How long are your game sessions?

[Ian Cooper]

We play for about 2 and half to three hours on average. Everyone turns up between 7 and 7:30, gossips, unwinds after work, and we are usually running between then and 8. We finish between 10:30 and 11, when the hall where we play kicks all the gamers out.

Sometimes it is a bit too short, but generally on a worknight its probably the maximum creative time that we can reliably get out of people. We are thinking of trying to do some one-off weekend schedules for 'event' games, but scheduling adults lives is harder than kids.

[Chris Passeno]

We tend to be long-winded.  We are supposed to show up at 1:00 and game til 7:30 or so.  Like most, the first hour is for stragglers and socializing.

That would make 5.5 hrs. or there-abouts.

[wyrdlyng]

I would have to agree with the 3-4 hour groups. Our group meets alternate Saturdays. We set the time at 4 but don't usually get started until about 5. We usually take a break for dinner in there and break up about 10. So 4 hours of actual play.

[Mike Holmes]

My experiences lately match Jake's exactly.

But I consider this a bad thing. I long for the long weekend sessions to return, and am hoping that techniqes like Ron mentions will one day make it possible again.

Mike

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi everyone,

Oddly, back in high school, with my "non-gamer" english lit crew, we played three to four hours -- five hours max.   Then, in college, when I hooked up with what we might now call gamers, we started in the mid-afternoon and wrapped up seven to eight hours later to watch Dr. Who.

I realized after several months that the Dr. Who part of the day was more enjoyable than the actual playing.  I started saying, "I think an RPG session should be no longer than twice the length of a movie."  (Back to three to four hours.)

Why?  Cause I think human beings are used to sitting still for a dramatic narrative of 90 minutes to two hours (with engaging, longer exceptions).  Once I figured in the book keeping required during an RPG session, you'd end up with something about twice as along to have something with enjoyable pacing, momentum, and climax.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the game mechancis required for this sort of play didn't exist yet.

With AD&D and Champions, so much of the session is dragged out (in my view), with book keeping, page flipping, rules adjudicating and so on, that you'd need nearly eight hours to squeeze the "story" elements in.

I'm finding the games coming off the Forge remove enough of the incoherent qualities that my "double-movies" rule of thumb works great.  And so now my ideal is met by the rules.

Christopher

[Thor Olavsrud]

My group averages 3 to 4 hours of play per session. We play on alternating Sundays. We generally get together between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. and play until 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. with occasional breaks. Every once in a while we will push on for an additional half hour to hour if something momentous is happening and we don't want to lose the tension.

One of my players would definitely like longer sessions -- he is also the only one that feels "cheated" if for some reason we have to call off the session or if we get together to socialize and don't end up playing (which is a drag, because he's a fun guy to just hang out with).

My wife, who is a casual player in our game, would be happiest with about 2.5 to 3 hours of play -- she wants to spend her Sunday evenings relaxing.

Personally, 3 to 3.5 hours is enough for me, especially when I'm GMing, which I find to be more taxing. When I'm in the zone, I can go for a while without noticing the time, but much past the 4 hour range I feel like I'm starting to get tapped out creatively. At that point, I almost always call the game right there.

Even in college I don't often remember having marathon sessions. I think my preferences were probably framed by my first long-running group. It was a mixed group age-wise (and gender-wise actually). There was one other guy in the group the same age as me: we were a group when I was 12-16. The other players were in their 20s and 30s.  The hosts were a married couple with two kids (4-8 during the group's existence -- they didn't play).

We met on Sunday evenings and played from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. During this time, I always felt 3 hours was too short -- I was having fun and wanted to continue. But that desire meant that, 1) I was always eager to get back to the table next Sunday, and 2) we had to squeeze as much play as possible into the time we had.

Now 3 hours seems like a perfect segment -- enough time for everyone to do interesting stuff, but not so much time that you get burned out or bored.

[Eric J.]

I don't find anything wrong with my "super-sessions" (TM).  10 hours is usually good, and my players are always begging me for more at the end, so I would consider it pretty good.  I guess that we divide it up into multiple sessions, once you condiser session breaks, though.  I find it greatly usefull to have a non-RP event every time you game.  It allows for more casual play (which is good) and the oppertunity to go into greator debth.

[Jabberwocky]

Our gameSoc at uni meets wednesday afternoons and the sessions I run tend to be between 2 hours and 3 - although an immenent campaign change may increase this due to me actually planning something resembling an adventure beforehand (Wild Talents -> TROS)

[greyorm]

In high school, we would play for 6 to 8 hours, sometimes longer (this was usually interspersed with running to get the pizza, socialization and other things besides just gaming).

The tabletop group I played with (briefly) two years ago ran sessions for around five hours, usually until the GM fell asleep.

We used to do once-or-twice-a-year marathon sessions back in high school, lasting 10+ hours, and would spend the whole weekend playing, sometimes switching campaigns to give one GM a break. I've only done one since, which lasted for around seven or eight hours via IRC (a special Halloween game some years ago).

Our group's typical sessions last around 2.5 to 3 hours.

However, my experience is somewhat skewed in regards to the medium we use to game.  I'd prefer to play longer sessions than I do currently because chat-based play slows things down somewhat. Usually we get one scene and one Bang per session, sometimes more. We can run one or two small combats and some role-playing or exploration in that time.

So a game session that normally takes three hours (tabletop) takes around five to six hours via IRC.

[Brian Leybourne]

"I think an RPG session should be no longer than twice the length of a movie."  (Back to three to four hours.)

Depends on the movie, doesn't it. If it's Lord of the Rings, that would be 6-7 hours :-)

But yeah, I see what you mean. For my group that wouldn't be enough though. We play on Sundays, whenever everyone can make it, which usually works out to be two Sundays out of every three or four. We start between midday and 1pm, and usually stop around 10pm, with maybe 3/4rs of an hour for dinner in there, so probably 8-ish hours on average.

And no, that's not all taken up by combats and suchlike, we just love roleplaying :-) I would hate it if we had to stop after 3-4 hours, like most of the other respondants on here seem to prefer.

Brian.

[Ziriel]

Three to four hours huh?

That certainly izn't true for my group.  We meet every Monday between 4:30 and 5:00pm, though I cannot recall off hand the last time that everyone was actually there on time and ready to go.  We usually start around 5:30 or 6:00 due to tardiness, making food runs and catching up with one another.  (This seems to be pretty standard as most of the other posts have also mentioned this.)

We usually play until 1:00am.  Now this may seem like a long time but we have noticed a trend that it seems to take us a few hours to really get warmed up, in character and rolling ahead full steam.  We break in the middle for dinner.  (We trade off cooking for each other every week, a tradition that we find really enriches the night.)

When it's all said and done I would say we play for about 7 hours, although every once in awhile we have a "long" session and stop after about 12 hours and go catch some breakfast.  Admittedly it does help that most of us have night jobs, and none of us work on the day we game.

Does anyone else find longer sessions better for really getting into stories, character's heads, etc?  Or are we perhaps just slow?  

I feel I have to add that our ages range from 23 to 29 and that may have a hand in our long sessions as well.

Even though we run long by most accounts, most of us ask one another with a laugh, "Iz it Monday yet?", at some point during the week.  Ah, the joys of having a hobby you are passionate about!

[JSDiamond]

Long sessions were the best!  The norm for me and the groups I played with (up until about a year ago when I began doing more artwork).  Every, or every *other* Saturday/Sunday,  usually from around 11 am until 1 or 2 the following am.  Group breakfast to start (prepared by one of us or spouses) then maybe a 1 hour break for food and leg stretching, butt untingling, etc., somewhere during.  On average 12 hours.  Personally, I never found it tedious or too lengthy for sessions.  We would be running out of steam at around midnight though.  So that last hour was more wrap-up than anything else.

Not that big a deal when you think of LAN parties going for 12+ hours of Unreal tourney or whatever.  But that stuff burns me out faster.  I  never 'lived' adventures duing LAN parties that I remember to tell to this day.

Jeff

[Mike Holmes]

Does anyone else find longer sessions better for really getting into stories, character's heads, etc?  Or are we perhaps just slow?  

Not slow. But what system are you using? Why should it take more than a minute or two to get into the flow?

BTW, welcome aboard.

Mike

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ziriel,

Welcome.

Like Mike, I've found that system (with a strong intention for the characters, with the characters setting their own agendas), allows for a faster "ramp up" than most players are used to.

I've found time and time again that the first three to four hours of play are often spent "figuring out" the GM's "real" plot, or which NPC you actually have to talk to, or the guy you really have to kill, or where the monster really is... Or whatnot.  Until that point, the PCs are often bumping randomly into stuff as the Players sort through the clues and look for the entry point into the really increase in story speed.

(This has been my experience.  Your milage may vary.)

That's why I use the use movies as a time guage (doubled for book keeping).  Most movies get going strong within the first ten minutes (whether it's an action movie or a puzzle movie or whatnot).  A game that can get folks hooked into strong, forward moving action within twenty minutes (as opposed to still sorting through a long list of possible suspects/locations/clues that really matter) will ramp up faster.

Some games here on the Forge encourage this speed.  But they really demand giving up certain assumptions about the pace, rythym and roles (of players and GM) to be enoyed.

Take care,
Christopher

[Irmo]

That's why I use the use movies as a time guage (doubled for book keeping).  Most movies get going strong within the first ten minutes (whether it's an action movie or a puzzle movie or whatnot).  A game that can get folks hooked into strong, forward moving action within twenty minutes (as opposed to still sorting through a long list of possible suspects/locations/clues that really matter) will ramp up faster.

Some games here on the Forge encourage this speed.  But they really demand giving up certain assumptions about the pace, rythym and roles (of players and GM) to be enoyed.

Well, I guess it depends on what kind of movies, and what kind of roleplaying one prefers. There are movies, mostly long ones, which take quite a while establishing a character. That doesn't necessarily make them tedious. It depends a lot on the depth with which the character was created. And while frequently there will be some exclaiming 'That movie was loooooooong', others will note that they consider every single minute of it essential. I think it is similar with characters. I personally vary a great deal in the time it takes me to get into character, and it frequently also depends on my mood. How long it takes until the "theme music" of the character is playing in your head isn't always a question of system. (And I am not sure how many groups would agree to have the Adagio by Albinoni/Giazotto being played just to get you in a depressed mood fitting your character ;) Of course, with certain systems supporting some modes of play more than others, system can be a factor in facilitating it, or in increasing the likelihood of someone playing that game wanting to go through that process to begin with. But in the end, I think the depth of the character and the degree of empathy with it favored by the player are more important than the system itself.