Your Typical Game Session

[schneeland]

Typical game sessions stars with: schneeland is 10 to 15 minutes late

More seriously: I only play online for the past few years - currently, game night is Wednesday every other week. Soft starting time 8:00 pm, hard starting time 8:15 pm. There's typically smalltalk until 08:30 pm anyway, though. We try to end at 11:00 pm, but will sometimes run over time (however, we rarely end sessions past midnight). Typically no alcohol for me, but others prefer having a drink while playing.

Gamewise, we play Savage Worlds/Sprawlrunners with (adapted) 1e and 2e Shadowrun adventures. On the technology side, we use Discord and our GM has a nice little video streaming set up, where he deals cards and tracks Bennies, so currently no VTTs. In other groups, we have used Owlbear Rodeo and Foundry, though. I personally roll my dice physically at my own table, but one of the players is also using an online dice roller.

Hopefully, in the coming month, the Forbidden Lands game I played in last year will also restart. That's with different people, but will otherwise be pretty similar, except no video, but Foundry with the respective modules. We're still in the dreaded scheduling phase, but there's still hope and I'm looking forward to play once a week again (I have found that these 2.5-3 hour online games once a week are my sweet spot w.r.t. RPGs).

 

[Corinnguard]

My sessions for the last two years have always been on a Monday around 8:30 pm EST (7:30 pm CST for the rest of the group who lives down in Texas). My friend (who lives right next door in Ohio) and I will log onto the group Discord channel a couple minutes early, and then wait for everyone else including the DM to log in. We'll spend the first couple minutes chatting about what we have been doing lately in RL. And then the DM will ask everyone for a recap of what happened in our previous session. After that we all log onto the Tabletop Simulator for a couple of hours.

Sessions for my group generally run two to four hours depending on how far the DM wants us to proceed in the current adventure. Sometimes we ask him if we have reached one of his benchmarks and have leveled up, or not. There have been other times where the DM will tell everyone in the party that we have leveled up. Then we spend sometime in between sessions updating our characters. Currently we update them using D&D Beyond, before that it was fillable character sheet PDFs.

All of our adventures are 5e. My Ohio friend and I have participated in the last 2 adventures run by our DM ( Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, Tyranny of Dragons).

 

[Cruentus]

Ours sounds a lot like everyone else. We played a lot of 5e during the pandemic online: Discord for voice, Fantasy Grounds for maps/sheets/etc.

We would schedule 7:30pm to start, every other week on Tuesday. We would start usually around 8 by the time all were there and settled, and play until 10:30pm or 11 sometimes. Lots of slow spots during that campaign, sloggy combats, very little ability to RP (or I should say that some of the players didn't want RP, just smash stuff). That campaign ran for a little more than 2 years. Then I started a second 5e campaign, same set up, same time, same schedule. That ran for 1 year. It was a little smoother as we had fewer players, and we were a lot more familiar with the VTT.

Then one of our players started a B/X game on Owlbear and Discord, which was even faster and easier given the simpler mechanics and the ease of Owlbear. That, unfortunately, got torpedoed by a couple of players who quit to play something else.

Now I am running an OSE/Beyond the Wall game via email, with the occasional VTT for combats or when requested. (Fantasy Grounds or Owlbear), which has been going for probably 9 months. We have a one hour timeslot scheduled on Tuesdays every other week in case we want to discuss/handle things live.

 

[Blue]

Typical online game I play in
We play in the evenings after work, generally starting 7pm. Try to log into Discord before start time, don't always succeed. Games are always voice and video, you lose too much emotional & RP bandwidth with just voice. Log into whatever else we're using, like a VTT or Google Draw. Open up my character sheet and sessions notes in Google docs.

Usually we have everyone there by a few minutes past start time. Chat for a few, starting roughly 15 minutes past start time. (In one game the DM says gather on Discord at 6:30 and game starts at 7pm sharp regardless of who's there.)

Once started, lots of in-character chatter, only an occasional player joke. It's online so some people may have snacks for themselves or even be finishing up dinner, but no one drinks alcohol. We will have at least one felinus-interruptus as one or another of the player's cats will jump into camera focus and require requisite noises of adoration.

We usually play one down, cancel two down. Demographically we are a mix of genders with no clear majority except for the 1920s pulp Call of Cthulhu which only is predominately male, and ages typically range from 30s to 50s, though some games have a player in their late 20s.

A player in several games is a teacher who wakes at 5:30am, so unless it's summer any games Mon-Thurs end at 10pm if she's playing, otherwise we end somewhere in the vicinity of 11pm.

Typical online game I run
Same as above in general. All of my notes are in Google Docs, with some of them player facing and shared, as a well as a shared google doc I use for images and battlemaps. I run every other week so I back-brain it during most of those two weeks and work out what's happening next, and then spend the day before and/or the day of the game taking care of details - images, maps, stat blocks & treasure that might be needed, and (virtual) handouts, etc.

Typical in-person game I run
All of my notes are on google docs. I print out my session notes which should have everything unique I need for that, and if there are significant changes to my other docs (dramatis personae, geography, etc.) I will also reprint them (usually 2 pages per physical page and then double sided, so 1 page of paper holds 4 pages of notes, though rather small.) I have a cheap 10" kindle table that I use to display images, and has PDFs for the games that sell them. For D&D I have a rolling hanging folder box from amazon (~$25) that both has all of my notes well organized but also the various DM-focused books in it. I also have my "player bag" which is a backback permanently loaded with everything I need to play including dice, paper, player-facing books, etc. For other games I have messenger bags or old briefcases (go go garage sales!) with shoulder straps for each game.

Typical in-person game I play in
Unfortunately since the start of COVID I don't have any in-person games where I am the player. We all moved online, and have diversified geographically, so to move any of them to in-person would require dropping players.