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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doppleganger" data-source="post: 370783" data-attributes="member: 722">Wow it's really surprising to me that our own group plays for way beyond the apparent average length of time.  We can't ever get enough gaming done!!  It's really difficult to stop playing a game session, we often end up losing track of time and playing much longer than we intended/wanted.  By high school/early college we were playing twice a week, starting at 5:00pm (with several people showing up early to socialize for a while), and play till 3:00am.  More often than not we would become so enraptured in the game that somebody would eventually notice some light outside the window and say "oh no, we played till dawn again!!" (and we did our fair share of 24+ hr weekend marathon sessions at cons every now and then).  Nowadays we are older and have more real-world responsibilities and commitments, so it's become much harder to organize a day/time that's convenient for everybody, so we only manage to play about once every 2-4 weeks or so.  To compensate, we've starting doing alot of "daytime/weekday" sessions starting at 8:00am (everybody takes the day off work or school) and continuing on through somewhere between 6:00pm and midnight.  We rarely take a break for anything other than pausing while somebody runs into either the kitchen or bathroom.  Heck, nobody even wants to waste the time to stop and eat dinner/lunch anymore!! (We usually have some food handy or order a delivery, but are too excited with the game to do much more than nibble on it).  Nobody ever wants to stop, but it eventually ends up that a couple of us have to stop because of some other "real-life" commitments.After DMing lengthy sessions for so long (far too many years than I'm willing to admit), I think it would be much more difficult to squeeze things into the constraints of a single 4hr session.  I've always believed that including a wide variety of events in each session was an important part of it's overall success (and some game elements are time-consuming; like in-depth NPC interaction/dynamic battles/intricate mysteries).  I admire those of you that can pull the game off within smaller session times.To respond to the original question, I don't know what to suggest in order to maintain such a continuous high level of enthousiasm, other than to say that it's constantly at the forefront of my mind to keep the players wanting/craving to obtain/complete the next set of desirable goals that are dangling in from of them, it really works if you can keep your players "emotionally" motivated and enraptured by the events/storyarcs/villains/mysteries in the game world.</blockquote>

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