Thursday, April 24, 2014

Sword and sorcery note on game time

I believe the average game time for most RPGs is in the are of 4 hours of play per session. I don't know if this true or not. My feeling for a sword and sorcery game is that the 'adventure sessions' should run more like short stories and not chapters an book. An adventure should be short, perhaps and hour to two hours.

I like this idea. Sword and sorcery is quick and to the point and action oriented. It is better suited to the short story and novella rather than novel or the dreaded 3 in a series model. Running a quick paced action oriented adventure would be different than running an adventure in which exploration and treasure finding are the key elements.

Shorter.

Of course one could run as many adventures back to back as one desired, making a session as long as one wanted. Just thinking to those days of yore in our youth when we would run 12 hours of games or more, we could have done six or more adventures in one night. A whole book of adventure so to speak.
Each edition of the game and other role playing games allow for differing amounts of activities to occur in this time frame. Those with more crunching to undertake tasks are, generally, more restrictive in 'how much can occur' in that four hours than those with low crunch. So, to keep the game in under two hours and include some combat and other activities, a low crunch game is necessary.
And, did you know there was a Gore movie.


3 comments:

Chris D. said...

Gor is on netflix streaming. Never saw it, maybe I'll have to watch it this weekend. With Jack Palance and Oliver Reed, it can't be too bad can it?

Anonymous said...

I knew there was a Gor movie. It was the one fantasy movie in the $1 rental store way back in grad school that I didn't bother with. I'd had a very small sampling of the novels (the first few chapters of one I'd checked out of a public library) as a teen, which I didn't like. I was even more freaked out by the PG rating of the movie. The two combined were enough to keep me from renting it.

What I didn't know is that there's a Gor II movie.

--Jeff

Morty said...

If you watch it as part of the MST 3000 series- it's doable. Otherwise, not so much

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