el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
Today I am going to run the 6th session involving the PCs undertaking the adventure "The Isle of the Abbey" from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. My guess is that it will take 7 or 8 sessions total.
The specific adventure is not so important to what I am posting about (since this while on the high end of average of how many sessions an adventure takes is still typical), but rather that while my sessions for this campaign tend to be significantly shorter than I'd like (3 hours rather than 5 hours for my in-person group) I am still amazed not that it takes so long for my group to get through adventures, but that other groups (based on the anecdotal evidence of these boards and social media) seem to blast through adventures and advance so quickly. I just can't imagine going much faster without losing something of the experience.
Since we only get to play about once a month (sometimes twice) that means we started this adventure in December of 2022 and will probably wrap it up in July or August, or maybe even September!
Anyway, this is not a complaint or a suggestion that anyone else is playing too fast. Nor, am I asking for advice for speeding up. I am just trying to imagine how given the base amount of role-playing, investigation, combat, exploration, NPC interaction, planning, etc that I imagine a D&D adventure having, how folks play through whole campaigns in a few months, even with longer or more frequent sessions.
This campaign has been going since May of 2020 (with a break of a few months when we lost some players and needed to recruit some more) and the PCs have only recently hit 5th level and this adventure on its own will probably not be enough for them to hit 6th. Today is the 37th session.
We even use discord to cover as much between session stuff as we can - esp. logistics that might eat up session time if we didn't.
Wildest of all, these 18 hours of gameplay (including today's forthcoming session) represent two adventuring days of time in-game.
So how long does it take your group to get through adventures (accounting for session length and frequency)? How do you account for that amount of time?
The specific adventure is not so important to what I am posting about (since this while on the high end of average of how many sessions an adventure takes is still typical), but rather that while my sessions for this campaign tend to be significantly shorter than I'd like (3 hours rather than 5 hours for my in-person group) I am still amazed not that it takes so long for my group to get through adventures, but that other groups (based on the anecdotal evidence of these boards and social media) seem to blast through adventures and advance so quickly. I just can't imagine going much faster without losing something of the experience.
Since we only get to play about once a month (sometimes twice) that means we started this adventure in December of 2022 and will probably wrap it up in July or August, or maybe even September!
Anyway, this is not a complaint or a suggestion that anyone else is playing too fast. Nor, am I asking for advice for speeding up. I am just trying to imagine how given the base amount of role-playing, investigation, combat, exploration, NPC interaction, planning, etc that I imagine a D&D adventure having, how folks play through whole campaigns in a few months, even with longer or more frequent sessions.
This campaign has been going since May of 2020 (with a break of a few months when we lost some players and needed to recruit some more) and the PCs have only recently hit 5th level and this adventure on its own will probably not be enough for them to hit 6th. Today is the 37th session.
We even use discord to cover as much between session stuff as we can - esp. logistics that might eat up session time if we didn't.
Wildest of all, these 18 hours of gameplay (including today's forthcoming session) represent two adventuring days of time in-game.
So how long does it take your group to get through adventures (accounting for session length and frequency)? How do you account for that amount of time?