙂
Back in high school, I used to run Ghostbusters International during lunch (half an hour every weekday) and I found that the frequency of play made up for the short duration of the sessions.
My current group plays once a week for about 2 hours per session (7:30 – 10:00 on a weeknight, minus the usual socializing). The sessions aren’t nearly long enough, and have really limited our games and our gaming styles. It’s hard to do any substantial roleplaying (or to encourage roleplaying when I’m the GM) with such short sessions.
I play with a group of four to six guys every other Sunday. We often play more than 8 hours and if it weren’t for work and school we’d definitely play longer.