Hang around the RPG space long enough and you’re going to hear an old chestnut that goes something like “Scheduling is the real BBEG” of the campaign, referring to the inescapable fact of universal geometry that identifying and reserving a time to play your favorite game is as achievable as faster-than-light travel and the perpetual motion machine.
The problem with this joke is that it doesn’t go far enough and actually ignores the we’ve actually stepped through the mists and found ourselves face-to-face-and-another-face with the dreaded Dual Boss Fight.
Let me save us all a thousand words:
These freakin’ guys!
Don’t get it twisted, I’m never going to tell you that scheduling game-time is easy or less-hard than anything else in our hobby. All I’m saying is that we have a second foe, often overlooked, that has a nasty habit of sneaking up and slicing our hopes and dreams into tiny ribbons: “Estimating”.
This isn’t really news to folks in project management spaces (I’ve gotten questions about time-and-effort estimating in job interviews) but it’s not something that anyone would expect to turn up in games.
So, why does this matter?
Well, our universe has one thing in unquestionable abundance: scarcity. We get a limited amount of time, and there are a lot of interests competing to gobble up as much of that time as they can. Having a sense of how long - how much time - a campaign, session, scene, or encounter is going to take helps us understand what we’re expecting of and asking from ourselves and each other, which helps us be more sensitive and responsive to the needs of our fellow players.
It’s like a thousand Ray of Frost when all you need is a Fireball, don’t you think.
Open-ended commitments are (allow me to be kind and generous) fragile. Things come up, attention drifts, details get forgotten. The next thing you know you’re 87 sessions deep, hoping to hit 4th level, and players are being laughed out of their estate planner’s offices for bequeathing their character sheet.
There is but one way, from the middle of this wood, for us to return to the direct path…
A Budget Session Plan is a Moral Document
That’s a popular phrase in the political world and I can’t find an original attribution, so let’s just assume it’s been invoked by any number of people of variable personal qualities and forgive it for the questionable company it keeps.
We make budgets to plan how to distribute our scarce resources, presumably allocating more resources to the things we value more highly. If you put more time and money into “candy” than you do “housing” then you probably really enjoy candy and treasure your time with it, at least more than you feel the need for more housing.
So we make a budget of our weekly hours, granting so many to work, so many to sleep, and so many to whatever we will. Among those for “whatever we will” we say “D&D shall be played Friday nights from 1900 to 2230” (I’ve heard it, people are out here saying it, promise) and thereby indicate that D&D is worth roughly 8.75% of our too-limited leisure time.
The D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide pretty famously tells us about the Three Pillars of Dungeons & Dragons: Social, Exploration, and Combat. That concept is a budget: 1/3rd for each Pillar sums up to a full game, each Pillar in perfect balance against the others. But maybe your group never met a goblin they weren’t ready to smash, so you dial back the Social to favor Combat because that’s what matters to the people who matter.
I and my Siblingage in the Mastery of Dungeons make a budget of the content of a game session. We shift and slide our abacus beads from one side to the other, weighing this lengthy discourse with the ruling council against bouts of “Pin the Tail on the Dracolich” against delving for gold in a dwarven mine.
The elf-eyed among us may see the problem on the horizon. We can’t plan how much to allocate to something without knowing what it costs. It doesn’t matter if we dedicate one-half of our three game-time hours to a 4-hour combat because that one encounter blew the entire session budget!
How Long is this Going to Take?
It was lurking this whole time, and now it has sprung its trap: Estimating has entered the chat.
How do we know how long something’s going to take? Is there a formula to calculate it? Are we all just guessing? It depends. No. Yep.
I took to the interwebz (the kids still say this, bet) to find out. Search results were, um, unhelpful. People either threw up their hands and called it an intractable problem or assigned a-contextual, meaningless durations to different events. Unsurprisingly, they granted combat a lot of time and minimized everything else, even denigrating social role-play in the process. To be fair, I got almost exactly what I expected from “the front page of the internet.”
One suggestion I saw was pretty broad and general: 45 minutes per scene. The simplicity here is attractive, and I like the equal weighting for scenes of all types. It’s not advice that’s going to work well for dialing in anything very precisely (once had a 3rd level fight against a squad of kobolds run for hours), but it will probably average out over the whole session with this scene being 20 minutes and that scene running 60. What I like most about this is that it centers the idea of “scenes” - which I find to be under-represented.
Desperate for answers, I turned to the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I think we’re all familiar with the DMG14 and how much of a mess it is, so I left it on the shelf and checked Chapter 1 of the 2024 book. The spine creaked open and pages kept trying to return to their natural state, fleeing the light of day. But there was something useful! And easy to find! Right there on page 8 - impossibly, inaccessibly tucked away in the single-digit pagenumbers and laid out in large, friendly letters: “The One-Hour Guideline”. I’ll spare you having to make Odyssean quest and summarize: in one hour of play, a party should be able to do about three things. And then, inconceivably, it provides examples of the sorts of things to expect to take, in triform, roughly one hour. Fascinating, and all the more for being so unexpected.
Unfortunately, I have surfaced three incompatible, contradictory estimation strategies that can’t even agree on the particulars. So, yeah, “it depends”. Final answer.
Oh, What To Do?
Here’s what I’m going to do, and what I encourage you to do: pick one and try it out. Tell us your results. I don’t really care which one it is or what the results are, we need data baby! Maybe it’s “three things per hour”, maybe it’s “45 minutes a scene”.
Make a note on your session plan, right at the top, of what your estimation strategy was. Don’t stress over this, no paragraphs or bulleted lists, just some little note of tasks-over-time - or whatever format makes sense for you - and run your session like normal. Give it smiley/thumbs-up/gold-dragon if you were (mostly) on-time, a cry-face if the estimate wasn’t long enough, an angry face if it estimated too much time and your session wrapped early (maybe a sleepy face, since that’s how Sara uses the refunded time).
Don’t have a session plan? No worries, they’re a communist plot anyway. NO! You need to have a session plan, every time. The only exceptions is for ad hoc pickup games that you didn’t intend to run in the first place.
I’m going to write more about session plans some other time. But you knew that already. Of course you did. You know what I do.