What all my worst RPG sessions have in common

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What all my worst RPG sessions have in common

Shortly after I got into RPGs, I had the worst session I’ve ever played in. It was at a small convention in Phoenix (my first RPG convention, actually) and I’d signed up to try the Dungeon Fantasy version of GURPS.

I’d never tried GURPS before. I’d heard it was pretty crunchy, but I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal as I’d played plenty of crunchy boardgames before. The crunch, as it turned out, was not the problem.

The game was four hours long. Here is what happened during that time period:

• We picked our pre-generated characters.

• We walked the perimeter of a haunted cabin, looking for threats. One of the PCs talked to a tree.

• We approached the cabin and fought a single monster inside.

During the combat, I remember checking the time and realizing that I was getting to take a turn every 45 minutes. The rules weren’t even that complicated. Players were simply not ready for their turns, they would discuss tactical options with each other endlessly, they’d forget how the mechanics worked…it was so bad that I could have played a complete boardgame in-between each of my turns. And when I did take a turn, it consisted of rolling my dice, whacking the demon on the head and saying, “that’s it for me.”

This wasn’t the fault of Dungeon Fantasy, which I’m sure can be played much more quickly; it was the fault of everyone at the table, myself included. I should have pushed for more decisive action but in my defense I was pretty new to RPGs and didn’t have a great sense of what a session ought to look like.

As time has gone by and I’ve played with more groups and tried more systems (especially at conventions), I’ve come to believe that slow play is likely the most common problem in bad games. It’s the single common factor that every bad game I’ve played in has had. There’s a hundred different mistakes that GMs and players can make, but if you just turn up the tempo it covers for an awful lot of them.

For example, last GenCon I got to play in MacDeath, a comedic retelling of Macbeth, run by its author, Professor Dungeon Master. According to popular wisdom, the module should not have worked. It follows Shakespeare’s play scene by scene, the players taking on the roles of several side characters who watch their king descend into madness (with some new fantasy twists) while getting to make a few choices and put on Scottish accents. If you know the play, you know what’s going to happen, and there didn’t seem to be a lot you can do to alter its course. It was a highly linear adventure and didn’t try to disguise this fact.

But it worked, for one simple reason: speed.

The sheer enthusiasm and urgency with which Dan ran it left you no time to be bored. No milling about, no long debates, just the GM pointing and asking “What are you doing?” Things were always happening to react to, dangers were always escalating. You had no choice but to be engaged.

By the time the game was done we had accomplished a lot, even in just a couple of hours. The choices we made had fairly minimal impact, I think (I haven’t read the adventure so I’m not sure how much wiggle room it’s supposed to have), but the experience was like being on a rollercoaster, and I had a lot of fun.

In an ideal world, a game would both move quickly and have frequent impactful choices, but if I had to choose between a fast, enthusiastic game with frequent but low-impact choices and a grindingly slow game with only a couple of high impact choices…I think I might choose the former. Sitting in a chair for hours waiting to do something is my idea of hell, and as I’ve become older I’ve also become better at simply excusing myself from convention games like that.

I remember a Delta Green session I was in once where we were investigating supernatural phenomena in a small town. The GM spent the whole first hour very slowly playing out a side mission where one player checked out the newspaper office, while every one else had to sit and watch. I kept wondering what was going through the GM’s head. Did he think that everyone wanted to spend their Saturday afternoon watching someone else play the game? Eventually I said I had to go home and left.

It’s because of sessions like that that I’ve put more and more emphasis on running games quickly as a GM. Here’s a video I made 5 years ago on this topic (amusingly, it’s also reacting to Professor Dungeon Master), but these days the main things I keep in mind are:

• Point at players and ask them direct questions. “Where are you going?” “What do you tell him?”

• For initiative, use the around-the-table method or all-PCs-go-at-once. Systems that require you to keep track of whose turn it is usually don’t pay back in tactical choices what they lose in speed. I don’t like playing a minigame just to determine how we’re going to play the real game.

• Put some form of time pressure on the players. If they spend too much time waffling, in-character or out-of-character, danger escalates.

Fundamentally, speeding up a game is about making sure that players always have something to do, which is the bare minimum games ought to shoot for. It’s continually surprising to me how often RPG groups put up with hours of “empty” gameplay where almost nothing gets accomplished. If there was a boardgame where that was a regular occurrence, it would get raked over the coals.

In short: don’t waste your players’ time!

Here’s a video of my running Winter’s Daughter (with DM commentary in the subtitles), if you want to see what my games tend to look like.

Next week: my hottest D&D hot take?