D&D 5E Advice on lunch-hour games

[Monayuris]

Sounds like a lot of fun, good luck!

I've never attempted a lunch hour style game. But, I have run a weeknight game, online, nearly every week for about a year. These games usually featured about 2 maybe 3 hours of actual play per session.

In my experience:
1. Don't worry about if players miss sessions. If someone can't make it, their character drops to the background. If they show up the next day, their character returns. Don't waste time working out what happens to their character.

2. Online via Roll20 has the advantage of being able to save state. In a real person game, maybe use something like Gaming Paper that you can roll up and set up again. Alternately, if you have a presentation room, you can put your laptop with Roll20 up on the display and use it for your maps.

3. I recommend using an old-school concept of a Caller. Have the players designate a Caller for each session. This person informs the DM of the actions the party takes. This helps speed up discussion and communication.

4. Run something simple and easy to manage. I had the most success with a dungeon crawl. I originally ran my online game using Dyson's Delve. They went in, explored as much as they could, and then they left. When I tried to do more with the game (story lines, wilderness travel, etc) was when the game started losing focus. Whatever you choose to do, keep the focus tight.

5. In my experience, I had a problem with disparity between Short Rest recovery classes and Long Rest recovery classes. When we played online, we had time for 1 or 2 combats. I'd recommend using the option of Short Rest 1/day, Long Rest 1/week from the DMG. Otherwise Barbarians raging every combat and Wizards going nova tilts balance and effectiveness away from fighters or rogues a bit.

6. Use whatever techniques you can to speed up combat. Combat in 5E can really drag, since every character has so many things it can do. I recommend... 1. Use side initiative. 2. Roll attacks and damage together (or maybe just use average HP and damage). 3. Buy or make spell cards for casters. 4. Use the Cleave rule from the DMG to help against low level creatures.

 

[darjr]

I’ve run a lunch hour game, for several months one a week. It helps that we have flexibility in our schedule.

Low level works great, the higher level things bogged down. If I were to do it again I’d change a few things. I’d up the bad guys damage and lower their hp. I’d run only solo fights and hand wave everything else. I’d only allow long or short rests rarely, even though I’d have to come up with in game events or reasons why. Finally I’d probably limit levels to 5. And either let players start over with a new PC or start a new campaign or run a while at 5th level.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

3. Buy or make spell cards for casters.

Lots of great advice so far in all the responses. For this particular point about spell cards - and I've mentioned this in other threads - I use www.dnd-spells.com to create custom spell sheets for casters at the table. Players can do it themselves, too, of course. It has all but eliminated the need to look up spells at our table. Definitely keeps things moving.

Hope you have fun!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

That is some serious chutzpah. Most of us feel guilty about just printing out the occasional character sheet at work, but that's so much farther beyond that.

Be careful of work policies, though - A group of people working for me were using their chat to play D&D as they worked. It ... did not go over well.

 

[rogermexico]

Thanks so much everyone – this is great!
What I'm hearing is:

• Keep it simple mechanically – do whatever I can to remove fiddly stuff that chews up time.
• Keep it simple subject-matter wise – do something that's fun in short bursts, like a dungeon crawl, where we can stop and go in whatever way happens and won't lose time to recaps or exposition.
• Make it easy for the players to get started and right into it quickly.
• Put a lot of care into clock management and focus on moving the action along so everyone stays engaged and has fun.

It's great to hear that a few people have made this kind of thing work – I feel confident enough to volunteer for this!

 

[Unwise]

[MENTION=6872275]rogermexico[/MENTION] I have a weird idea. It may not be the greatest for a new DM, but could work. You could frame the adventure as a bunch of retired adventurers telling their tales around a grand table in the Yawning Portal (the premier adventurers pub). Some of the adventurers are alive, some are ghosts and memories but you never point out who is and who isn't.

You could frame the adventures as "Let me tell you the tale of how we plundered the Lost Temple of XXXX...we have travelled for three weeks through the fetid jungle...finally we saw the hidden enterance..."


When/if a character dies, you can cut to the old guys talking saying that they miss Fred. Alternatively, you cut to them saying "Bah, no Fred, that's not how it happened you old senile coot!", then go back a minute (Prince of Persia style) and let them play it out again.

This would lend itself well to the Tales from the Yawning Portal, as they have nothing that really links them together. They could just be highlights out of these old adventurers lives. In a perfect world, the adventures would interweave in such a way as to point towards a real and present danger. The finale is playing a bunch of elderly adventurers who have finally worked out that Lord Poopypants is really the bad guy/how to stop Cthulu/where the missing gods went/who had the Rod of Seven Parts all along.

 

[Uller]

I did this. I work in a software development company with a pretty flexible schedule. We have to work 40 hours per week, they prefer we work 9 hours per day (and 4 on Fridays or every other Friday off) or 8 hours per day 5 days per week, give or take. We must take at least a 30 min lunch break but can take more if we want anytime between 11:00 and 1:30. Typically people break for 45 minutes or so around noon.

I got about 6 people interested (figuring not everyone would show every time) and we agreed to play once per week (Thursdays at lunch time) I planned on taking 90 minutes on those days and reserved a conference room. I'd get into the room around 11:45 and told them we'd start promptly at noon. Then we'd play and start wrapping up around 12:50 and then I'd stay and clean up.

I used a battlemat and minis and would just mark where everyone was at the end of the session then roll it up and stash it in my along with any notes to setup for next time.

This was 4e...We played Keep on the Shadowfell and I just showed up with 8 pre-gens for the first game and let everyone pick from those rather than waste time making PCs. I didn't waste much time explaining the rules, instead everyone just learned by example and I told them to just tell me what their PC does and I'd figure out the rules.

We used personal e-mail to keep the game moving between sessions.