How tightly are you choreographing your timing?

[Eric J. Boyd]

So in putting my entry together, I've been pondering just how long various aspects of a game can take and how to best adhere to the time limitations.

The resolution of each hazard in my entry will take no more than around 3-5 minutes (3 minutes or less of narration plus die rolling and such). Then there's scene framing, other roleplaying inserted between hazards, kibbitzing, etc. So I'm playing around with how many hazards there should be in the game to fill 2 sessions of 3 hours each (the first session is for character and setting creation, including some of the hazards). I'm thinking of having enough hazards for around 4 hours of that time. Any thoughts on whether having this amount of the available time set up is too much or too little?

More broadly, if you're not using a clock to rigorously time the session, how are you ensuring that your entry stays close to your chosen time limits?

[Mark Bravura]

Just a thought- how about a pre-programmed music "soundtrack" in the background- perhaps with hourly and half-hourly sound bytes?

M.B.

[Joshua BishopRoby]

I was considering blocking out what happens each minute of each session, and maybe throwing in a stopwatch, but I actually don't think I'll need to in my alpha entry -- the gameplay will lend itself to moving quickly (you can't speak until you play a card, then you say what you do, then somebody else can't speak till they play a card...). Whether or not I'll define the time tightly in my beta-entry remains to be seen.

[Doug Ruff]

I don't have a fixed number of 'rounds' of play for my game, so when the 2-hour limit comes up, it's time to stop and count up the scores (there will be some sort of score.)

Not sure yet whether the round in progress will continue, after the 2 hours is up. It will be impossible for a round to last more than 10 minutes (each round is also timed) so probably it will.

[kenjib]

[Hobert Roward]

For hegemony, I'm trying to keep mine loose, and just making the play style such that it naturally resolves itself in the time allotted (1 hour, 10 times). The second or third sessions may have this happen with slight encouragement to "wrap up each of the three parts of the session in 20 minutes", but in the first session so much is going on that I may require a time device to keep things REALLY moving. But sessions two or three (probably four, too) could flow without the timer, I think.

If I were to do a second game on one of the other time limits, I'd definitely do it so that little "strict timer adherence" is required, rather planning it out so that it almost naturally ends in the time allotted.

Or, at least, that's what I'd aim for.

[JenniferS]

Am I counting off the minutes to an hour? No. I'm getting a general idea of how long the game SHOULD take. With Mississippi Steel, I've learned actually that the real race is 25 laps at 25 minutes. I figure it'll take players at one action each a round about 30 minutes to get through the actual race, leaving time before and after the race to do interactions.

Now, I can see a lot of people doing three races at a time (3 hours of gaming over all), so the GM will have to have an idea of what's going to be happening between races about 3 races ahead.

[rpoppe]

I'm not worrying about exact times - I've run the numbers and tried it out a bit with an eye toward getting each of the ten scenes around ten minutes, and that leaves ten minutes buffer on either end. But even then, two hours will be tight if anyone is long winded or prone to distraction. To address this, since Terra Nova has a hard end-point anyway, I've included a rule that says the game absolutely ends, no argument, at one hour fifty minutes, regardless of what scene you are in. Given the subject matter this will work fine.

[spaceanddeath]

In Crime & Punishment, I've got things on a schedule. Most of the rounds for the writers have time limits - or deadlines. In the second half of the session, the Actors have an in the fiction director - Captain Steele - that timekeeps and pushes the actors to say on schedule. I've suckered a couple of my friends to come in for a playtest on Wednesday, so I guess I'll know if I've been too ambitious after that.

[Antti-san]