Why you should play DnD less

What does an average DnD session look like?

A bunch of friends sit around a table, surrounded by books, paper, dice, laptops, drinks and snacks. More likely at the moment, a bunch of friends sit at their computers, surrounded by paper, dice, books, drinks and snacks, playing on Discord or Zoom. They roll dice, they joke, they eat snacks, they have fun. One of the friends is much more stressed as the frantically look up rules, monster stat blocks or random names for NPCS, try to keep the story moving forward while giving the other players space to roleplay and express themselves, reference their notes so that they can drop story hints or plot hooks into different scenes, all while suffering anxiety over whether the rest of the players are having fun.

Typically, that goes on for about 4 hours, once a week.

That is a hell of a long time!

I find it really interesting that the standard length of time for a DnD session is this long. It is commendable that so many people have such dedication to their hobby that they are happy to dedicate so many hours at a time to it, often multiple times a week, especially given how many other demands on our attention there are in the modern world.

But someone please think of the poor DMs.

Planning for a 4 hour long session is very time consuming, and running a session for that long is exhausting. You cannot possibly hope to predict with any certainty what you players will do over a 4 hour long sessions, so you either have to leave a large portion of the session up for improv, or you have to plan an incredible amount of content, knowing that much of it will not actually come up, or you have to railroad your players so that their choices are very limited. Usually what happens is a mix of all three.

I think all three of these are generally bad,, either for the DM, or for the game as a whole. Leaving lots of the session to improv is stressful and can lead to sessions meandering, or even going down a path that the DM will later realise is not as interesting, or runs counter to their longer term plans. Planning lots of content means lots of work for the DM, and can mean that players get less input into the story than is ideal, and railroading players likewise leads to less player agency.

So, here’s my solution. Play less DnD.

I know, it’s radical for a DnD blog to tell you to play less DnD, but I have been running weekly 2.5-3 hour sessions for several months now and it has definitely reduced my planning time, increased the amount of fun I (and I think my players) have, and meant that I am much more able to let the players lead the campaign.

Here’s three reasons why I think shorter sessions lead to better DnD.

1. Be led by the players

This is the most important reason for playing shorter sessions. Planning DnD should be cyclical. You plan various story hooks, offers for character development, opportunities for roleplaying with NPCs and challenges for the players to overcome. The players respond to these however they like. This may get resolved during the session, but, especially when you only play for a few hours, it’s more likely that you will get some of the way down that story thread, then run out of time. Then your planning for the next session is based on how the players reacted to your initial offerings.

This means that you are constantly in dialogue with your players. You have time to go away and think about how their plan might play out. How NPCs might react to their decisions. How the world is going to change as a result of what the players did. You come back next week with these answers figured out, then the players respond to that and you start the process again.

That sounds, at least to me, like a much more interesting way of planning DnD than sitting down and wondering how you’re going to fill a 4 hour session!

1. Sessions have better pacing

We’ve all been there. The session is just entering hour four. Everyone is tired. It’s probably pretty late at night. This fight has been going on for an hour, but only 24 seconds of in-game time has actually passed. The DM is getting tired, or is worrying that once this fight is over, their notes are blank, you think one of the players might be asleep.

Ok, I think I’m going a bit far. Most DnD isn’t like that. Most of the time it’s fun. But it can be slow. Players love to argue back and forth over decisions for far longer than they need to. Snack breaks, drinks breaks, toilet breaks. An awful lot of time spent around the gaming table is spent not actually gaming. This is fine, but it can lead to the game progressing very slowly, which I find quite frustrating as both a player and a DM.

If you know you are only playing for 2.5-3 hours, that pacing sharpens a little bit. It’s easier as a DM to push players into making decisions, and once people start flagging, you can call time without anyone feeling like they’ve missed out on game time. I’ve found in shorter sessions that there is still plenty of time for table talk, joking around and for people to look up how rules work, but that I’m more incentivised to push the pace a little, to get through that little bit more of what I planned.

I find I’m more likely to finish the session before running out of material, whereas when running for 4 hours, I’m likely to run out of material before the session ends, meaning I’m more likely to let players procrastinate while I work out what happens next.

1. It’s better for the DM

Being a DM is hard. Running a game is stressful, planning a game is time consuming. The amount of effort everyone is bringing to the table in TTRPGs is very unbalanced. I’m not sure there are many other hobbies like it. In most other group hobbies, you either pay someone to do all the work for you, or the work is more evenly spread around the players. Having one of the players putting in plenty of hours outside the game, then having a more stressful time while playing, especially when it’s the same one every week, is not actually all that fair.

That’s not to say that I don’t love DMing. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t. But it’s just to highlight that as players, we need to remember to be thankful for all the (often largely unseen) work that a DM does. It’s also to remind DMs to be kind to ourselves. Don’t flog yourself to get 4 hours worth of game time every week planned if you don’t want to. Shaving 1-1.5 hours off the standard gaming session does not remove 25-33% of the planning time. It probably halves it.

I spend less time planning DnD since moving to shorter sessions, and I have more fun both planning and running the game. I think my players do as well. And I think we’re telling a better story because of it. It sounds like a win-win to me.