Two-Hour Adventures: what do you think?

When the Adventure League began producing 2-hour long adventures, I thought to myself "What? Why?" But with a bit more time, the idea and brilliance of the idea became apparent. Now let me explain where I come from and the LONG trip I that made me accept 4h as a "standard" time slot.

Some of you may remember my first convention (I told the story of it in this post from 2012). It was in Amiens, France. Now one thing to remember, if you don't already know, is that French people love to talk, and talking is an important part of role-playing. I love to talk quite a lot myself. The owners of the international language of diplomacy are, well, diplomats. Game slots are usually between five and six hours long. And you don't sit back and wait for things to happen during that time. There is a lot to do and to be done.

Then I moved to Ireland where they had three-hour slots. Ouch. Cut the time in half! That was a very tough adaptation as it seemed to me I was barely out of the introduction that the slot was over. On the plus side, I got to play many different RPGs while there. It did not help my wallet however, as I bought too many other games and products, but it was worth it in the end.

Then I returned to Montreal and adapted to the Living Greyhawk 4-hour slots. A little better than the three hours, shorter than the six hours. For the last thirteen years, I have been writing adventure targeting that duration.

After I attended Denver Comicon in 2012, I realized that the 4-hour time slot was too long to provide a taste of the campaign without taking the full slot. At the time, all my PFS adventures were full slots and we had problems with people up and leaving in the middle.

The next year, I returned with two two-hour adventures: Spreading the Word and Lady of the House. Both those adventures got great reviews and their short run-time allowed me to run them quite a few times. They were fun, quick and showcased the setting.

Then as I worked on Saggakar, I began to focus once again on four hour and the short intros went into the "I'll do then later" column as I focused on setting up the world and its mythology...

I did play a few 5e Adventure League adventures that ran for two hours and they felt like a burst of quick excitement. My mind meandered back to those short adventures I wrote for Denver ComicCon 2013 in mind.

Then the last couple of times I tried to organize games, I received a few comments about slots being "too long" and "going on too late".

I spoke about it to Loren to get his thoughts... see what he thought about the idea. And then I posted a poll to get your thoughts on our Facebook Group. Click here to get to the poll. So now I turn the question over to you.

Would be able/available/willing to play more online (and F2F) if we moved to a 2-hour game format?

JP