Comments on: What’s the Longest Session You’ve Ever Run?

By: Gaming Sessions: What’s Ideal, What’s Too Short? : Treasure Tables

Gaming Sessions: What’s Ideal, What’s Too Short? : Treasure Tables — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 22:09:40 +0000

[...] on TT we’ve looked at the longest sessions you’ve ever run, and at some models for GMing short sessions on [...]

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:39:50 +0000

Here’s how reading this went for me:

“Eleven hours! Wow. That’s pretty impressive.

Wait…37 hours!? Okay, that’s insane. I bet that’s an anomaly.

20+ hours…

26 hours…

28 hours…”

And on and on — you, faithful TT readers, are insane! Insane in the very best geeky way, of course.

Christ, my eight hours feels weak. Maybe we need a 24 GMing Day (like 24 Hour Comics Day) to get all of us endurance-challenged GMs up to snuff…

By: Shandar the Ashen

Shandar the Ashen — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:13:28 +0000

When I was in high school we did a marathon session that was continuous over a three day weekend. We used a figure based system then, expanded from the very simple rules that came with the Dungeon Dwellers paint n play sets. I’d built 3 or four levels of a 3D dungeon using core board and balsa wood and in our system, each player had a party of 5 characters, and each adventuring company was in a race to clean out the dungeon, so there were four parties in the dungeon at the same time, and it was all turn based. Sort of like a role playing board game. If the player wanted to eat, he or she had to secure a room, and not play while eating, which gave monsters a chance to attack by surprise if they got there before the person finished eating. Same with bathroom breaks and naps. We had two people doing GMing in shifts.

I don’t know that my body ever recovered from the exaustion or the poisoning by Doritos and Mountain Dew, but it was probably the most fun session I’ve ever played. There is something wonderful about your band of orcs decimating a party that is caught asleep because the player is too tired to even lift his dice and just mumbles…”kill them all…I’ve got to sleep…kill them all…”

Tee hee.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:10:54 +0000

A couple of years back, one of the guys from our core gaming group back in the day was getting married and we were trying to figure out what to do for him, since he doesn’t drink and he’s not really into strippers. As all of our old gaming crew was back in the same city for the first time in five or six years, we decided to surprise him with a marathon gaming session (which I GMed). The best man brought party favours and food. I brought 4 liters of Mountain Dew.

About 10-12 players started the session (which was a huge 2E Drow module adapted for 3E) at 5pm. One by one they fell away until there were 4 players left – all the core players from our old group – at 5am. They defeated the menace and then everyone slept, and slept well.

We pulled a 12 hour all-nighter to send our friend off properly and he still talks about it fondly. Good bachelor party, all things considered.

By: paul

paul — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:51:38 +0000

back in jr high, we played from friday night through sunday afternoons, with some breaks sometimes. there was one holiday weekend, where we didnt sleep, or at least we didnt break for sleep. we had people falling alseep sitting, with their eyes open. lots of gaming, lots and lots of home made dungeons with 300 goblins in a 10×10 room.

By: Clayton

Clayton — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:03:34 +0000

Individually the longest I have gone is 6 hours.

As a group, me and my friends took one weekend and played for 72 straight hours.

We took turns DMing the story. When it was our turn to DM we just ran our character as an NPC. By the end of it we were so sleep deprived that when my turn came up they ended up meeting a talking pizza and the Harry Potter Sorting Hat…

And I think they ate the pizza 0_0

By: David Wright

David Wright — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:02:49 +0000

Back in erm the dim and distant past (early 90s) my group at that time ran a 24hr RPG (AD&D 1st) session for a UK charity event.

I was the sole DM and there were 6 players. Players could only go to bed if their characters were killed… Unfortunately towards the end of the 24hrs some of the players started to almost engineer their death so that they could go to sleep.
The scenarios were from a variety of sources including Dungeon and I concocted a theme throughout them. At the end of the 24hrs, 4 of the characters were still alive which is quite impressive I think.

It’s something I’m planning on trying to do again with my current group for charity but it doesn’t seem as easy to organise now I’m in my mid30s.

By: caroline

caroline — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 07:59:46 +0000

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By: David Michael

David Michael — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:58:35 +0000

12 hours was my longest session as a GM. This was several years after college, and was the “wrap up” session for a campaign (because I was moving away to take a new job).

12 hours is pretty small potatoes to some of the other posters, but I remember the action and intensity levels being high all the way through the session, and everyone having a lot of fun.

Which stands in contrast to most of the 12-hour sessions I (vaguely) remember from college: Those sessions seldom, if ever, had a high level of intensity or action. They just…kept going. And going. Because none of us needed to be anywhere else.

-David

By: Sarlax

Sarlax — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:58:23 +0000

Mine was 21 hours. I’d had a group of six players in my sophomore year of high school and we were deeply into Planescape. We’d gotten into the longest arc of the campaign when two players suddenly and simultaneously couldn’t show up for several weeks. We didn’t want to stop, so we kept going. But we didn’t want those 2 to miss any of the action, either.

So I ran it twice. Once those two came back, they got a special “session” that ran from 6:00 PM to 3:00 PM the next day with no sleep and only a 15 minute break while we ate pizza.

This was back when D&D wasn’t as treasure-intensive as it is now so I wasn’t worried about duplicating treasure. Those two PCs (a fighter-thief and a mage) blazed through encounters like mad. They gained levels several times. They didn’t skip a single encounter and they even caught a lot of things that the first 4 didn’t.

By: The Burb

The Burb — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:56:08 +0000

Whenever we’ve run a long session in my group, it’s because we’re all trying to reach a good end point, but can’t. We prefer short sessions of 3-4 hours, but with D&D 3.5, if someone’s being a jackass (me) and trying to grapple, bull rush, feint, or cast obscure spells every round of combat, the game tends to lag for much longer.

We start our sessions pretty late (10pm-ish), so if we go on for more that three or four hours, we’re talking dusk or dawn, and everyone’s falling asleep. The longest session we’ve had ran until five or six in the morning (about seven or so hours). This is nothing compared to the twenty-something hour games some of you guys have run, but we were nonetheless exhausted (-6 to Dex and Str and all).

By: Darth Krzysztof

Darth Krzysztof — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:55:28 +0000

At one point my buddy Gopher was slumped over the table, periodically waking up just long enough to roll a d20 and declare “I kill it”. Then he’d fall back asleep. He didn’t even look at the die. He was a fully autopilot hack n slasher.

When our friend Jose fell asleep at one of our marathon sessions, we tried to wake him to tell him it was his turn.

All we could get out of him was the moan, “White lettering!”

This incident was never explained.