The 2.5 Hour D&D Session

    The biggest challenge running the Angstlands is ensuring the session is productive and fun despite its short runtime. Our sessions are scheduled for 2.5 hours and we usually lose half an hour to chatting, book keeping, and/or starting late because of work or traffic. Its taken almost the full year we’ve been playing to develop a system and set of tools that keep the action moving without things feeling too rushed - huge thank you to my eternally patient players!

    I imagine that the majority of the people reading this have limited time to engage with the hobby given the average age on the In Rust We Trust discord. If you’re interested in trying to squeeze in some D&D between kids/work/family, there’s a bunch of stuff that makes the 2.5 hour game happen. Some of it is campaign design, some is pregame prep, and some is watching the clock and adjusting things as needed.

    When building the Angstlands hexmap, I made sure there were plenty of small dungeons, combat encounters, and RP encounters that could be resolved in one session. For the small encounters, I have a rough outline of what the story is there with a few NPCs to facilitate it. I never 100% know where my guys will go, so that’s about as much prep as I want to have for those. When they pop up, I try to meld what I have with what my players try to do. It really is an emergent story to some degree, I just give prompts and then react to their characters. If there was a random encounter on the way, I may try to incorporate that, too. On paper, these encounters may feel like they are too little to be interesting but players will almost never go the most direct route to resolution and usually end up doing something I never thought of and changing how I want it to play out. With a group like ours, four sentences and a stat block can turn into a great session.

    Doing any preparation I can do to speed up gameplay is key. For example, I pre-roll three or four random encounters based on where the party is planning to go. That could save up to 20 minutes of me just rolling dice and I can better incorporate the encounter to what the group is doing. I also screenshot stat blocks for monsters and make little stat cards so I don’t have to flip through the book. If I suddenly need stats for an enemy because the players pick a fight I wasn’t expecting with an NPC or something that isn’t meant to give the party a challenge, I just give them a +0 bonus across the board and have them do 1d6 damage to keep things moving.

    It can be hard to give everyone their time in the spotlight with these short sessions, so I have been using “always-on initiative”. Even outside of combat, the players will take actions in initiative order. This gives everyone roughly equal playing time and stops my open-table game from excluding shy or new players. Its given us a great rhythm when exploring dungeons and increased the number of rooms explored per session. Its also made the game feel even more collaborative!

    I do my best to keep the focus on the players and watch the clock. I try to have NPCs talk the bare minimum so more time is there for the players to interact and RP. I focus on what needs to happen to drive action and resist the urge to goof around. These sessions are like a short story and you need to use every line of dialog to keep things moving. I try to be flexible and remove parts of the plot that are not key when the time is getting low. If players feel stuck or directionless, I give them a nudge or a clue. The last 20 minutes of play are almost always reserved for encounters, dividing treasure, and wrapping up. This last method is often aspirational because it can happen close to the sessions climax and everyone wants to see it through!

Don’t worry about mastering all of it at once and just start playing! You can figure it out on the way.