Shorter, More Frequent Sessions
Modern living has us giving up more and more of our precious leisure time. I don’t want to be the guy who laments that I don’t have time to play TTRPGs. I want to be in this hobby. I want a long lasting campaign.
So here’s how I do it: roughly 2 hour long sessions, almost every weekend.
THE HOUSEKEEPING:
I realize that this might sound like I am putting too much of a time constraint on our session runtime. It’s true, I am. But I am also not in a position where I can pull a group together to play for 4+ hours with any kind of regularity. So while 2 hour sessions do mean I get to play more often, there are caveats, so I’ll get those out of the way first.
For one, you really don’t want players spending too much time on any given scene talking in circles. We just don’t have time for that. So what I like to do is present them with a problem from the get go. Usually it is something they didn’t resolve last session that comes back to bite them. This is just the kickoff so it doesn’t need to be elaborate. Can just be “those bandits from last session are still on your tail, what do you do?”
Deliberation is fine, and there isn’t a problem if everyone is engaged in that conversation, but if the players are given all the information about a situation and are still taking too long to make a choice, then it becomes a problem. It’s worth paying attention to who isn’t talking in these moments. Go around the table and hear everyone’s say. Normally one person will have a sound idea. If not, there may be an issue with how you’ve presented the problem if no one feels like there is a solution.
I'll add that it is totally fine for players to remain in a single scene for the duration of the session, so long as the fiction progresses. If players are making choices within that scene and the conversation is going in interesting directions, don’t feel bad that they are taking their time. This is clearly what is interesting to them right now, and it will interest you if you pay attention to what they are doing, even if it is small.
All this is to say, you should not feel disheartened when a session predominantly becomes about one thing, so long as everyone is invested in that moment, including the GM. RPGs let us interrogate and engage with a shared fiction. If you are having vibrant, thoughtful and entertaining conversations about said fiction, your session is going great!
ADVENTURES and PROCEDURES:
Having played through a couple of campaigns with this session length, I can suggest that you keep adventure sites smaller so that players feel like they are making tangible progress each week.
Shorter adventure modules work great at providing a sense of meaningful completion. It is rewarding to feel like a chapter has been closed and that a particular situation has been resolved. Of course, you can always show the spillover effects of any given adventure, but at the very least your players can say “we played through Winter’s Daughter in like 2 sessions and it was great!” vs. “we’ve been stuck on the same floor of this megadungeon for 20 sessions and we're still all at level 1”.
In my current campaign, we are running a hex-crawl, with various dungeons scattered about, ranging from small to medium sized. I do play out the travel procedures because I find it gives meaning to the map's scale and leads to emergent moments. That said, travel does eat up session time, so worth keeping in mind if you are the type to want to get to the action quickly.
For hex-crawls, my advice would be to make them dense. Players should not be too far from the next adventure site. I would also make the different regions quite varied. This is personal preference, but you can easily spend a lot of real-world time in one region which can start to feel stale.
SYSTEM:
I should note that my home game is currently playing Mutant Crawl Classics, which falls on the lighter side of rulesets. The reason I would recommend less crunchy systems is that when session time is so scarce, you really don’t want to be spending any more time than you have to arguing over rules. As such, I would definitely favor systems that empower the GM to make rulings on the fly so you can prioritize the flow of the game and the fiction.
For my money, I think you are fine using this approach with something like 5E, or even Pathfinder, though you may want to have your group be familiar with the ruleset in the first-place before adopting shorter sessions.
Really any system can work with this session model. You just have to keep in mind that many "trad" systems were designed with longer sessions in mind and a consistent party, so tinkering may be necessary to get the pacing right.
GROUP:
I am not a particularly fussy or precious GM when it comes to making sure every player shows up each session. If I was, I would be playing a lot less. I don’t run West Marches or open table campaigns, but I don’t particularly care if person X didn’t show up this week and instead person Y who missed last session is available this time around.
This is a fairly touchy subject for many groups. On the one hand, being less strict about player composition (as in, who from the player pool is showing up this week) means you do get to run more games. The flipside is that you can throw out any hope of a cohesive narrative forming over the course of a campaign.
Furthermore, you cannot plot around macguffins, unless you are using “magic pockets”-style inventories since the player character with that item might not be around next week. You can be flexible with this. In my games, if a character has an important item (usually from a pre-written module) and their player doesn’t show that week, I will ask the player if they passed the item to another character or run their character on autopilot for that session (with the player's blessing).
Likewise you probably should not prep special moments for specific characters each session, because you can’t count on any given player being there that week (even if they RSVP, life can get in the way). It also means you need to handwave how a player who missed 2 sessions in a row is somehow now 3 levels deep in a dungeon with players who have more context. It is immersion breaking. That’s unavoidable.
But it also means I get to run more sessions with my friends. It may not be the exact combination of friends each time, but so long as we have at least 3 players showing up, we get to run our game that week, unless of course I can’t make it.
I think having 3-4 players is ideal for 2 hour sessions, because you have less turns to cycle through and less spotlight to share in the limited time while also ensuring there are enough players for it to feel like a party. I'd even argue that running for 2 players is fine, so long as they are both game.
The most important thing is to keep the session calendar consistent. Regardless of who joins, so long as you have the minimum number of players to run the game, you run the game. This avoids the issue of the campaign stagnating because we are all still waiting on the right moment to bring everyone together to keep it going. With consistent session times you will find that within your player pool (I recommend having at least 5 players you can call on each week) there will be the regulars who form the ‘core party’. The rest end up feeling like recurring guest stars.
It goes without saying that if you take this approach, make sure session notes are published after each week, either by the GM or the players, so everyone is on the same page. Short “previously on” recaps at the start of each session are also good, just keep them brief as you don’t want it to eat into playtime.
PREP:
The biggest benefit to me is that I don’t need to prep as much per session. At this point, I can expect my players to get through a maximum of 5 rooms of a given dungeon in about 2 hours, and that isn’t including time spent on travel or socializing. I am the type to only prep one session at a time, so this really gives me a bit of slack when it comes to prepping a weekly game.
When it comes to static world elements (dungeon placement, adventure sites etc…) 1 week’s worth of prep roughly carries over for 2 sessions, so you tend to actually be quite ahead of the players. If not, no worries, since you will likely have enough prepped to satisfy the bulk of an individual session.
I believe that the GMs real turn occurs during prep. That’s your time to think and strategize on what effect this session had on the game world. Showing how a bandit chief is now rallying troops to retaliate against the players is hard to improvise right after the players just had a lengthy combat against said bandits. So having that break right after important events can give you the breathing room to prepare something more robust for next time.
It also gets the players thinking on their next move. Definitely have them state their intentions at the end of each session. This will allow the GM to laser focus on prepping for that content, and it will also allow them to marinate on their plan and come in ready to execute, or at least with a better idea on how to do it than they would have otherwise.
It will never go according to plan.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
This writeup is purely informed by my experience running 2 hour sessions every weekend. It is my way of engaging with this hobby on my terms and I encourage everyone to adopt a mindset of putting you and your table’s needs above all other dogmas. You may find that shortened sessions do not aid your scheduling problems. Maybe you need that longer session time to fit your preferred playstyle of taking things slow and indulging in each moment.
What I am proposing is just an alternative way to look at a long-term campaign, one that I find to be a bit more sustainable for my group of players who are all working adults with familial and professional responsibilities.
4-5 hour long sessions are awesome, but they are certainly not a rule. You can and should set your own pace with this hobby, whether it's through 2 hour sessions, 8 hour marathons, or 30 minute blitzes. Mold the game to fit into your life. It's way easier than the other way around.