What Should You Be Able to Accomplish in Four Hours?

[ibldedibble]

Much less than I think we'll be able to achieve when prepping.
On several occasions I've prepared what I've thought would be fine for an hour or two and then it's taken at least twice that.

I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but in the last session I DMd (OD&D; we played for about an hour) we managed to fit three combats and some 40-45 minutes of exploration and RPing.

Lately I've found myself falling in love with rules-lite RPGs that have deadly combat rules. Less time spent on combat = more fun, at least to me.

Two things you can do:
- Whenever a rules question comes up, just go with whatever feels right at the moment and then after the session look up the actual rules for the issue. Then talk to your players about it before the next session so everyone knows why you've changed the ruling if it comes up again.
- Have everything deal extra damage, that way combat will speed up quite a bit. (Make sure you talk to your players about this one first though).

/Ibl

 

[delericho]

Our sessions typically last 3 hours.

In that time, when playing 4e, we can generally get through 3 'standard' combats, plus a little roleplay and/or exploration. However, we do have to proceed at a very high pace to achieve this, and the roleplay in particular has felt short-changed.

With 3e, we do seem to get a bit more done, but that is probably due to a combination of greater system mastery on the part of the DM and the fact that we don't use the grid with 3e (but would never play 4e without).

Frankly, though, both 3e and 4e feel too slow to use for such short sessions. A much more rules-lite version of D&D would probably suit us better. Certainly, our experiments with other systems have seemed to bear this out; sadly, they just don't have the same classic feel of D&D!

(Ideally, I would suggest that no 'standard' combat should take longer than 20 minutes real time to resolve. A system that takes longer is probably overcooking the combat system. But, of course, that is a matter of taste!)

 

[Haltherrion]

Four hours would be tight for our group. Even trimming out the normal non-D&D chatter, we'd be hard pressed to get in 2 combats. It isn't so much that the combats take a super long time, although they can at times but that there is typically a fair amount of RP and decision making to do out of combat and that can take a lot of time. My group doesn't dive into fights and tries hard to find non-combat solutions to most problems.

I guess to take your question another way: how would I live with 4 hour sessions? I would probably go to a "dense encounter setting" where stuff happens more quickly. Some of the stuff could still be RP and not combat but a city setting possibly (although they can get very talky, although a city in the midst of a disaster might work) or more likely some sort of dungeon crawl type setting although dressed up a bit- perhaps they are tossed into some strange plane or a huge derelict flying fortress or some such.

As a ref, I'd like to make sure that in any session there were several interesting things happening just to keep the players coming back and so given a time constraint, might consider settings where a faster pace could be justified.

 

[amnuxoll]

My observation has been that a focused group of experienced players tops out at about 3 combats and 2 roleplaying encounters in 4 hours. This seems to be just as true with 4e as it is with 3.5e. It also assumes that the PCs are about 10th level or less (in 3.5e) and none of the battles is versus a elite soldier or solo (4e). Otherwise, combats get too long.

However, I think trying to target that maximum really ruins the experience. Just play, take your time and have fun.

Creating faster combat with minimal loss of compatibility with D&D was one of the focuses of my d20 system (see signature below). You should have little trouble running d20 material with it if you'd like to try it.

 

[Rel]

However, I think trying to target that maximum really ruins the experience. Just play, take your time and have fun.

I agree that targeting the maximum is a mistake. But this part of your post brought something to mind that I think plays into the pacing of games.

Four hours is generally how long the "slots" are at most of the Cons or Game Days I've ever been to. It seems to be a sort of universally accepted block of time for how long an RPG should take to get something "significant" accomplished.

Having run a lot of these games I'm used to designing stuff to fit within that window and I think that has been a big aid to my ability to GM with an eye toward keeping the game moving. I don't run my regular campaigns in strict adherence to this kind of schedule. But I often do urge new GMs (who, IME, often struggle with pacing) to run games "as though you're running it at a Con". In other words, plan a beginning, a middle and an end of the session and make it clear to the whole group that you WILL get that all accomplished.

And I sometimes shoot for this ideal myself. It can be powerful GM stuff to end a session at a dramatic moment rather than having to simply leave off when the clock strikes done. That said I also use some other "tricks" like the cliffhanger ending if we just don't have time for the climactic combat that I'd planned for the end of the night. Instead I'll have the bad guys (or PC's) make their dramatic appearance and then call things over right there so that the next session we start with initiative.

My point is that at a Con or Game Day, the group is focusing because they know that there is fun to be had and only 4 hours to have it in. I think that if you instill that concept with your regular campaign group, even if you don't do it every session, then it may get them working together to make sure that they do their best to get to the "end" of the session rather than move at whatever pace happens with all of the typical interruptions, asides and distractions.

 

[GhostBear]

Whoa, post made to the wrong thread. Sorry about that!

 

[mxyzplk]

Let's see, we keep session summaries in our current campaign so I can do a quick survey. Pathfinder, we do five hour sessions (of play - meet at 12, lunch till 1:30, screw around till 2, play till 7).

Last Session:
roleplaying in town
2 sex scenes
1 assassination
2 or more combats depending on how you count it (they kept letting what could have been one combat pull a train into another, so they got 3 combats for the price of 1)

Previous Session:
4 combats
exploration (garbage dungeon)

Session Before That:
roleplaying in town
exploration (garbage dungeon)
6 combats but one was trivial

And session before:
4 combats; one was trivial but one was a setpiece
roleplaying in town
investigation

Annnd the one before:
lots of roleplaying in town
rescuing people from a disaster area
two sex scenes
3 minor combats; two were minor

So on average 4 combats, .8 sex scenes, a healthy chunk of roleplaying, and some kind of investigation/exploration in a Pathfinder 5 hour session.

 

[Thunhus]

We play 4e 4 hours in almost every wednesday.
Typically we:
Chat and wait everybody to arrive 25 mins
Rehearse last session 5 mins
One standard combat encounter 1 h
skill challenge 10 min
Big combat encounter 1,5 h
Roleplaying/decision making/exploring 50 mins

Half the time we end session 15 mins before 4 hour is full, because I don't want leave encounter in halfway. We try to keep focused on the game, but usually we chat other things (other games, coming new rulebooks, movies, books etc.) while playing.

PC's are at 16th level.

Thunhus

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I'll break down what we do in my sessions where I DM, which typically last about 3 1/2 - 4 hours.

- I prep 2-3 encounters to throw at the group depending on where they are in the campaign, and sometimes they only get 1 encounter done because of role-playing or skill challenges.
- I give the DM Rules Compendium to one of the other guys at the table to be my assistant so he's the one who looks the stuff up when there are rules questions that people really want to know. I don't stop the game to do it. This speeds up games considerably.
- I use a laptop to keep track of combats (DnD4e Combat Manager to be precise) which helps me track all the hit points of NPCs/PCs, conditions, initiatives, and this is what I plan my encounters with ahead of time and save in my campaign folder.
- I have an ongoing write-up in Word that I keep track of everything that has gone on in the campaign for everyone and send it out weekly to keep everyone reminded of what happened previously. My players are also very good at writing things down in game to keep track of major NPCs, events, places, et cetera.

So in a 3 1/2 hour session we'll get done quite a bit and progress the storyline to the next chapter. I don't really plan on where they will end up in any given session, but I wing it where necessary to keep things interesting. We all know the players like to go off on tangents so I try to have the world open to do whatever they feel like doing and they know the major quests that they have to get accomplished.

 

[Herobizkit]

Four hours became the standard for gaming sessions in my group.

As a DM, i tend to run the 'episodic' style of campaign, as if the PC's were in an hourly TV serial. As such, I try to pace my adventures in a similar fashion.

Introduction, Interaction, Complication, Combat, Resolution.

You might also check out this article about the five-room dungeon.

For my players, they're introduced to the adventure, the discuss things with NPCs before venturing off, they have a difficulty to deal with before getting there, the area with the "main fight", and wrapping it with a bow.

It's very formulaic, but it works, especially for short sessions. In 4e, they have created the "delve" format which (I believe) has exactly one fight per 4-hour mini-session.