Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 3493413" data-attributes="member: 27051">20 minutes of fun stretched out over a four-hour gaming session seems like a dreadful way to spend an evening.  You'd have to get my players to confirm this, but given that we play for only three and a half hours per week, I try to make damn sure that we don't go for more than ten minutes without something happening.  And those stretches of ten minutes are generally given over to the characters debating their next course of action, or quick shopping trips (OK, sometimes they "debate" for a bit longer, but when that happens, I am swift to crack the whip and get things moving).Last night in my 11th level Dark Sun game we started with a cut-scene of the villans plotting, red-lined a three-day trip across the desert, had some neat PC/NPC interaction, a swift bout of PC plotting, a battle at an inn with a gehreleth (DR 10/good is a hoot on Athas!), a stealth infilatration of an enemy base (including three combats of varying sizes, with from two to eight opponents apiece, and various coups-de-grace of sleeping foes), some traps, hidden passages, looted chests, mulling over handouts detailing enemy plans, and then a cliffhanger showdown with a recurring NPC.The sort of wasted time alluded to in the "20 minutes" quote simply isn't possible, let alone desirable, if we want to have any kind of decent pacing and sense of accomplishment in a session.For short sessions of this kind, I think that preparation is key.  I am using Paizo and WotC maps and Dungeon Tiles where possible to save on time drawing battlemats (found this to be a big time-saver last night).  I have also picked up the Combat Pad initiative tracker from Paizo, which is seven shades of awesome.  Index cards for stats, NPC writeups on my laptop are hyperlinked to the SRD or various pdfs, music is in a series of premade mixes and playlists, counters for all the encounters are premade and stacked in the order that they are likely to come into play.  Every minute that is saved in prep work is shaved off dead-time in the game and with such short sessions, every such minute counts.  Maybe the original quote comes from a game with a more laid-back approach, I dunno.  We like to socialise and have a laugh around the table, but we are having the most fun when the game is whipping along at a solid pace.</blockquote>

Verification