For pacing purposes, how much does your particular group get done per session? What makes you as DM say “holy shit, you guys got a lot done this session” or conversely, “the party is lagging”?
So we can skip to the good part, can we please take as a basic assumption that yes, all groups are different, yes, all DM’s are different, yes yes, there are combat-heavy modules, rp-heavy modules, and exploration-heavy modules and that changes things, sure, some players are good role players, some more experienced than others, yes, yes, all excellent points and the real answer is truly “it depends”.
Let’s skip all that, please?
Tell me about your group, what kind of campaign you’re running, what kind of focus it has (combat/rp/exploration), length of sessions, and what gets done in a typical session.
Why do I ask? I’m running an rp-heavy Strahd (albeit with a lot of homebrew in it) and I’d like to get a sense of how others are pacing their games- especially long campaigns.
So my group of five is made of a mix of quite experienced, mildly experienced, and one new player. Our Strahd sessions are 3 hours long, we play weekly on R20 by Discord video session, and I’d say the breakdown is more or less 45/35/20 between rp/exploring/combat. So far the pace has been as follows, by session:
Session Zero, Introduction & Opening, and a few small combats in a first level dungeon crawl I homebrewed to give the players an opportunity to give their characters a shakedown and get some initial impressions re: party dynamics;
Completion of the dungeon involving three or four easier combats, return to Phandalin (started there since the players just finished Lost Mines and I wanted to draw a clear line between a typical high fantasy setting and the Strahd gothic horror), level up to 2, introduction of Death House;
Death House, up to third floor;
Death House, up to attic and one basement combat;
Completion of Death House, including an rp encounter with Strahd (replacing the, imo, silly shambling mound as the final encounter), granting of Dark Gifts on the party by Strahd, arrival in Barovia, level up to 3;
Heavy rp session, initial impression of Barovia, party grappling with the dark gifts (none of the members know what happened to the others- some have shared, others haven’t), testing of fog, discovery of Gates of Barovia, a tough campfire encounter with Strahd zombies, and eventual arrival in the Village of Barovia.
Tonight is 7, and I see my party getting through most, if not all, of the Village encounters (I’ve got a big wolf encounter planned at the church), with the next session involving a random combat encounter as they head west, a visit with Madam Eva and the famous tarokka reading, a deadly chase encounter as they come through the gates of Vallaki, and a level up to 4. 8 sessions from level 1 to 4, starting with a bobo dungeon crawl level and ending in Vallaki. Players seem pleased with pace, but that notwithstanding, thoughts on pace appreciated.
Generally the pace sets itself. In my first session, the group went to a village, spoke to people in the inn, got the quest from the elders, travelled, fought some bugbears who tried to mug them ~(mugbears?)~ , found a wagon (with no horse), looted it, then found an anchor in the mountains descending from the clouds. It seemed like they got a lot done. Second session had them explore the hsip, kill the crew (accidentally) , meet the captain, and also travel to a demiplane where the ship sails an endless sea. Also felt like good progress. Third session saw them sail the ship to an island, then go into a cave, argue about whether it was safe to rest in the cave, get ambushed whilst resting in the cave, then leave the cave to rest. Fourth session had them clear out the cave, and return to outside to rest again. Those two felt like they went at half the speed of the first two, but none of them have felt like the players are going too fast or too slow.
I guess that I would consider it "too slow" if the session was supposed to be progress heavy and the players did nothing but roleplay and mimble around. I'd consider it slow if the players did nothing but explore the woods when they needed to talk to people in town to progress the plot. I'd consider it slow if the players were "ready" to go to the dungeon but instead insist on talking to everyone in town to find out what they know.
But all of these become moot because I, the DM, know what there is for the players to do, and the players do not. I know they will gai nnothing from talking to every farmer - but they don't, and if that's what they want to do, and they enjoy doing it (IE, no-one is making them do it) then it's going at the right pace. Though I can attest to the sadness when you've planned loads, and only the first bit comes up because the players aren't moving at the pace your imagination is!
Our groups are playing homebrewed world stuff so nothing to compare to, really. Our progress varies GREATLY depending on what we're up to. Investigating and traveling, we seem to run into TONS of side track things, many of which DO draw us in and cost us a fair bit of time. We lost an entire city due to our distracted travel, so we have (for the most part) tried to ignore the side stuff for now.
Most recently, we were about to get ready to head off and find the state of one of our player's people. He is a Dwarf and his family/clan had to abandon their home (large caverns) many years ago due to some unspecified event. The day we were getting ready, this same Dwarf, who has a habit of impulsive actions, ran into a repeat troublemaker our DM has us run into periodically, and BAM, Deck of Many Things is presented......Naturally, Dwarf grabs a card.....POP No Dwarf. He was transported to a remote plane and inprosioned. SO, now we have been transported to that plane (My Goddess sent us there to retrieve him, since she feels he is important) to try and get him back. The player is using an alt he has, whom we met upon arriving in the plane, and he is going to help us, because he has no other plans or ideas for how to get home.
So, if we are in constant fights, we roll through pretty well, as our group is a damage machine, so we roll over stuff easier than our DM expects many times, but anything else, we are, as a group, all goofballs, so we piss away a lot of time doing silly stuff. Not usually too bad, but at times, frustrating, especially this incident, as we were on a timeline, to intercept a caravan on the way to his old home. I expect we may well miss that now. On the up side, the Dwarf will lose the most, because this caravan was supposed to be his path to a wonderful axe he was drooling over, lol. Impulse killed his dream.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Ok we just ran session 31 of a home-brew game 8 players, our sessions run 7/7:30 -10ish. The party are level 4 (levelled up session 28) with probably another 5-6 sessions for level 5.
In terms of what they have done and pacing, I run an open world game and as long as the party are having fun i am happy leaving things to run as they will. Last session the party spent the first hour discussing what they where going to do next, I told them they had used about 4-5 hours of game time having that conversation, when it felt they where going in circles I asked them what they where doing next to move them on. They went to another Inn, didn't achieve a great lot, mainly because they asked all the wrong questions of the wrong person. On the way back I gave them a big not very subtle hint of a thing they could do without explaining why (found themselves walking past the brothel the Satyr was raised in/works at) Minotaur decided to go in and "see if her mother was free for a session" mother had been replaced by a changling while the BBEG teleports her to the Aboleth who is enslaving people. So this then gives the party a reason to go trying to find out where she is (they don't know about the aboleth).
The previous 3 sessions was the party moving through the sewers hunting for the reason for people going missing, they had a total of 7 fights during this time, with rats, carrion crawlers, and every type of ooze in the books :). They also shut down a portal to the Abyss (where oozes where coming from) and did the usual investigation, looting and general stuff that characters do. That took 3 sessions.
In general I find that not having a linear route to take slows play down but I run an open world campaign where the characters are free to investigate what they want how they want, currently they have a series of clues and information some of it they understand, some of it they dont. some of it they don't know is a clue or information yet :).
TLDR Version: Weekly 90 minute games. Pacing is done by weighing what I call small vs large "contributors" to the adventure. Small contributors I aim for 1 session (with a few shorter social/combat/exploration encounters), large contributors take 2-3, maybe even 4 sessions for very involved situations (with long social/exploration moments, and larger combats)
Long response: Before I even speak about pacing and how I approach it, campaign/group context are below because as OP stated, it heavily informs how pacing is done, and what an expectation for a well paced session even is.
Format: Fantasy Grounds with Discord for voice chat
Sessions: weekly, 90 minutes each time
Players: 9 total, 8 of who are brand new to D&D
Campaign: plan is a 1-20 campaign combining multiple modules, with a homebrew thread linking the arcs. Beginning is LMOP (with some Icespire Peak side quests thrown in) moving into the Tyranny of Dragons adventures, with homebrew to then follow from levels 15-20
I realize its a bit of a large endeavor for 8 brand new players, but I did this intentionally. All 9 of us are longtime friends and I wanted to give them an epic game, with a casual approach. I have 9 players because on any given week I'll get 4-5 who show (sometimes a full house which is fun too) so as long as I have 4 players, I run the session. I hand-wave away members who aren't there, and we catch everyone up with recaps before each game so people who miss sessions can still follow the story.
Assuming then that I have my players knowing their characters and the platforms (duh, not knowing your platform or character will kill pacing, no need to harp more on that), whats left is adventure/gameplay pacing. For me its a matter of how important is this area/conversation to the overall story, balanced against how much players are engaging with it. I think of places/"scenes" as either small-contributors to the story/adventure, or large-contributors.
They're getting ready to finish the LMOP arc of the campaign, so I'll use some of those sessions as examples since its an adventure most people are familiar with:
Phandalin (the town itself) is a "small" contributor to me. By this I mean its a "walk around the town and talk to some NPCs to get leads/general info"
Ideally in 1 session they can arrive in town, find a room, chat to NPCs, get the info they need, and end the session with a small brawl against 2-3 redbrands.
If the players really like the NPCs and are getting into it, maybe we end the session with the redbrands confronting them and start the next session with the actual brawl/fight.
Either way, a good "small-contributor" session is found, and explored generally in 1 session (again, we play 90 minute sessions)
The actual "deal with the red brands" (whether by fighting, social, or whatever means) is a "large" contributor.
It has decision points, its dynamic, and will likely have a bit of a dungeon crawl or at least multiple combat/social encounters in one session.
This would be something I expect to take at 2 sessions to fully resolve, ending with the players deciding where they would like to go next based on information they recieved earlier from NPCs in town or that they found during these 2 sessions
If the players are a bit slow or I'm getting too verbose, it might take 3. If this went to a 4th session something has gone terribly wrong.
In the end, it took 3 sessions because they got the whole town to rise up and support them in a rebellion, so it was a bit more involved.
By this measure they basically "completed" their initial Phandalin entrance in around 4 hours, which would be 1 "normal" session for many D&D groups. This feels about right to me for pacing.
The "Storm Tower" from Dragon of Icespire Peak is a "small" contributor, but it ended up taking my players 2 sessions.
This happened partly because they arrived at the tower about halfway through a session, but also because they really enjoyed the opportunity to do some underwater diving/exploring of the shipwrecks, so I embelished that for them as they were heavily engaging with it
They used the second half of 1 session to get the info/begin exploration, then used the second session to have some combat, chat with the banshee/crab, and do some underwater exploration.
Overall then the "small" location still took about 90 minutes worth of time to explore and "finish"
This would make it about half of a normal 4 hour session, which feels good. The rest of the time could be used to regroup, head back to town, or move on to the next "small" destination if we played 4 hour games.
Thundertree from LMOP to me was a "large" contributor.
It is a larger scale area that isn't just a "pass through" (I changed Reidoth a bit, and one of my PCs has a beef with Dragons and Dragon Cultists) so it had the potential to be an important moment within the story, plus it was my PCs first time seeing a dragon in D&D so cmon, it has to be more than just a "oh thats neat" moment!
This location ended up taking 3 sessions which overall felt "right"
1 to meet reidoth, chat with him, explore some buildings, and fight some small skirmishes with dust zombies and spiders
1 to find/talk/fight the cultists, and approach the dragons tower
1 to resolve the social/fight with the dragon, and talk again with reidoth. The session ended with the decision to head to the Cragmaw castle.
Looking at this, the group probably could have experienced all Thundertree has to offer in a single 4 hour gameplay, which again seems to make sense for me pacing wise.
Examples are great and all, but the big question then is HOW do we as DM's control/influence pacing. For me its player engagement/importance to the story. If the players are engaging then fantastic, I'll usually let it keep going. That said, sometimes players are engaging TOO much (thinking everything is a trap, thinking every NPC needs 10 minutes of interrogation etc) and at these times its about using good narration/short clear "dialogue" from NPCs to convey that this has run its course, and there is no other info or benefit to be gleaned here. This then is balanced against story importance, and DM fun (because at some point every DM has been sitting there, pulling their hair out, wanting a dialogue to end or the party to just GO already, and the DM having fun is important too).
"Professor Dungeonmaster" of the Dungeon Craft youtube channel has a video that I think actually really helps when considering pacing. He labels it as "ways to improve narration" but honestly it absolutely deals with pacing and how to steer players to the important moments of a particular session. In the video he talks about 3 concepts: 1 - paint the picture, 2- move the camera, and 3 - lead the players. I have found points 2 and 3 to be MASSIVELY helpful in "unsticking" slow moving sessions so I recommend giving the video a peek:
It varies pretty wildly. My group loves to roleplay, and sometimes will spend 1-2 hours having a series of heart to hearts, campfire discussions, or debating an in character issue the party faces.
There's times we've gotten through like 2 NPC roleplay scenes, an investigation scene, some exploration and two combats in four hours, but that's about as much as we get done with 6 people.
Last night they traveled to a site to speak with a new NPC, circled back to investigate an abandoned village, went back to the NPC, then left to go take down the local BBEG to end the story arc, no combat, but they spent about an hour during the long rest having conversations and running their own scenes in character.
For pacing purposes, how much does your particular group get done per session? What makes you as DM say “holy shit, you guys got a lot done this session” or conversely, “the party is lagging”?
So we can skip to the good part, can we please take as a basic assumption that yes, all groups are different, yes, all DM’s are different, yes yes, there are combat-heavy modules, rp-heavy modules, and exploration-heavy modules and that changes things, sure, some players are good role players, some more experienced than others, yes, yes, all excellent points and the real answer is truly “it depends”.
Let’s skip all that, please?
Tell me about your group, what kind of campaign you’re running, what kind of focus it has (combat/rp/exploration), length of sessions, and what gets done in a typical session.
Why do I ask? I’m running an rp-heavy Strahd (albeit with a lot of homebrew in it) and I’d like to get a sense of how others are pacing their games- especially long campaigns.
So my group of five is made of a mix of quite experienced, mildly experienced, and one new player. Our Strahd sessions are 3 hours long, we play weekly on R20 by Discord video session, and I’d say the breakdown is more or less 45/35/20 between rp/exploring/combat. So far the pace has been as follows, by session:
Tonight is 7, and I see my party getting through most, if not all, of the Village encounters (I’ve got a big wolf encounter planned at the church), with the next session involving a random combat encounter as they head west, a visit with Madam Eva and the famous tarokka reading, a deadly chase encounter as they come through the gates of Vallaki, and a level up to 4. 8 sessions from level 1 to 4, starting with a bobo dungeon crawl level and ending in Vallaki. Players seem pleased with pace, but that notwithstanding, thoughts on pace appreciated.
Generally the pace sets itself. In my first session, the group went to a village, spoke to people in the inn, got the quest from the elders, travelled, fought some bugbears who tried to mug them ~(mugbears?)~ , found a wagon (with no horse), looted it, then found an anchor in the mountains descending from the clouds. It seemed like they got a lot done. Second session had them explore the hsip, kill the crew (accidentally) , meet the captain, and also travel to a demiplane where the ship sails an endless sea. Also felt like good progress. Third session saw them sail the ship to an island, then go into a cave, argue about whether it was safe to rest in the cave, get ambushed whilst resting in the cave, then leave the cave to rest. Fourth session had them clear out the cave, and return to outside to rest again. Those two felt like they went at half the speed of the first two, but none of them have felt like the players are going too fast or too slow.
I guess that I would consider it "too slow" if the session was supposed to be progress heavy and the players did nothing but roleplay and mimble around. I'd consider it slow if the players did nothing but explore the woods when they needed to talk to people in town to progress the plot. I'd consider it slow if the players were "ready" to go to the dungeon but instead insist on talking to everyone in town to find out what they know.
But all of these become moot because I, the DM, know what there is for the players to do, and the players do not. I know they will gai nnothing from talking to every farmer - but they don't, and if that's what they want to do, and they enjoy doing it (IE, no-one is making them do it) then it's going at the right pace. Though I can attest to the sadness when you've planned loads, and only the first bit comes up because the players aren't moving at the pace your imagination is!
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I think if I had to narrow it down to a basic template of a "Busy session" It would be for them to:
1. Learn of a "quest"
2. Create a plan
3. Get to location
4. Resolve the plan
all in one session.
Slow would be getting about half of those done in a session lol
Our groups are playing homebrewed world stuff so nothing to compare to, really. Our progress varies GREATLY depending on what we're up to. Investigating and traveling, we seem to run into TONS of side track things, many of which DO draw us in and cost us a fair bit of time. We lost an entire city due to our distracted travel, so we have (for the most part) tried to ignore the side stuff for now.
Most recently, we were about to get ready to head off and find the state of one of our player's people. He is a Dwarf and his family/clan had to abandon their home (large caverns) many years ago due to some unspecified event. The day we were getting ready, this same Dwarf, who has a habit of impulsive actions, ran into a repeat troublemaker our DM has us run into periodically, and BAM, Deck of Many Things is presented......Naturally, Dwarf grabs a card.....POP No Dwarf. He was transported to a remote plane and inprosioned. SO, now we have been transported to that plane (My Goddess sent us there to retrieve him, since she feels he is important) to try and get him back. The player is using an alt he has, whom we met upon arriving in the plane, and he is going to help us, because he has no other plans or ideas for how to get home.
So, if we are in constant fights, we roll through pretty well, as our group is a damage machine, so we roll over stuff easier than our DM expects many times, but anything else, we are, as a group, all goofballs, so we piss away a lot of time doing silly stuff. Not usually too bad, but at times, frustrating, especially this incident, as we were on a timeline, to intercept a caravan on the way to his old home. I expect we may well miss that now. On the up side, the Dwarf will lose the most, because this caravan was supposed to be his path to a wonderful axe he was drooling over, lol. Impulse killed his dream.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Ok we just ran session 31 of a home-brew game 8 players, our sessions run 7/7:30 -10ish. The party are level 4 (levelled up session 28) with probably another 5-6 sessions for level 5.
In terms of what they have done and pacing, I run an open world game and as long as the party are having fun i am happy leaving things to run as they will. Last session the party spent the first hour discussing what they where going to do next, I told them they had used about 4-5 hours of game time having that conversation, when it felt they where going in circles I asked them what they where doing next to move them on. They went to another Inn, didn't achieve a great lot, mainly because they asked all the wrong questions of the wrong person. On the way back I gave them a big not very subtle hint of a thing they could do without explaining why (found themselves walking past the brothel the Satyr was raised in/works at) Minotaur decided to go in and "see if her mother was free for a session" mother had been replaced by a changling while the BBEG teleports her to the Aboleth who is enslaving people. So this then gives the party a reason to go trying to find out where she is (they don't know about the aboleth).
The previous 3 sessions was the party moving through the sewers hunting for the reason for people going missing, they had a total of 7 fights during this time, with rats, carrion crawlers, and every type of ooze in the books :). They also shut down a portal to the Abyss (where oozes where coming from) and did the usual investigation, looting and general stuff that characters do. That took 3 sessions.
In general I find that not having a linear route to take slows play down but I run an open world campaign where the characters are free to investigate what they want how they want, currently they have a series of clues and information some of it they understand, some of it they dont. some of it they don't know is a clue or information yet :).
TLDR Version: Weekly 90 minute games. Pacing is done by weighing what I call small vs large "contributors" to the adventure. Small contributors I aim for 1 session (with a few shorter social/combat/exploration encounters), large contributors take 2-3, maybe even 4 sessions for very involved situations (with long social/exploration moments, and larger combats)
Long response: Before I even speak about pacing and how I approach it, campaign/group context are below because as OP stated, it heavily informs how pacing is done, and what an expectation for a well paced session even is.
I realize its a bit of a large endeavor for 8 brand new players, but I did this intentionally. All 9 of us are longtime friends and I wanted to give them an epic game, with a casual approach. I have 9 players because on any given week I'll get 4-5 who show (sometimes a full house which is fun too) so as long as I have 4 players, I run the session. I hand-wave away members who aren't there, and we catch everyone up with recaps before each game so people who miss sessions can still follow the story.
Assuming then that I have my players knowing their characters and the platforms (duh, not knowing your platform or character will kill pacing, no need to harp more on that), whats left is adventure/gameplay pacing. For me its a matter of how important is this area/conversation to the overall story, balanced against how much players are engaging with it. I think of places/"scenes" as either small-contributors to the story/adventure, or large-contributors.
They're getting ready to finish the LMOP arc of the campaign, so I'll use some of those sessions as examples since its an adventure most people are familiar with:
By this measure they basically "completed" their initial Phandalin entrance in around 4 hours, which would be 1 "normal" session for many D&D groups. This feels about right to me for pacing.
Looking at this, the group probably could have experienced all Thundertree has to offer in a single 4 hour gameplay, which again seems to make sense for me pacing wise.
Examples are great and all, but the big question then is HOW do we as DM's control/influence pacing. For me its player engagement/importance to the story. If the players are engaging then fantastic, I'll usually let it keep going. That said, sometimes players are engaging TOO much (thinking everything is a trap, thinking every NPC needs 10 minutes of interrogation etc) and at these times its about using good narration/short clear "dialogue" from NPCs to convey that this has run its course, and there is no other info or benefit to be gleaned here. This then is balanced against story importance, and DM fun (because at some point every DM has been sitting there, pulling their hair out, wanting a dialogue to end or the party to just GO already, and the DM having fun is important too).
"Professor Dungeonmaster" of the Dungeon Craft youtube channel has a video that I think actually really helps when considering pacing. He labels it as "ways to improve narration" but honestly it absolutely deals with pacing and how to steer players to the important moments of a particular session. In the video he talks about 3 concepts: 1 - paint the picture, 2- move the camera, and 3 - lead the players. I have found points 2 and 3 to be MASSIVELY helpful in "unsticking" slow moving sessions so I recommend giving the video a peek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA5DSjzvtek (skip to 1:45 to get to the first of the 3 points)
It varies pretty wildly. My group loves to roleplay, and sometimes will spend 1-2 hours having a series of heart to hearts, campfire discussions, or debating an in character issue the party faces.
There's times we've gotten through like 2 NPC roleplay scenes, an investigation scene, some exploration and two combats in four hours, but that's about as much as we get done with 6 people.
Last night they traveled to a site to speak with a new NPC, circled back to investigate an abandoned village, went back to the NPC, then left to go take down the local BBEG to end the story arc, no combat, but they spent about an hour during the long rest having conversations and running their own scenes in character.