Imposing
Way back when, in days of myth and legend and undergrad, I served as president of my college’s sci-fi/fantasy club. That mostly amounted to hosting a board game night once a month. There in the dark of a New York winter, as the snows of Lake Cayuga mounted higher, and as the boxes of leftover pizza coagulated on common room tables, and as the distant tinny sounds of the Super Smash Bros. Melee OST wafted from the one shitty speaker that still worked, I was the guy shouting, “One more game!” at two in the morning.
A lot has changed since those halcyon days. It’s been 1.5 D&D editions since I’ve had that kind of energy. My copies of Munchkin and Betrayal at House on the Hill haven’t seen use in years. Gaming has become a strictly regimented affair. Blocks of time are now carefully calibrated to fit in half a dozen grownups’ schedules. In the bleak wasteland of adulthood, fantasy and adventure are rationed out like the Campus ID Preloaded Snack Bucks of yesteryear.
As of this writing, the author of this here Handbook of Heroes is in Semester #8 of grad school. And folks? I feel that manticore’s disgruntlement in my very soul. Making it through to the end of a full four-hour session has become something of a rarity of late. After half an hour of “hey, how was your week?” and twenty minutes of “what happened last time?” and a couple hours of actual play, I’ll often find myself glancing at the clock and looking for a good stopping time.
As the East Coast guy in an interstate VTT game, I like to think that geography has something to do with this sad state of affairs. Gaming from 7-11 on a New York worknight is one hell of a lot different than gaming from 4-8 pm in California. (Of course, it may also be a sign of my impending decrepitude.) But regardless of the reason, when your GM says, “Let’s pick it up here next week,” you probably want to take the hint. Because I will hurl you from my game room like a neckbearded Uncle Phil.
How about the rest of you guys? Do you ever find yourselves calling a session early due to exhaustion? Is this just a case of COVID-times sapping the ol’ energy reserves, or is changing gamer habits a part of growing up? And if you happen to play with a GM who runs half-assed, two hour long, why-did-we-even-bother-to-game-this-week sessions, when is it fair to call them out on it? Tell us all about your own abbreviated sessions (and possible solutions for ’em) down in the comments!
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I remember canceling a session once because it was snowing heavily, and I knew my players came in by bicycle.
One player tried to argue: he wasn’t worried, he could handle it…
He was also the youngest and smallest of us, and we played in the evening. I canceled. The end.
Heh. I was the last car through the “road closed” gate on I-25 one winter. I had great fun pretending to be indecisive about driving down.
“Should I risk it? I don’t think the roads are too bad.”
And Laurel on the other line: “Don’t be stupid. You can join the game next month. Hello?”
But I’d hung up, because I was already coming down the stairs to her folks’ game room right behind her. Good times. 😀
I blame kids gaving crappy constitution score and forcing the parents finish earlier than those of us in the group that have not breeded those little gremlins that try to eat the minis, tear sheets or demand attention from mon and dad every time they are about to do their actions, as opposed to last ten minutes they weren’t doing anything.
Kind of makes you wonder what the right age is to bring the kiddo to the gaming table. It’s like a math equation.
Distraction away from table divided by baby’s first murder hobo at the table multiplied by the square root of their age = Annoyance Quotient. If your AQ is greater than 1….
if 1 is the Todlers demand to get to sit on dads friends lap and suddenly decide to stand up and try to make sure he wont get kids while reaching for the coloured “candy” your calculations seem correct. I will however not be part of the practical study to test thta theory.
Suspiciously specific. I suspect you mean you will “not be part of ANOTHER practical study.”
The first time had no other study on going but my pain tolerance and ability to not have normla reflex of responding in kind.
You can collect your own data.
I’ve found that it’s really “individual spawnling” dependent, but younger than 10 is usually not a good age to mix with adults who want to game.
9 and younger are fine if you’re running a game //for that age group// though.
Laurel was 16 before she got the official invite to her dad’s game. You can go younger, but I think that’s the age when you can start treating ’em like something more than junior partners that you’re indulging.
I was 9 when I got into my first AD&D game (at school with some kids in a higher grade), but it didn’t last long. Then I was 11 when I joined my first long lasting roleplaying group, they were all high school juniors and seniors.
But then I’d been “playing” Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was 5 and had the AD&D Player’s Guide and DMG since I’d turned 10*. I also routinely read the rules to boardgames and stuff and figured out how to play them when even the parents were stumped… so I was a bit of a “gaming genius” as a kid.
Which is why I’m willing to give someone’s spawn a shot if they can sit still for at least two hours at a stretch.
.* We moved in with a friend of my parents when I was 10, and his ex-roommates had bailed on him and left boxes of “crap”. Mostly clothes and books, he’d sorted it and was going to give it all to Salvation Army, but when he saw I had loads of fantasy and sci-fi books he said “Hey, these boxes have a bunch of books, movies, and games an shit, take what you want from it”. So I got the AD&D books, the Black Tower boardgame, HeroQuest (missing all the pieces and cards), the complete run of Lovecraft Mythos and Howard’s Conan, and some other fantasy and sci-fi books that were rather waaaaay more salaciously adult than a regular 10 year old should have had. Luckily I’d already been reading stuff like that at the library for years, so it was no worse on my “developing” brain than any of the other stuff I’d read and watched at that point…
I’ve often had to end a session early as my wife suffers from medical fatigue, but on the bright side, that has become less of an issue with online play letting her use all the comforts of own home to keep chugging along. Also it usually kicks in when the party starts spinning its wheels, so its a good excuse to stop when we’re losing momentum.
I’ve ended early sessions that I felt were going poorly, but not from exhaustion. I do however usually feel the after-effects the next day, like a GM’s hangover that I think is from just tensing for 3+ hours, so it does get me eventually!
Trying to be *on* for that long can for sure be tiring. It’s fun and exciting to try and be at your 100% high-energy best for long stretches, but you’re right. Going full performance-mode takes a toll.
2-3 hour virtual sessions is normal for us these days… that’s a bit shorter than was normal for face-to-face gaming pre-Covid, but that’s balanced by the fact that we’re playing more consistently… mostly due to players with families finding it easier to put the children to bed and then jump online, versus being out the entire evening. We still fall back to board games occasionally, but nowhere near as often as when playing face-to-face.
And yeah, whether face to face or online, sometimes sessions end up getting shortened, if someone has had a particularly trying day or expects one the next day. No big deal… as much as we might be enjoying a campaign, there’s no rush.
The “fade back to board games” move is interesting to me. What triggers that? Is it just that everyone shows up, the GM feel overwhelmed, and you make the swap? Or do you plan it out ahead of time?
This is what email is good for, right? I mean, sure, sometimes a change of plans hits without warning… there’s not much you can do if everyone gets together and the GM find his laptop catches fire. But usually you can count on at least a few hours warning if someone is unwell or having a bad day in the office — and a quick email the group makes it easy enough to arrange a change of plans.
Is it always the GM that makes this call? Or is it ever acceptable for a player to be like, “I’m not feeling it, can we just do board games tonight?”
Sure. I mean, this is a group of friends, right? If a friend asks if we can adjust our plans for the night, because they don’t feel up to a night of drama, what else would you do?
We generally don’t play RPGs with players missing, and if the choice is to play with someone who’d rather not be playing, or to delay to next week and play board games instead… it’s not a particularly controversial decision.
I run a game every other week, on Saturdays, from noon until (we aim for) 4 o’clock. I usually peek at the clock around 3:30 and start looking for an opportunity to wrap things up. Maybe it’s all being in the same time zone, maybe it’s the fact that my “impending decrepitude” is still several years away, but we usually get through all four hours, and often a little more. I think the shortest session I ran for this group was about 3.5 hours, and the longest was maybe 4:45. I can’t offhand recall a time where we ended more than an hour early… The thing about having a predictable schedule is, people plan around it, which means their adult obligations don’t kick in until it’s time for the game to be over. When you know you have game time from X-Y o’clock on Z day per week, you don’t make other plans for that time, and when the ranger needs to go pick up his kids from their weekend activities, it’s a sure sign that the session should’ve wrapped up half an hour ago.
I do think playing during the day rather than evenings helps, and weekend vs weekday also helps. Every second week is probably not hurting either, leaving the other weekends free for other stuff. My group skews young as well, with only one member having kids to schedule around. Being all online helps too, because if your Adult Obligation(TM) is at 4:15, you might get to play until 4 rather than 3:45… Basically, there’s a lot of circumstances working in the favor of long sessions at the moment, and the looming threat of Real Life getting in the way of game time scares me a little.
Playing every other weekend definitely helps, both from the perspective of having the other weekend free to do stuff and getting everyone around the table consistently. I play a VTT game every other Sunday across two continents, four countries and I think five time zones, and we can only manage about three hours a session. Most of the group would love it if sessions could last longer but everyone understands time zones, and most of all understand that the DM is five to eight hours ahead time-wise (that would be me, living in the UK) and one of the players is an hour ahead of *that* (over in France). Sometimes we make specific arrangements to over-run, like when they’re coming up on a BBEG, but mostly we make do.
The daytime slot is an important point. My group is usually 7-11 EST on Sunday nights, which means there’s very little downtime between me and the workweek. It’s just that that’s the time when everyone can hop on.
Running three games on alternating weekends and taking a “week off” to play minis games in between may be too much as well.
I need to think about this biz. :/
Between childcare, work schedules, health issues and one player in another time zone I have one game thats 2 hours max a week and another that’s maybe 3? But the sessions are never half-assed, so it’s ok.
I used to play and run 6 hour or more marathons in uni, but those days are sadly past …
How does the 2-3 hour session time change playstyle? I imagine it’s tough to get through a standard 5-room dungeon in that time…
https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/
…Do you tend to default to “social interaction into one big combat?” Some other structure?
Thing is, none of my games have been standard dungeon crawlers! Combat being slow AF is usually an all-session thing if it’s a DnD game (or at least a large part of any one session) and when we’re doing social stuff you just have to find a good stopping point so that you don’t have to try to carry on a conversation with a week-long gap in it.
Mostly we just get as far as we can with whatever we’re after at the moment, and pause wherever it makes sense to do so, usually while our characters are resting. I do think GM recaps of what we’re up to become a lot more valuable though, as remembering exactly what you were up to, especially if you skip a week for whatever reason, gets kinda difficult.
Man… I do need to get back on the recap train. I’m like… Six or seven sessions being on my writeups.
There are the inevitable times where we have to call it early due to people being sick or needing to get to sleep extra early or other stuff like that, but mostly we seem to have found a healthy balance of 3-4 hours of play followed by the DM running out of stuff prepared and telling everyone good job for surviving my wrath for another week.
In the depths of time (meaning before COVID) we would meet in person, and occasionally stay up unwisely late, like 2 AM, playing climactic boss fights. We cant make ourselves do that anymore.
The big boss battles are always a nutty proposition. Ideally, they’re balanced such that you’re on a life-or-death knife’s edge by the late stages of the fight, keeping the marathon combat compelling. But when it’s a matter of “I’m still stunned for the fourth round,” and “does it look like it’s almost dead?”, the exhaustion gets REAL.
Yeah. And one thing we’ve noticed is that its flat out easier to keep the enthusiasm going when we’re all meeting in person and can see the dice rolling. Sitting at a computer screen in your own home, the call of the bed becomes loud and real.
In my current group, I’ve got a pair of players in Ireland and one player in California. Ya better bet that means I have to keep things tight, lest I exhaust my poor players on the other side of the globe. : P
Usually it’s about 2 hours a session. Which is aight, cause it gives me a bit more time to plan as when I’m tired… My ability to improvise on the spot goes way, waaaa-ay down.
I think today’s prompt came about because my megadungeon players decided to return to the Demon Level to talk to the super-computer-oracle-from-another-world last session. I had not anticipated the move, and found myself scrambling to think of an interesting way to run this field trip. In the end I disappointed myself by saying, “Let’s end it there. Why don’t you just like… write down your questions on the group forum for next time. I’ll figure out how the computer’s rules work by then.”
As you say, improvisation gets more difficult when it’s close to nap time.
Our traditional game night crew has both young singles and parents with kids ranging from elementary to adult–for various reasons we’ve never regrouped from the isolation of COVID nor linked up online. (Those of the group with fewer dependents are now meeting irregularly for board games.)
At my house, we’ve got a non-regularly scheduled family D&D campaign. We shoot for non-school nights or try to wrap up by 10:00-10:30. I just pulled a “mini-boss? Nope, that was the finale!” early end to a session. I try to look at the bright side: that omitted final encounter I can now build into a separate follow-up adventure, and it lets me procrastinate some more on coming up with the plot for their next quest.
The opposite to that, I find, is what one of our other DMs pulled on us once: our host had an early shift and wanted us gone, the players were exhausted and wanted to go home, all the pizza, beer & soda had been consumed, but BY ODIN’S BEARD the DM’s plan involved ONE MORE MACGUFFIN HUNT before the end and we were all bound to complete it, come hell or high water. Mercifully, the fight went quickly, but we were all too bleary to even catch the context or exposition that was supposed to make it all meaningful. Honestly, all I recall (and I’m the one who’s supposed to take notes) is that it involved Orcs vs. Razorbacks commanded by a wereboar Druid and seemed vaguely like a football game.
Blood bowl? Blood bowl!!
http://www.bloodbowl.com
OMG! I loved BloodBowl in college. My all-Orc team, the Westphalian Widowmakers, led the league in opponent fatalities. Never won a game, but we all count our victories differently…
Oof. I feel that GM’s pain. I’ve wanted to get to THE CLIFFHANGER a number of times in my Gaming career. It’s never worth it when you wind up GMing for sleep-deprived zombies.
Man, that coffee must be some real good stuff if it’s keeping the Manticore conscious (but still grumpy) through a brain injury like that.
Hit Points, yo. Let us ponder the mysteries.
Ever since I hit thirty and found employment, I’ve found myself losing energy for the usual long (4+ hours) sessions. It’s gotten to the point I’m actually glad we finish a session earlier than usual, simply cause I’m feeling the fatigue hit me hard. This comic hits the soul.
MANTICORE PATRONUSES FOR EVERYONE!
…
\*sob*
two sessions ago I asked for quits after 4 hours on account of zombification on my part.
No complaints from the other players and a good thing it was too as we just woke up the dungeons endboss.
Likely a good thing. I always like to strategize before those big complicated fights. This just gives the part a chance to be tactical geniuses over Messenger for a week.
During the most severe times of work I was waking up at 4 AM, biking an hour to work, working til 9, and biking an hour home. A couple of times the game was called because they could hear me snoring over discord.
When it hits it hits. I got a dude falls asleep during Back 4 Blood. Not that game’s fault, you know?
We’re playing from Germany with some players in the UK. That means we can’t start earlier than 8pm our time (cause the UK players need time to finish work, have some food, etc); but if we can’t play longer than 11pm our time on a “school night” cause we get up at 7am for work (and stopping at 11pm means we might get to bed before half past midnight…). Theoretically we could play longer on Fridays, but then again, that’s at the end of a (usually exhausting) week… so it certainly is a balancing act.
I mentioned the “5 room dungeon” elsewhere in the thread. That design always struck me as ideal for a 4 hour session. It honestly makes me wonder what other session types work best in 2 or 3 hour blocks.
Trust me, the “5 room dungeon” design wouldn’t really work for these groups, cause they tend to spend half the session arguing in character in front of the first door. Which can be quite amusing actually, but it took our party two full sessions to actually start heading to the “haunted house” in the first Saltmarsh adventure; and in about 4 (or 5?) sessions in the (other) party is still like only halfway through the first adventure in the Candlekeep Mysteries.
“Do you ever find yourselves calling a session early due to exhaustion?”
Early? No. We do end game night ‘early’ sometimes because it’s about an hour left of the “time slot” (we game from “6-11” roughly) because we just finished a boardgame and don;t want to start another at that point.
My current f-t-f group doesn’t do the “funny voices games” as half the Players “don’t like” rpgs (one doesn’t, but I think it was just a poor example of gaming, and the other has never tried one).
At some point me and the other roleplayers are going to kidnap the uninitiated member and subject him to an rpg… and then we’ll outnumber the sole “I don;t like the funny voices games” Player and have him thoroughly outvoted.
“Is this just a case of COVID-times sapping the ol’ energy reserves, or is changing gamer habits a part of growing up?”
The dreaded “grownupitis”. Most of us* have to get up for work early the next morning (we game Tuesday nights).
.* Not me! Haha suckers, I work evenings…
“And if you happen to play with a GM who runs half-assed, two hour long, why-did-we-even-bother-to-game-this-week sessions, when is it fair to call them out on it?”
Oh yeah, immediately. Unless they were upfront with “today’s game is being cutshort on account of [REALLY GOOD REASON]. As a fellow GM I call out shit GMing when I see it… now sometimes there’s good reasons, inexperienced, busy, etc. So you give advice or offer to assist as a Player as you can, but you can’t let your GMs get into bad habits like calling game early, thinking they can win, or engaging in TPKs…
> As a fellow GM I call out shit GMing when I see it…
Careful. There’s a fine line between constructive criticism and “making sure no one wants to GM.” That’s especially true when you have new players.
I stand by my tongue-in-cheek response sir! Sometimes “you can’t let your GMs get into bad habits like calling game early, thinking they can win, or engaging in TPKs…”
Honestly, ever since I started working full time, I get so little time to play that a two hour session is just fine for me.
It’s been a while since my groups have talked about this sort of thing. Nearly a decade later, it might be time to have that conversation again.
I managed to get a session in just a few days ago. Alester is now a level 4 Eldritch Magus gestalted with a level 3 Paladin. (With one level of IB Swash.) I have to decide if I want him to be a Divine Defender Paladin, or double up on being able to enhance my weapon with a class feature.
IB Swash is *still* good enough after going for a double-CHA gestalt? Yeesh.
Wait…
CHA + INT! For some reason I thought it was just a straight replacement. Derp.
I have decided. I’m am not doubling up on the Paladin archetypes so I have more options and more usage for enhancing my weapon. Both Magus and Paladin have Keen on the list, so that means my rapier is critting on a 15. And Parrying all day long.
I’ve got 3 Panache, 4 Arcane Pool Points, 3 Lay on Hands, and 10 rounds of Inspire Courage thanks to being an Oath of the People’s Council Paladin.
The rules of Hospitality also bound play session 🙂
Nope. It’s all Red Weddings up in here.
Funny, thought it was Lord of the Rings themed. Laurel will for sure love a Red Wedding themed wedding 😛
I keep my sessions to about 3 hours, trying to start at the scheduled time – so we aim to arrive a bit early to get the non-game greetings out of the way. We do sometimes stop a little early, but not before 2 hours. There are usually some minutes of post-game discussion that can get up to an hour.
It helps that the group I GM for runs on Saturday afternoons, so it doesn’t hurt anyone’s work (or school) schedule. Though even my group that does Tuesday evenings (so I can play as well) keeps it to 2-3 hours.
Always interesting to hear about other groups’ timeslots. It’s easy to imagine that everyone is shooting a “four hour ideal,” but that just isn’t the case in practice.
I’m the west coast guy in my group (or at least, farther west than anybody else), so I’m always the one on the other end, with people needing to go to bed while I’m still eager to go—and it doesn’t help that I’m a night owl.
That said, this weekend I got to do a marathon 6 hours DMing on Friday, 6 hours playing on Saturday, and 4 hours playing on Sunday, and even I was burnt out by the end of that.
It’s not like we ever *plan* to go that long, really, but when everybody’s gaming from home, not having to worry about the drive back definitely lends itself to the “well, I could probably go a *little* longer…” mindset, right up until the body says bedtime. Which is why we tend to schedule for when we don’t have anything afterwards!
Yeah… My group tends to like Sunday nights. I’d honestly prefer Saturday for that reason, but hey… Scheduling isn’t a one-way street.
Lately it hasn’t even been DnD related, but just video game realted. My fiance and I started a play of Divinity 2 which neither of us have ever played before despite the age of the game and generally having a lot of fun. But we have had several times where we planned a play session and it was just One Of Those Days where it feels like we somehow cant have a normal half conversation of any kind without being very snippy with each other and I tend to say we really shouldn’t play this today because we are just going to be unpleasant and get angry over it and don’t want to tarnish the play of this thing.
I also work 3rd shift overnight so when my mmo gang wants to raid with me on my day off I have to wake up the normal person equivalent of two or three hours EARLIER than I do on any given normal workday for me to do so, which sometimes leads to general grumpiness and general poor performance on my groggy part.
I too miss the days of staying up past the wee hours rolling dice, but any equivalent staying up too late on any free time activity these days inevitably leads to regret at the lack of sleep. I’ve also definitely called short DnD sessions the last year if I was just really not feeling it (just the two of us game so at least I didn’t disappoint a room full of folks). I’d rather play less in a given session than drag on something we will both regret if either one of is us feeling foul for some reason that day (and it really usually is lack of sleep)
Laurel and I tried to play through Divinity 2. I wanted to progress the main storyline. She wanted to get Unsinkable Sam laid. We ultimately had to call it off, lol.
My group has gone to full online play due to people moving, and down to 2-hour sessions 8p-10p. I have a kid to put to bed, dinner dishes to clean, and we all have careers to manage – that’s just all we can do. It’s a little exhausting.
In case you need to hear it: You are good enough and your games are fun.