Is it possible to run a satisfying game session in just one or two hours? In this inaugural episode, Andy and Chris share their experiences running game sessions with very tight time constraints.

Transcript below provided by Barbara Tozier!

Episode 1: How to run a game in two hours or less

[opening music]

Chris: Hello, and welcome to _Roll for Topic_ an RPG podcast. This is a podcast where we have GMs discussing various topics related to running games. Let’s do some quick introductions. My name is Chris Salzman.

Andy: My name is Andy Rau.

Chris: We are two GMs, we’ve known each other for a while, but we decided to do this podcast to get a chance to sit down and talk more specifically about one topic relating to, “Hey, you’re the GM. How do you keep this thing going smoothly?” So to that end, we have created a D10 table with a number of topics on it. This is… our hook here is that every time we record, we pull up that table, we’re going to roll a D10, see what comes up, and then we’ll use that as our topic. This helps us to not over prep, which is a good thing when you’re dealing with GMs.

Andy: All right, Chris, I’m going to need a D10 roll from you, please.

Chris: Ok, all right. Thank you.

Andy: No modifiers.

[sound of dice rolling]

Chris: Yes, all right. That is a nine. So what’s nine on our table?

Andy: All right, let me consult our table here, Chris. Today our topic with the result of nine: we will be discussing how you fit a game into two hours.

Chris: Ooh. Okay. Should we keep it narrowed to two hours? Or should we just be like, “How do you fit a game in one hour, two hours, four hours, et cetera?”

Andy: Yeah, let’s give ourselves a little leeway and say, “How do you run a really short tight game?”

Chris: Yeah. Okay. Well, I have some thoughts, but why don’t you dive in first.

Andy: This has been one of my big goals as a GM over the last couple of years, and that is getting the game experience down to just a couple hours and it’s entirely because of my life circumstances. Like everybody else, I don’t have as much time to game as I did in my youth. But the main thing is I’m playing more and more with kids, with my own kids and their friends, and I have discovered that over a couple of hours, you… the game really goes south with kids under the age of 12 or 13. So my daughter is 11, I play with her a fair amount with her friends. And I have just found that if I’m going over two hours, I start to lose them and they start getting silly and things like that. I have also found this and it’s makes for a much easier pitch for my kind of casual gamer friends who are not super enthused at the… who can’t or aren’t enthused about the idea of taking six hours on their Friday night. Like we used to, we start at 6pm and then people are heading home at like 1:15 in the morning. That’s not really something I can ask from my adult friends with kids and jobs anymore so…. Two hours is maybe a little too short for adults, but I have been trying to keep the games I play with my casual gamer friends somewhere in like the three hour vicinity.

Chris: That’s interesting. So you mentioned when you were younger you’d do six-, seven-hour sessions.

Andy: Yep.

Chris: So if like that, I guess now I’m just really curious. Like, what was the longest session you ever played?

Andy: Oh, I don’t know. The longest session, and I’m reaching way back into the mists of memory that are clouded by nostalgia…. One of the first times I ever played _Dungeons and Dragons_. This is mid ’80s, I was introduced to _Dungeons and Dragons_ by my cousin who I was visiting for the summer. And he broke out