Whether due to lack of prep (“Crap, there’s no way this’ll last four hours”), an encounter taking a lot less time than you expected or any other factor, have you ever padded out a gaming session to make it last longer?
Ways to pad a session include adding an encounter on the fly (“Ninjas kick in the door!”), making a puzzle more complicated than it should be or drawing out a conversation between the party and a key NPC.
Doing things like this to make the game more fun, or to adapt to changing conditions, is part of being a GM. Doing them just to stretch out a session is padding (the key difference is intent).
And as a follow-up question: Is there such a thing as good padding?
I’ve had a conversation with an NPC go longer than I originally expected. I don’t think I’ve ever worked to make one run longer than it would naturally. If anything, I’m always working to cut things short. If by “lack of prep”, you mean that I included things that weren’t explicity written in the notes, then yes. However, I rarely include anything that I haven’t considered before hand. It merely happens that the notes are in my head instead of on paper. Again, I’ll do this because it is something I intended or a natural outgrowth of player interest, not to pad the encounter.
Padding, by definition, sounds like a bad thing to me–or at worst, a neutral, flavor thing.
It seemed clear in my head, but I didn’t get my question across very well. 😉 I’ve edited the post accordingly.
Despite my muddy writing, you hit it on the head, CJ: the key difference is GM intent, IMO.
In the old days, padding was called the “wandering monster table.” 🙂
I think the question is one of perception. In most D&D adventures, players expect a number of ultimately irrelevant encounters (does it really matter what’s populating the rooms on the way to the Big Bad?). These are opportunities for collecting treasure and gaining XP along the way.
In mystery campaigns, padding often comes in the form of red herrings. These “false clues” often eat up a lot of time. Throwing in a random mugging would seem way out of place (or, in a 1980s adventure, a perfect opportunity for the PCs to show off their martial prowess).
I once played in a Rolemaster campaign where the GM really wanted us to go through his Iron Wind adventure. Rather than starting us at an appropriate level, he insisted that we start at 1st level and work our way up. In this sense, all of the adventures leading up to the Iron Wind were “padding” and we knew it. Needless to say, we never did make it to the Iron Wind, having lost interest in the pointless adventures leading up to it (note that these adventures could have been fun in their own right, if not for the little thought and care the GM put into them). To this day, the “Iron Wind” is in our gaming lexicon as a big payoff that isn’t likely to happen.
Hey, Martin, no fair editing the post while I’m in the middle of responding! LOL
(hides face in shame) Yes! Yes, I did it. I was young! I needed the money! Well, no money, but I admit to padding quite a bit in my younger days. Mostly, it was due to inexperience (“How did they manage to find the Lost Idol of Tiki-Kuoa in two hours?”) and a “me vs. them” mentality (“So you killed the dragon without a scratch? Well…umm…it’s mate flies into the cave! Killed that too, eh? Well…now the hatchlings are awake and hungry!).
But I’m okay now 😉
This is something that happens fairly often when the players take off in unexpected directions. Luckily, I prep my campaign by writing lots of stuff down that’s not supposed to come up in the next session. Thus, as the players suddenly decided to check out that lone castle, I had the evil cleric and his band of undead ready. Or when the players decided to visit the old wizard in the forest instead of investigating the sewers, I had an encounter involving an ettercap & monstrous spiders ready somewhere in my notes. The idea is to have some generic encounters prepared ahead of time.
Alex, I don’t think any of that is padding. Coming up with something to respond to unexpected PC investigation and travel is just improv. Padding occurs when you find the PC’s have finished the adventure halfway through a game session. What do you do now?
I think it really depends on the style of campaign. In my combat heavy (hack-n-slash – though I reject the negative connotations) campaigns, I don’t think it’s bad to pad. The players have committed to playing for 4 hours, you should deliver (and it may be too disruptive to try and start a new adventure).
I guess it really depends on how everyone will feel about ending early. If they see it as a bonus, then padding is bad. If it’s easy to start on the next scenario, then padding is bad. If the players will be disappointed, and it isn’t easy to start another scenario, then padding may be appropriate. But the padding needs to be carefully thought out. Drawing out the scenario is probably not good padding. Making more use of a random encounter table that you are already using might be ok. Tossing an encounter in on the way home from the dungeon is probably ok.
I think part of the difference here is to do the padding in a way that doesn’t detract from the player’s success. They solved the mystery. They cleared out the dungeon. They defeated the big bad guy (but now perhaps have to mop up some of the minions).
In a sense, if you respond to the unexpected early finish, then you’re in a situation that demands improv, and now the fact that you decide to throw in a filler encounter is no different than responding to the PCs going left (unplanned) instead of right (planned).
Frank
I hear what some of you are saying, but even when I use a “wandering monster” table, I never use it for padding. Rather, it might be used to abstract and simplify the idea that this particular area is a dangerous place to dawdle. In that sense when the situation is communicated clearly, it’s actually anti-padding, because the point is to encourage the characters to move.
I guess I’ve never had the situation where the party was expecting 4 hours and I’m out of material at the 2.5 mark. The closest I’ve come has been times when we finished a particular bit earlier than expected, and decided to close up for the day rather than start the next big thing with the hour or so we have left. Since I’ve always run long sessions (or usually multiple, consecutive short sessions), the players aren’t out that much: “Oh great, after starting at 7:00 PM, we finished at 3:30 AM instead of our usual 5:00 or 6:00 AM. Guess we’ll all get more sleep this time.” As our group has gotten older, the start and end times have moved up considerably, but the basic principle is still sound. 🙂
I don’t pad to stretch things out. That to me is a sure way to take a good adventure and make it a longer boring one.
If the players do whip through my scenarios due to luck or a great use of tactics I will improv the rest of the session (if we want to keep playing) and I am up front with the players about it.
Just telling the players that “Hey, you all did great and really caught me off guard tonight! I’m happy to keep going, but it is going to have to be on the fly because I’m out of prepared material. Are you all cool with that?” has two great benefits:
1) You set the players expectations at a reasonable level. They know that you may have a few plot holes and moments of “Give me a second . . . Okay this is what happens next . . .”
2) You take the pressure off of yourself to do as well as you would with proper prep work. The players not only know that you are improving, but have actually agreed to play with that in mind.
Padding may be good or bad depending on the situation, but I just prefer to avoid it altogether and go with the flow.
Yes. More than once, I misjudged game time… or I ran out of prep time… or any other lame excuse…
And I’ve found that the best padding is to let the players talk. They love to talk, and I just oblige them, let them chase down all the red herrings, beat the dead horses, obliterate the straw men, etc.
I’ve turned a two-hour game into a six-hour session by just letting the players chatter.
Telas, yes: I’ve deliberately dropped into small talk once in a while when I realized that I needed to stretch things out a half hour or so. And “so, what’s your next move going to be” is always good to get the players talking and not acting — last session was almost entirely “what do we do next” discussion, with lots of comments that illuminated me as to what they thought was going on.
Sigh. Never underestimate the ability of players to assume that coincidental events are connected.
I think pacing would make a good subject for a post, especially as a follow-up for this one.
How important is it for the “Adventure!” to start and finish at the same time the session does?
How do you normally structure your sessions, scenes, and adventures?
i’ve never worried about lining up adventures with sessions. i’m happy to end the adventure when it ends, and move on to the next. i’m used to winging nearly everything, so two or three minutes of crunch prep, usually while the party’s talking, is all i really need to get started on something.
I’ve been attempting (with mixed success) to have closed story sessions, with each session ending at a natural breakpoint in the story. The reason is that players have unreliable schedules, and I want to have places where characters can enter and exit without huge disruptions between sessions. So pacing is important. However, usually I end up dropping things for timing purposes rather than adding them. (If we’re getting to 5 PM, the monster in the next room disappears….or maybe there really is no room there at all…) The one game when it was reversed, I hummed and hawed for a while, and then confessed that I was underprepared and ended the session early.
Here I’ll get into some semantics:
By your definition above, no there isn’t such a thing as good padding. Why? Because you state that padding is JUST to take up time. Since the ultimate goal of the game is to have fun, and the goal of padding is to take up time, not only is it not necesarily fun, BUT it doesn’t contribute to the sucess of the game. If you find yourself padding simply for time’s sake, just cut it short. A short fun game is more “sucessful” than a longer, less fun game. HOWEVER, if you instead define pad as “a previously unplanned extension of the game with the intent of extending play time while upholding the quality and goals of the game” then yes, padding can be fine because it doesn’t neccesarily detract from the game. It’s all about keeping an eye on quality as you pad. If you’re out of quality ideas, it doesn’t matter HOW short you are, give it a rest and come back next week.
I’d like to second Cliff’s nomination for a post on pacing. Have there been any dicussions on the roll of timing in a game session? My players can barely get through the front door of a dungeon in 4 hours.
My group and I lovingly refer to this phenomenon as “GMing on the fly,” and is as much an art form as knowing how to GM in the first place. I find it best to drop a hint, not necessarily subtle, so your players know that you’re making it up as you go. Heck, I once put a literal road sign along the party’s path that said, “Warning: Now Entering GM on the Fly.” Assuming it doesn’t happen every session, I find most players understand. The better ones even try to make suggestions along the way. “Oh, gee, we have to go through this swamp. I sure hope a band of lizardfolk don’t try to ambush us. *wink* *wink*”
Padding is in my eyes improvising. I guess I never let a nice padding out.
Padded a session?
In D20 there is no need. One combat can eat 4 hours.
🙂
Yes, in the past I’ve padded, but it’s on my “not to do” list now. As mentioned above, just letting the players pick where to go next will stretch to fill any amount of time…
(longcoat000) (hides face in shame) Yes! Yes, I did it. I was young! I needed the money!
No shame needed. 😉 I’ve certainly padded my share of sessions, and it sounds like I’ve done it more recently than you have.
For me, padding starts looking attractive when I haven’t had enough time to prep, or haven’t put in the time that I needed to on prep (even though I did have enough time). And I always feel bad about it — and given why it comes up and what it means at the table, I think I should feel bad about it.
Re: A post on pacing. That’s an excellent idea! I’ll put something together in the next few days, and we can use it as a starting point for discussion and more suggestions in the comments.
The whole idea of padding seems to come from the idea that there is a set, limited and boundaried story created by the GM–one could get around this problem by creating a situation which runs itself:
a player-driven story created around the PC’s in a family feud situation in 1850’s wild-west California (for example), with the towns & various NPC’s activities and motivations set, but no pre-determined story, would never need padding–the whole story could be run ad infinitum based on what the players did, with everyone creating the story together.