Over 700 hours of DF

Game session length came up peripherally in a recent discussion I had, and more directly regarding restocking my dungeon.

We play for about 8 hours. It's occasionally less, sometimes a bit more, and we're together for a bit longer than we play. A couple sessions were much longer - like more than 12 hours - because we played on a Sunday with a Monday holiday.

So how much time is that?

91 sessions.

Call it 8 hours per session.

That comes out to 728 hours of play in the past 5 years.

That's a lot of rolling 3d6.

Still, I'd rather be running Felltower than have a lazy Sunday off with nothing to do.

Why 8 hours? Most of this has to do with 1/3 of our group living very far away, so weekly 3-hour sessions are vastly less realistic than bi-monthly 8 hour sessions. If we want Gale's player and Vryce/Gerry's player to participate, we need to play long sessions to make the trip worthwhile. If we want to play at all involving me, it's got to be Sunday or the rare Friday night (and both of those precede very early mornings leading into long days of work.) It is just how it has to work. I just didn't really think about how long it's been, in terms of total hours.

Gaming Logistics II: GURPS DF, megadungeon w/minis

I ran AD&D with so little stuff that it could all fit into my backpack. I still managed to bring too much and get disorganized during play, but that will happen.

But when I run GURPS, I run it full-on. Maps. Minis. Handouts on occasion. Small maps depicting large areas that my players then map onto much larger maps.

So what do I bring?


- a plastic "milk crate" with full of:
     three plastic Plano 2-3700-00 tackleboxes with figures (one each Battlesystem, Cardboard Heroes, and Bones/Legendary Encounters/D&D pre-paints/Pathfinder pre-paints/terrain);
     My converted GURPS GM screen;
     two binders (one with DF1-15, stripped down to just what I use in this game; one with DFM1, 2, 3 and my own monsters sheets, plus DF8)
     four-five small boxes of doors (thanks to my players and Archon Shiva), minis (apes, gargoyles, the otyugh just in case), a bag of troll minis, a bag of orc minis, and terrain bits;
     two tea tins of home-made carboard heroes (inc. 33 druagr, thanks to Emile Smirle)
     printouts of sometimes-needed rules and rulings I'd prefer to hand out when they occur (cones, area effect, scatter mostly).

Plus I bring:

- my packet of maps (it's in a folder that says Loved Pineapple on it, because it's made in Korea and was sold in Japan);
- my laptop;
- a GM screen so I can roll behind it and have handy charts;
- printed roster charts;
- my notebook;
- dice.

Then you add a GW 80-mini case full of orcs, which holds about 2/3 of my orc collection. and a Feldherr case over-filled (one extra tray) with all of the PCs, likely hirelings, and what I think will be the monster minis I'll need for the session.

I've managed this in one trip, but it's better with extra hands, usually Vic's thanks to his poor timing coming or going. Heh. It's not heavy so much as bulky, something I like to remind people when they say "Holding that 2 x 2 x 3 chest full of coins and potions only puts my guy to Medium Encumbrance!" Yeah, true, but weight isn't the only issue there.

It's not really heavy, but it's somewhat delicate. I've had minis break in these cases because the minis don't quite fit in the slots and the cases get banged around a bit. That's generally just fragile weapons (cough, cough, Wargames Factory, Dwarven Forge) and odd-shaped minis (GW, Reaper monsters mostly).


If I could change anything this, I'd simply do what we did back in the day: play where I live. That would allow me to have my minis close by.

If the PCs suddenly decide to attack the big dragon, the big dragon comes out of its storage bag in the back of my desk and gets put on the table. But if they do that while I'm away, sorry, no mini. If they plan to and then decide not to, I had to carry a large and potentially delicate mini (I could drop it, that happens) all the way to game for nothing. I have to pack figures in cases and remember where they are (and remember to bring them). I can't pre-set terrain and then just pull it out.

This is a special sort of problem, because a lot of what's in Felltower is an excuse to use minis I've accumulated over time. That's part of the fun and joy that is playing this game - pulling out minis that have sat ready for use since . . . whenever. Figures I'd owned since I was a kid. New ones I bought just to get that reaction from my players when they hit the table. It's combining the minis aspect of my game with the imagination that went into our dungeon and characters.

If it was only the megadungeon, no minis?

I'd need:

- my packet of maps;
- my laptop;
- a GM screen so I can roll behind it and have handy charts;
- printed roster charts;
- my notebook;
- dice.

And that's about it. Felltower is a few files on my computer and a bunch of maps (and I really should make copies of them and off-site back them up, actually). Part of me would like to run things that way. But only a small part. I mean, just wait until you see that dragon on the table . . .

How long of a session do you play?

Yesterday I wondered How many players do you GM for?

Well, when you do GM, how long are your game sessions?


My game sessions theoretically run every 2 weeks, but we cancel any of those weeks if we have insufficient players (less than two, with rare exceptions), or if there is a holiday that occupies myself or sufficient other players, or if I'm working (which I do on Sundays a few times a year). That's why we've only managed to get in 30 sessions over now just about two years of play. 31 sessions in just over two years, if you count our one-shot MOTFD playtest.


So with that in mind, we play sessions that run from between 5-6 hours (mostly back in the first half of the game so far) and 8-9 hours (lately).

Since we can't play often due to family/work/travel/scheduling concerns, we play for a long time when we can. It just works out that it's easier to have a long session less frequently than to have short sessions more often.

I miss the days I could come home from work and run game nightly for my friends when they got home from work. Or run it at lunch at school and then on weekends. But those days are gone - I can't even commit to playing a video game solo that often, or blogging that often, because there are much more critical things that I want and need to do. But when I did play that often, I remember lots of long sessions mixed with short sessions. A nightly 3 hour session, say, or playing until our parents told us to clear off the dining room table for dinner, mixed with marathon whole-day sessions that would start back up the next day as well.

But like I said, that's not going to happen. It's an average of 15 times a year, take it or leave it.

So when we play, it's as long as we can make it.

How about you guys?

How many players do you GM for?

Eric Tenkar has started to read an old book by Gary Gygax I've long wanted to read but have yet to track down - Role Playing Mastery.

In his first post on the subject he's talking group size, and ideal group size. Gary Gygax expressed an opinion that a fairly smallish group is ideal, but a lot of old school D&D legend is of gigantic groups and massive campaigns full of a huge rotating base of players. How true that was, I'm still not sure, but either way, for all the Mordenkainen and Robilar solo adventuring ("solo" as in "one player" not necessarily "one character") you think of RPGs as having a party of adventurers, not Conan going solo.

I started my DF campaign with five players plus one guest star (he can't commit to even our intermittent games). We ended up adding two more, for a total of seven plus one. We had a potential newbie guest star who ended up not making it. We have a line on a potential eighth player.

We've had one session that I recall with every one of the regulars there although we've been close. Usually it's closer to 3-4 players, and we've recently had a few sessions with only 2 players. Two of those, if I remember correctly, went down to one player for a while since one of them had to pop out to work in the middle of the session to take care of a few things before he got back.

I could run a game with more, but mostly we want a bigger pool because it's more fun when you've got 4 or 5 people instead of 2 or 3, and scheduling wipes out plenty of play time for everyone. We just can't reliably get that many people there. So we're always keeping an eye out for a friend we can lure back into the dungeons and who is in the right frame of mind for this kind of deliberately light game. Still, it works out to less than 5 people per session just about all the time.

So how many guys do you run for? What's your attendance rate like - lots of missed sessions, rotating pool, or play only when everyone is there?