Doing more with less time.

There’s a tension when it comes to plotting the timeslot a game is best designed to be played in. On the one hand, my guess is the majority of players across the entire RPG hobby devote most of their attention to multi-session play. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the lion’s share of actual games happen at conventions, meetups, and other one-off gaming situations, owing to sheer volume. The spikes for things like D&D are awfully high, but never overlook that the Long Tail is long.

Few games truly excel in both spaces, so focusing on one or the other is usually the right move. Selfishly, though, I wish more longform games included optional accommodations for shorter play within the primary game text. (By which I mean, present in the rules corpus as published or released, rather than bodged together later and perhaps tossed out online.)

The bulk of the games I get to play are one-shots — whether through Ready, Set, Game; or major convention lineups similar to Games on Demand; or smaller events like the Indie Hurricane at GameStorm & other cons organized by Games to Gather. So yes, the desire for more games I can play, and run, is a self-serving one. It’s hard not to feel like it might be in the better interests of many games though, too.

The reality is that most would-be gamers don’t have the ability to commit to a regular campaign in a single system, in the manner that’s the assumed default for traditional RPGs. The player who misses every other session is a trope that’s as venerable as the concept of the multi-year campaign arc. So why do so many games continue to focus on the narrow group of gamers for whom free time is in surplus? It certainly doesn’t lend a game any advantages in trying to get the attention of and access to a new player.

The one-shot storyline is D&D’s answer to the dilemma, along with most other makers of traditional RPGs. Which makes sense for the challenges faced by that group of games — hastening advancement so that players experience more of the system would only bog things down further, so instead the compression effort goes into the narrative arc that play produces as its side effect. Create a compelling beginning-to-end scenario in that space for players to move through, and hope that it creates a good experience in a short time.

For most indie games, that’s a solution that either A) makes no sense, as everything in the narrative is created in the moment through play, or B) is assumed from the beginning, since the game scenario from the outset is a highly structured situation that the players will play within. Category A is true for a lot of storygames and indie RPGs, whereas category B holds for some games like that too, but is even more true of the larps of the American freeform & jeepform variety that I’ve had the chance to sample.

Category B works wonders for games where that kind of narrative structure is an assumed part of the experience, but it’s death for games that leave those assumptions up to the playgroup to decide at the table. In my experience, what works best for games in category A is the presentation of character, setting, and story offerings that the players may or may not choose to incorporate. Apocalypse World and its host of derivatives include it on playsheets as part of character creation. Kingdom contains its story seeds and prompting questions. In a Wicked Age has the four different oracles, Durance its system of planet creation, Serpent’s Tooth has the options within all the various kings, Fiasco has both its playset lists and insta-setups, etc.

For games running in a limited timeframe, that kind of accommodation is one of the best gifts a designer can give a facilitator. As open-ended as any game might be, it never hurts to have a list of ideas players can draw from. Blank paper induces creativity in some, paralysis in others.

Including that kindness within a game’s text also doesn’t really alter the play experience, which is both helpful and not quite helpful enough — it falls more into the grouping of “advice for the reader” and not an actual tweak for a game’s mechanics. Some games are in desperate need of this! Not all, of course: trying to rush & cram the full experience of Grey Ranks into a single 4-hour slot would be a waste of effort and the ruining of a great game, which is just one of several examples that leap to mind.

But to every game designer who’s thought to include a section on rules for faster play, or for shorter play, I say thank you. Squeezing a game to fit in limited time isn’t always the best way to play, but for a lot of us, it’s the only option we have.