Poll: P&P role-players, how long can/should a play session last?

[Little Woodsman]

Heyas fellow escapists!
So when you & your friends are sitting around the table with books, dice & character sheets how long can the play session last before your attention starts to wander?
If there is combat in the play session, how long can the combat last before you grow tired of it?
Thanks in advance for all your replies!

 

[Foolery]

Depends on your players, man. 3-4 is usually what my group goes for each week and that's perfect for me. Attention spans tend to wander after that in my experience. Longer sessions can be alright if you throw in a break, get food, etc. I've also run what I call one-shot campaigns that go all day, but that's really only on rare occasions.

 

[Aris Khandr]

My group only got together once a month usually, so we started around 10 AM and stop somewhere around midnight. There was a dinner break in there around 5, but otherwise we just wanted to keep going.

 

[Little Woodsman]

My group only got together once a month usually, so we started around 10 AM and stop somewhere around midnight. There was a dinner break in there around 5, but otherwise we just wanted to keep going.

About how much of that was combat and how much character interaction? My current group can go almost endlessly with character interaction but lengthy combats can be a trial after a couple of hours.

 

[Aris Khandr]

My group only got together once a month usually, so we started around 10 AM and stop somewhere around midnight. There was a dinner break in there around 5, but otherwise we just wanted to keep going.

About how much of that was combat and how much character interaction? My current group can go almost endlessly with character interaction but lengthy combats can be a trial after a couple of hours.

Our game was fairly combat light in general. We had whole sessions go by without anyone even mentioning a weapon, much less drawing it. It depends on the group, of course. I had another game, a few years later, that got bored of character interaction and needed to hit things every 30 minutes or so.

 

[Johnny Impact]

My group meets once a week from 6pm until midnight. We start earlier if everyone is ready. It's pretty common for us to run out of steam around 10:30-11.

When we were younger, we used to play all day, like 12-14 hour sessions (with meal breaks.) Now we all have jobs.

Combats tend to be reasonably brisk affairs. Of course, "reasonably brisk" in Pathfinder can be a couple hours. Mostly it hinges on what we're up against. There's a big difference between fighting a single stone giant and fighting a full party of NPCs with magic items and lists of special abilities as long and varied as yours.

 

[Anachronism]

My group only got together once a month usually, so we started around 10 AM and stop somewhere around midnight. There was a dinner break in there around 5, but otherwise we just wanted to keep going.

About how much of that was combat and how much character interaction? My current group can go almost endlessly with character interaction but lengthy combats can be a trial after a couple of hours.

My group was always the same. Especially in D&D, combat can be a real chore if it goes on for a while. We had some games which only lasted 2 hours, others which were more like 5, although the latter usually had a break for food in there.

As a rule, character stuff is almost always more fun than combat; tabletop RPG combat tends to be pretty tedious, in my experience. Our combats rarely went on for longer than about an hour; if the fight lasted longer than that it was usually a big, climactic battle sequence. The last game we played was a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, in which the final fight against the nameless horror lasted probably about 30 minutes at most; it was pretty brief, and much more dramatic and frightening for it.

By the by, Call of Cthulhu combat is actually really fun. It manages to cut out a lot of the slog that tends to come with D&D combat.

 

[DoPo]

In my humble opinion, an "average" session should be around the 3 hours +/- half an hour or so. Obviously, this can vary greatly depending on the group or game - you can easily have 1 hour sessions, or 6+ hour ones. I personally like them to take up at least half a day, so 6-7-ish minimum with more if possible, though it depends on the group - not everybody can make that, even me, depending on when we're playing.

Still, as a guide, 2 hours should be enough for a minimum session - 2-4 encounters/scenes/whatever, which can be any combination of combat and non-combat. 3 hours can fit these more comfortably, maybe have 4-ish, too, and then with more, you can either extend the encounters/scenes/whatever or make them more or both.

I should mention again, that's a very rough guide but it should be enough for...a rough guide.

 

[BabySinclair]

My average is around 3 these days but when I was playing a few years back in collage we started, and eventually we looked at the clock and realized we had to sleep before classes the next day. 2 hours minimum because groups rarely begin full swing and as for combat length it really depends on the system. World of Darkness games didn't feature long or even frequent combat, maybe a third of our playtime. D&D 3.5 and 4e were mostly combat 75% and each fight could take awhile. D&D Next so far seems to have a lot faster combats so we get through fights faster and my current game is about 50-60% combat some days and less on others, depends on the story and what we're up to.

A lot of it depends on the DM and the story involved when it comes to length in combat and how often combat occurs.

 

[Azahul]

As a general rule, my weekly games last about four hours, verging on five. We've been playing World of Darkness lately, so combat is a fairly rare occurrence and when it does happen, it doesn't take much time (World of Darkness combat usually means just a single roll per player/NPC per turn).

My players are usually happy with longer sessions when we have time for them, but after the five hour mark I tend to lose my grip on the game a little and... odd things start happening. Probably 'cos we normally play late at night, and by 1am I'm starting to find it hard to remember which mortal stole the important little item of evil faerie summoning.

 

[DoPo]

(World of Darkness combat usually means just a single roll per player/NPC per turn).

So, should I understand you're blessed to be playing nWoD? Because in oWoD combat was a nightmare - for each attack you get the following

1. attack roll (does the attack hit)
2. resist roll (block/dodge/parry)
3. (maybe - if the attack hits) damage roll
3.9 (hidden step just before 4. - maybe) any damage reduction
4. (maybe - if there is damage and if the defender can soak it) soak roll (reduces the incoming damage)

That's more or less the minimum. I'm not kidding when I say that I had one combat take up more than two hours. Though, with that said, it was over IRC but it's still long. And that was just a side thing - just few turns of struggle, and none of us or the other party was a "combat character" (well, the other party was slightly), actual combat characters are horrible, since, if you're not aware, in oWoD you can split your dicepool and in order to more attacks. And combat characters like to do that a lot, they do 2-4-ish of the steps above EACH TURN. EACH OF THEM. Heck, everybody can split their dicepool and it's a good idea against multiple combatants (otherwise, it's a bit hard to attack and block more than once).

Some supernatural creatures like vampires are even worse, since Celerity automatically gives them extra actions per turn (while werewolves can just spend Rage) without splitting the dicepool, they can still split their "normal" one - not the ones used for the extra actions. Older editions allowed for the extra action dicepools to be split, too, so you could seriously have a character doing, like 15 attacks a round. I'm talking a new character here - Celerity 5, Dex 5, Melee/Brawl/Firearms 5 ones can happily go for even higher. Thankfully, Revised fixed that and V20 fixed Revised.

All in all, I must say, I REALLY like the new Damage = (attack pool) - (defence) in play.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Heyas fellow escapists!
So when you & your friends are sitting around the table with books, dice & character sheets how long can the play session last before your attention starts to wander?
If there is combat in the play session, how long can the combat last before you grow tired of it?
Thanks in advance for all your replies!

For session length, I prefer 4-8 hours, depending on the game. I've been known to run for more than 12 hours with small groups (two players).

As for a single Combat Encounter? Depends - a regular encounter should go pretty quickly, if possible - no more than 30 minutes or so. A boss fight, maybe an hour.

An end of campaign final boss fight? Hours. The same goes for a massive "war" combat, for when a party of PCs stand against massive numbers of lower level characters. Battles like that can BE entire sessions.

Note: I'm talking Pathfinder by preference here. Other systems might vary.

 

[natster43]

Completely depends on how everyone is feeling and time restrictions. Some times the games I have been in last for 30 minutes, other times for up to like 5 to 6 hours. Really you should just go until people seem to be either bored or tired, then find a good point to end at.

 

[crudus]

Depends completely on the players. I have sessions that can only last a few hours. I have played in games that average on 6 hours (what I prefer). On at least 2 occasions I have gamed for 24 hours straight! The most important part is if everyone is having fun. Another important part is how it affects other aspects of the gamers lives.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

We meet once a week and our sessions last about 4-5 hours. That way it is always enough time to get a bunch done and we stop to eat partway through typically also.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

3-4 hours, unless its an "event" or one-shot dungeon/game/whatever. I've had marathon sessions that lasted a full day, but that was earlier in life, now that I'm older the old responsibility boss reared its head and I've got to devote time to slaying that bastard daily. And his loot drops suck, but the achievements are worth it.

 

[Something Amyss]

I prefer longer sessions, but I haven't been in a game where people can maintain focus for more than a couple hours in years.

 

[Beautiful Tragedy]

I would say 3-4 hours typically..ONLY because unless you have a GREAT DM/GM players can get bored after a certain time. When i played D&D with one group WAY back when i was in Jr. College we usually played about 5 hours or so... but we did some really original, interesting stuff... plus we all got along really well, so we were able to plan things out quickly, and almost knew what each other was thinking.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

When I was younger then really anything from 4-10 hours, although they would also usually involve a lot of dicking around. I haven't really played much at all in recent years but they've all been fairly short, maybe about 3 hours, primarily due to having jobs to go to in the morning or other obligations.

Combat wise...personally I've found that it doesn't really matter if a single combat drags out for a while as long as the combat system is interesting. For example, in cyberpunk2020, if you had both sides tooled up with automatic weapons, strange ammo types, full body armour, cyberware up the wazoo and any number of fancy combat gadgets then you could probably look at a few hours to sort it out, as long as no one did anything stupid, but that never really got boring.

What gets boring for me is repeated combat, i.e. dungeon crawl type adventures, but some people love them.

In the end I suppose it all depends on your group and what they like. Said every ex GM ever.

 

[MrRaggaedeman]

I used to play in a WoD group but I really didn`t like our GM and her story. It was pretty awful and she didn`t react well to criticism
(Just because my character is gay it doesn`t mean that he is going to suck every dick in the entire city...).
We had one good session, it lasted around 7 hours but the average was around 3 or 4 hours.

Right now I`m the GM of my own little party and our sessions tend to last very long.Although we`re not playing WoD anymore. Two weeks back we startet around 5pm and played all night and morning until 10am. It was great!!

If no one has a time limit play as long as everybody is having fun.