If we sat down to play D&D and, 10 minutes in, had to call it a night, that’s not a session. If I sat at my desk and made a character, that’s not a session. And at some point in my gaming career I’m going to play a game that takes 30 seconds, and I suspect I’d still consider that to be one play.Īt any point on the time spectrum, the key is that meaningful gaming happens during the session. My sessions of The Beast are short, but not the shortest I’ve played: My free RPG The Thief can be played to its conclusion in under 5 minutes. I’d probably describe anything under 3 hours as a short session in conversation, and anything over 4 hours as a long session, but they’re all fundamentally sessions.įor me, only the last entry - the shortest - pushes up against the boundary of what I’d consider a play. 90 minutes, how long my online group plays.6 hours, which was about normal back in Utah.9 hours, when the weekly game ran really long.Most of my gaming over the past few years has fallen into six broad time slots, session-wise: Number three is fuzzier still, since any given roomful of gamers is reasonably unlikely to agree on a single definition of “roleplaying.” So let’s poke those two a bit. Number two is a bit fuzzier, since “crazy-short” is obviously a subjective measure. #1 isn’t too fuzzy, and really has no fringe: When the session ends, so does the unit of play. Where things get interesting is on the fringes and in the liminal spaces. And obviously Savage Worlds is a roleplaying game, so there we go. Even though the first session was twice as long as the second, the unit is the discrete time spent playing, regardless of length - provided it’s not crazy-short (which these sessions are not). So if I play a session of Savage Worlds ( paid link) that lasts four hours, and then play again a day later, but only for two hours, that’s two sessions. To count as a session of play, my current thinking is that it must: But it’s also fun to think about in the abstract - and my thinking has changed over the years. On a concrete level, I log all my plays on RPGGeek, so I have to think frequently about whether some gaming thing I did counts for those purposes. Lately I’ve been playing The Beast, a single-player epistolary RPG that takes place over the course of sessions, each lasting 5-15 minutes, and it’s gotten me thinking more closely about units of play and the nature of RPGs in general. With RPGs, what counts as one unit of play? Or, basically, what is a single session of a roleplaying game?
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