Short Sessions are Good Sessions

We were all young once, and we had free time, so much in fact that we could spend entire days playing roleplaying games. But no more. Mortgages needs to be paid, spouses want attention, children needs parenting. So we adults all have much less time to spend playing games.

But this is a good thing, and here's why! (<== What great headline.)

I remember days long games of the classics, MERP, D&D, Runequest, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu (in which we did some dungeon crawls), Spacemaster, and these games lasted the entire day. Yet... the more I think back, those days were actually long drawn out affairs. I remember them included trips to the shops for snacks, or even pizza. I remember taking breaks to watch films (on VHS!), and even the odd game on Nintendo. Therefore when I probe a little deeper, they were great fun times, but they were more "themed" around roleplaying rather than doing the actual roleplaying.

Fast forward to today, my last year long campaign was played in strict two hour sessions. My IP blast of games using FATE  to play in the Dune, Judge Dredd, and Tron universes were likewise only 2 hour sessions. When I joined a group playing Monster Hunters, they were running two hour sessions.

In short the two hour time frame is much easier for a grown ass adult to carve out and reserve for play, and the two hour sessions are packed full. I've never played a two hour game where it was session-zeroed, that sh*t would take the entire session. No, instead players were given pre-gens, rolled them up before hand, or we were playing games where characters are created through play. The point here being that no one playing wanted to "waste" time on the preliminaries.

A little note on using pregens here. When I provide pregens, they are a place holder, and if the game goes beyond one session, the player can come back to the second session with their own new character and just drop it in to replace the pregen.

With only two hours to play, the scenarios have no filler-scenes, no slow initial pacing to ease players in, the time constraint means that you drop the characters into the middle of the scenario and game just goes. There's no roleplaying of "the boring bits", the journeys between locations are reduced to "cut to the next scene". Combats can not be long drawn out affairs, with staid and reserved counting squares on the board and moving slowly, it needs to move at pace. The end result is that its a literally action packed session that everyone gets the most out of.

If you haven't tried strict short sessions, I urge you to try it. If you are still able to play for a day, try and organise your day into a series of different 2 hour games. It could be great experience, almost like a con.

There are games out there that are designed for short sessions, one of which you might want to look at is called Challenge Dungeon.