A few of my players moved away recently - one to St. Louis, and another to Chicago. (I'm right between them, in Bloomington, IL.)  Since they were both really wanting to game and didn't mind driving, I threw together a once-a-month Saturday game a few months back.  I got 2 of my regular weekly players involved, a new local player, and an old friend also currently from St. Louis.

We had our 3rd session yesterday.  Now, since we're only doing this game once a month, we've been doing pretty long sessions - about 6-8 hours, if I'm remembering right.  It's a combat-heavy, gonzo-style, everything-goes, plane-hopping, demon-slaying 3.5 romp, and it actually goes quite quickly.

Well, this Saturday my fiancee was down with her parents a few hours away, and you know what they say about those mice while the cats are away...

Anyway, folks started showing up at about 1:30 PM and we went until 1:30 AM.  I'm 32 now, and this is by far the longest game session I've had since I was 16 or 17.

Now, it was fun.  But holy crap was that exhausting, from a DM standpoint.  I mean, we had plenty of excellent beer (though I had to cut back on the Delirium Nocturnum).  We also had plenty of amazing brisket (seriously, the best I've ever had - brought by my old friend) and overall had an excellent time.  Sadly, I was useless on Sunday and didn't get much of anything done.  I had a headache and just mental fatigue...

So yeah.  I'm going to scale back to the 6-8 hour Saturday games.

-O

Thise were the days weren't they?
When I was in college in the early days of what is now the Saturday Night Group, we would play from 6P to 2A on a wednesday, in our friend's apartment which happened to be right above the building's boiler. The sessions were 8 hours of game in sub-tropical conditions around a small table every time and we still managed to get to our first class around 9AM.

I think if I tried that today, it'd kill me.

Yep, that sounds about right

-O

At university I'd regularly play 18 or 20 hour sessions.

Nowadays 20 hours of anything would probably result in a visit to hospital.

Through high school, most vacation days followed a simple pattern:

1. sleep until noon
2. shamble awake, eat something, call players
3. get together around 4 pm, begin gaming
4. finish gaming around 2 - 3 am, go to sleep
5. go to 1.

Being a card-carrying member of Ye Olde Farte Club now, there's no way in hell I'd do that again.  :pundit:

AS

Up until about 4 years ago, my main group always used to do a 24 hour rpg marathon at christmas and easter (basically, whenever we all got some decent time off work), but as we've gotten older and other commitments have come in, it slowly morphed to 20 hours, 16 hours and now it's been 3 years since we've done it at all.

Man, I really miss those all-nighters.  Wish I could still pull them off.

Yeah, when in HS we would get out after school on friday and play from the minute we all got there to about 1AM on sunday morning. We were eating pizza and drinking jolt quite a lot.

If I tried the same thing now, I'd fall asleep at midnight of the first night and wake up with gut rot.

I remember those long sessions well, looking back I think we were insane. Some times if our weekend sessions fell on a national holiday our weekend could very easily look like this.

Friday 19:00 game start. Saturday 02:00 game end.

Saturday 14:00 game start Sunday 04:00 game end.

Sunday 13:00 game start. Monday 09:00 game end.

We were mad I tell you mad.

There was a time I ran a campaign on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And I still had the energy to do other things.

The problem I have had for many years since stopping that is learning how to make shorter sessions run well. Because we have all noticed that we were used to filling air with irrelevant crap.

Wow, I can totally relate. A couple years ago, I ran a marathon D&D session. We started with a printed out PDF adventure from the WotC site. Everyone had fun so, hey, while ordering food, let's print out another one and do it again.

And again.

And again.

We played for maybe 10 or 12 hours straight, from 5 PM or so to 5 AM. The next day, I was a total zombie.

It was fantastic, glorious, and awesome, but I think I can do it maybe once a year, and only if I don't have to do much of anything the next day.

I've done weekend-long games as late as a few years ago (now, with skype, I game more regularly with the out-of-town crowd so it's less necessary to game with those guys).

We didn't do 20hrs straight--we knew we wouldn't make that. We started on Thursday (when the GM flew in--with characters pre-generated) and started playing. Did about 15-18 hours a day Friday and Saturday and then whatever it took to finish it up Sunday. That, plus maybe 4-5 on Thursday put us close to 50+ hrs of game with decent sleep/eating/whatever schedules (on 6hrs of sleep, we could do *some* socializing).

Anyway, it was fun. Maybe we'll do it again (as I said, Skype helps a lot).

-Marco

We used to have a standing rule:  THE GAME DOES NOT BEGIN BEFORE MIDNIGHT.

...

...

...*sigh*

Well, naturally, two of my players think we should go this long every time.  Of course, they're in their mid-twenties and were talking about going out to meet up with some girls a third player knew from Myspace after the game, so they're hardly objective.

For what it's worth, I'm running Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which is one of the newer WotC adventures.  It really makes only marginal sense and it's basically a thin storyline to bring the characters from one fun combat encounter to another.  (The characters' 'boss' is pretty fun to play, though.)

They started the session almost getting wiped out by a CR9 creature (and they're 9th level).  They triumphed, but barely.

The second encounter was vs. a CR13 Ironmaw,

Spoiler

hidden inside a giant tree and attacking with 60'-long tentacles.

They managed to retreat without losing anyone, but barely.

The rest of the session was them kicking ass, until they made a tactical error and got holes poked in their bags of holding by a wandering drow patrol who wondered why the heck bags were hanging in the middle of a web tunnel.  (The PCs were in a rope trick spell, but of course couldn't bring the bags of holding inside.  So they hung them outside.  I mean, what's the worst that could happen, right?!)

-O