Comments on: Gaming Sessions: What’s Ideal, What’s Too Short?

By: Nino

Nino — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:15:30 +0000

I play with a group of four to six guys every other Sunday. We often play more than 8 hours and if it weren’t for work and school we’d definitely play longer.

By: TikiLoveGod

TikiLoveGod — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:03:39 +0000

Back in high school, I used to run Ghostbusters International during lunch (half an hour every weekday) and I found that the frequency of play made up for the short duration of the sessions.

My current group plays once a week for about 2 hours per session (7:30 – 10:00 on a weeknight, minus the usual socializing). The sessions aren’t nearly long enough, and have really limited our games and our gaming styles. It’s hard to do any substantial roleplaying (or to encourage roleplaying when I’m the GM) with such short sessions.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:39:58 +0000

Post-game wrap-up is an interesting point. With our longer sessions, my group is usally too wiped for much chit-chat after the game. We just tidy up and stagger home. With shorter sessions, though, I can see blowing off steam after the game being a lot of fun.

Mike Kenyon: One-hour sessions sound like a unique challenge. Would you be interested in writing a guest post about how you tackle that? If so, drop me a line: martin(at)treasuretables(dot)org.

By: ScottM

ScottM — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:05:13 +0000

Like Frank, I think this varies somewhat by the system. Universalis and Spirit of the Century work well in a 4 hour slot at the meetup, while 4 hours is the minimum I like for traditional games like Shadowrun or D&D. Of course, it’s somewhat dictated by the work week and people’s interest levels. I’d rather call it at a good four and the beginning of yawns instead of plowing through with semi-conscious people for another couple of hours.

By: drow

drow — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:56:52 +0000

my group usually starts playing from around 3pm to 5pm, depending on when we can all get together, and go until 11pm to midnight. so 6 to 8 hours, including an hour or two for dinner. it’s been working well for us for years.

By: Lon

Lon — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:30:22 +0000

Four hours is my target session length as GM. I find I can run 1-3 action encounters and 3-5 talking encounters (due to the fact that the rules in most games tend to make action encounters longer in real time) in an hour of play. This is about right for giving each of my players at least one spotlight encounter for their characters, and delivering the plot points needed to get the story from A to B.

By: Frank Filz

Frank Filz — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:03:52 +0000

Ideal session length for me depends on game system and how often we play, and pure logistics. Overall, I think my ideal would be 8-10 hours, but that’s not realistic these days. Generally, I think 4 hours is a minimum, less than that and the 30 minute socialization period and the inevitable 30 minute wait for a late player start to dominate the time.

I think a 3 hour session might work with a system that resolved things very quickly and had a small group of players (perhaps just 2-3 players plus GM). A 1 hour lunch session with co-workers might work, especially if it happens more than once a week.

Frank

By: brcarl

brcarl — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:03:35 +0000

My Friday group has 4-5 players and we usually go 5 hours – 7pm to Midnight.

My Saturday group has 3-4 players and we try for 5 hours, but often end up going long. Some dynamics in the Saturday groups’ members sprouted a parallel “boys game,” where our sons play a separate game in an adjacent room. As they’re aged 10-14, we will be more strict about the cut-off time so they can get home and in bed.

By: Bento

Bento — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:47:24 +0000

I always seem to GM four hour sessions, usually dictated by people’s schedules rather than a desire to quit. I played with a 6 hour group and I thought it went on an hour too long.

I think the ideal would be five hours with five players.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:36:41 +0000

My group used to run ~6 hour sessions, which included dinner, but now we start after out kids are in bed and play from ~8:30 to 1am. It ends up being ~4 hours. In the 6 hour sessions, we probably played for 4-5 hours, with the shorter, later sessions, we generally play about 4 hours.

The ideal length really depends on how the session is going. I’ve had sessions that I wish ended in 2 hours, and other where we wanted to keep going…. Although, I’ve found that we normally get the next sessions rolling much more easily if we ended the last on a high note (duh.)

By: Frost

Frost — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:59:45 +0000

My Monday night game typically runs 4 hours. I try to encourage everyone to show up an hour early so we can start promptly at 7:00 PM. I’ve run Saturday one-shots that run 6-8 hours, but those are few and far between.

By: ShadowChemosh

ShadowChemosh — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:36:20 +0000

The shortest D&D games I have played in for awhile was 6 hours and I have to say 90% of all groups I have played with do 8hrs. One group even did 12 hr games every 2 weeks. 12 hours is a little much as they ran from noon to midnight.

Personally I always plan and run 8hr games and they often go to 9 or even 10 hrs. This could be do in part to only gaming once every 3 weeks and sometimes as long as 4 to 5 weeks between sessions. So once we can get players to the table we want to do as much ‘gaming’ as possible.

Also for my groups games all accounting and character leveling is done through our YahooGroup. This also includes all rule discussions. This is done so that the 8hrs we actually game is all gaming fun and not book or record keeping.