A couple of weeks back I saw a tweet where some-one was going to be running a D&D session at work in their lunch hour.

It struck me at the time what a challenge that would be. I thought a two hour session was tough.

Running a session of D&D with tight time constraints such as an hour or two is difficult.

At a high level (as far as I can tell with the limited experience I have) a session is best described as a series of encounters. These encounters can be either social or combat driven. Naturally these are broad catch all descriptions, and that they can be broken down into finer more descriptive descriptions such as chases, interrogations etc.

I’ve found that in my two hour sessions that they are roughly four or five encounters of some kind, with the combat encounter being the main showpiece of the session. It’s something I’m challenging myself to shake up. I don’t want my sessions to be formulaic and predictable. But I do need to make sure that whatever the number of sessions and combination of, that the mix is roughly even. So that the session allows each player to experience the part of D&D they enjoy, and hopefully characters to shine.

How that person is running an hour session I have no idea. I can’t see it having more than two or three encounters in a session. Possibly if they are hacking through a dungeon just a single encounter.

So far I have found that when running a session as a DM you have to be very economic with descriptions and the scale of encounters, especially combat. It’s a tight line to walk. One I don’t feel I have the hang of yet.

There are many tools, and frameworks out there to help a DM plan a session. One I think that helps me a lot so far in the planning is the 5 Room Dungeon. The nice thing is that the 5 Room Dungeon doesn’t have to be just for a dungeon. Each “room” of the dungeon is an encounter which can be anything or anywhere. So easy to use as a framework for planning, and it matches up with what I find fits into a session for my group.

I think if I had that time restriction of an hour I’d be tempted to plan an adventure as normal and just see how much can be done each session. There wouldn’t be a nice clean beginning and end, just finishing at a convenient point. Which let’s face it is every session really. I think the important thing is to try and avoid a session feeling rushed because of the time constraints of it being a lunch break.

Then last night WotC on their D&D YouTube channel released a video of a panel from the 2019 PAX Unplugged. This panel was basically a promotional panel for an up and coming live stream series called T.O.R.C.H. Which is a live play game of D&D using the latest D&D products.

The DM for these shows will be the legendary DM and WotC D&D chief writer/designer Chris Perkins. During the panel they were asked how long these live stream sessions would be. To which Chris Perkins responded one hour and forty five minutes.

That got me really interested in watching this series when it is shared on YouTube (I’m not a Twitch person). I’m not interested in the performances of the players. For that is what most of these sorts of things are performances for the camera and home audience. I am interested in what Chris Perkins will be doing as a DM. Particularly how he structures the sessions, story/plot progression, pacing etc.

Once I’ve seen a couple of sessions, during which I’ll be making notes. I’ll write another post following up this one with my observations and hopefully what I can use in my own games.