Stopping A Game Session During Combat

[AuraSeer]

We stop in mid-fight quite often. It's not feasible to run very late on a weeknight when almost everyone in the group has small children waiting at home. Plus we're a party of seven, meaning each combat takes an hour at the very least.

If we go three weeks in a row without having a combat that spans sessions, we're doing well.

 

[fusangite]

Have you ever been playing a game into the wee hours of the night and had to continue playing just because you were in the middle of combat? To me, stopping during an epic battle just seems... off, so we've continued even though we're all tired and desperately need sleep. Are we the only group that suffers from this?

In an old campaign I ran, I actually deliberately made the season finale episodes (#21, 22 in each season) span episodes so as to give them the right cliffhanger feel. The bad guys' or good guys' reinforcements would typically show up right before I called it. Of course it helped that the combats were modeled in lego and could therefore survive the downtime without the miniatures sliding out of place.

 

[Emperor Valerian]

I've done it before... mostly as a plot device, though at a convenient 'pause point' between waves of enemies. Nothing makes me feel more evil as DM than leaving the players with the words, "Oh... and as you cut down the last bebilith, the sky starts to glow orange, then flecks of flame start to rain down..."

I'm a really mean DM sometimes.

 

[Arc]

We've stopped mid combat a few times, but mostly because it's fairly feasible for us. When playing live, we have initiative order written down on the side of the map, so we can keep track of who was/is up, and we can just mark player positions when removing the minis. When playing online, we have logs for pretty much anything, and the program we use (Gametable) holds the previous map and miniatures until cleared, so it's not too much of a hassle. Hasn't happened to us recently, since we've been mostly playing low levels, but I can imagine it occuring in the future.

 

[Legildur]

Never stopped mid-combat .... yet.

Two sessions ago the DM called it quits at midnight (we usually play through to 1am) on a Friday night (most of us have kids at home) because of an impending large battle. We didn't realise how large until the next session.... with 7 PCs it took us the better part of 4 hours to sort the mess out. Lucky we stopped last time when we did.

Other times we have battled through to 3am. However I note that when we do, we typically make elementary tactical errors, which sometimes results in a character death or three, so we try and avoid that now. Or maybe we'll just stop mid combat and take photos as outlined earlier.

 

[just__al]

It's happened to us on occasion. When you play a weeknight game and people have long drives home and jobs to goto the next day you can only play so long.

Digital cameras and just plain writing on the battlemap keeps everything straight until the next session.

In fact, right now, I am in mid battle for two different campaigns I'm playing in. One of the battles is the final battle in what should be the final session of the campaign before it takes a hiatus to switch DM's. The other is just bad timing and I fear bad tacticts.

 

[Henry]

Only did it once -- and as someone suggested, we even took several digital pictures of the battlemat so we could reset up!

We generally finish any combats before ending the session, though -- too much work to record everything. We'll even wrap up early and schmooze if a combat looms thirty minutes before the end of game time.

 

[DonTadow]

I was telling my gf who is just starting to DM that one of the most important things to master is time management, especially during combat. This weekend I let her dm and everything went great but the combat. The attention hogging cleric we had spent 20 minutes trying to decide what to do (taking advangate of the new dm) The combat was against a bunch of loley bandits and it took a total of an hour to get halfway through it. We ended up having to call it in the middle of the battle which made me furious. Needeless to say i'll be dm'n next week to speed through this battle .

 

[Rel]

We've done it on a number of occasions and it has worked out fine. I prefer if we can finish before the end of the session but sometimes that just isn't in the cards. We've done the same things that others have mentioned in terms of taking pics and so forth. And this is one time when the initiative cards really come in handy because I can just slap a rubber band around them and know that whichever card is on top is next in the order. I usually try to set things up so that the BBEG is about to take his turn so that the tension is at its cliffhanger best.

The one big upside to halting a combat in the middle is that the next session gets going with a bang. There's no dorking around with people going, "Oh and before we go on the adventure I need to stop by the store to pick up some more pitons and rations..." That stuff can drag into a half hour of trying to get things going. With combat already started then things get off to a quick start.

 

[shilsen]

I've stopped in mid-combat for the cliffhanger effect, just as things were getting really hairy for the PCs. It worked very well, with players worrying about and discussing the game all week.