This is from Greg Tito, one of the ACKS writers, posted over at the Autarch company blog.

Link.

Quote from: Greg Tito of AutarchHey guys,

I've been running a lunchtime sandbox campaign with my co-workers for the last few years, and I've found that ACKS is the best system to handle such small chunks of gaming time. Other systems either have combats which take too long, or are over way too fast, leaving the Judge (me) scrambling to come up with content to cover the remaining break. (Nobody wants to go back to work early, that's crazy talk!) With ACKS, I can have a fight, some exploration, and some pleasant roleplaying all happen in the same one hour session.

A lot of the success of a lunchtime campaign depends on preparation, while not over-prepping. I usually prepare for the game during work hours, so I don't have an endless amount of time to draw maps. It took me a while to figure out the right amount of content to tackle in a comparatively short time. Here is some of what I learned over the course of my campaign. Some of these tips are useful in every campaign, but they become even more important when you only play for an hour.

- Know your group. One of the groups I play with loves to roleplay with only a slight challenge in their fights, while I have another group which loves more realistic and dramatic action. For the first group, I spend time prepping the story, organizing characters and their relationships, while with the second group I spend more time fine-tuning the enemies they will face. Of course, I still will roleplay with the second group and challenge the first group, but if I know what will be the most fun, I concentrate on giving it to them.

- Don't prep an hour of content, prep an hour of play. This one's a little hard to describe, but I often don't plan too far ahead in my lunchtime campaigns. I have the story sketeched with broad strokes, but I don't come up with specific stats, monsters or treasure until I'm fairly certain it will come up in the hour game. That way, I don't waste time prepping for stuff that will never be discovered.

- Random Encounters are great fillers. Inevitably, your group will ignore the bits you HAVE prepped, and go somewhere else. In order to keep the game moving for the hour, I sometimes force the group to roll enough random encounter rolls that a fight or encounter of some kind is inevitable.  Some might call that fudging the dice, but it's gotten me through an hour and the group was never the wiser. You can use the random enncounter tables in Chapter 10: Secrets of ACKS, but it's more fun to create your own. Just be careful not to overuse this one.

- Don't penalize people for not attending. If you try this at work, make sure people know that work comes first. If they've got a meeting or are busy, make it clear they can skip out. The ease of playing ACKS characters - and the prevalence of henchmen - means players can easily grab a character sheet and play them. Also, make sure you keep everyone's character shee with you the Judge, so if someone is absent, the game doesn't become searching your coworker's desk for a ACKS character.

- Email roleplaying is your friend. If you have players with lots of lore questions or the desire to connect with NPCs one on one, you can just ask them to continue the conversation over email. That way, you don't waste everyone's hour watching one player flirt with a princess or haggle over a cloak.

Again, these are generally good tips for playing ACKS in any situtaion but they are absoutlely essential guidelines when you only play for an hour a week. Now if only I can figure out how to complete a story arc in a campaign that moves so slowly. When I got that one down, I'll let you guys know.

I thought it was an interesting post, and parts of it reminds me of Justin Alexander's Opening Your Game Table blogpost, one we've discovered independently and have been practicing for some time in my group, and which is pretty much paramount to the survival of a gaming group made up mostly of casual gamers.

If I know the RPGsite crowd as well as I think, I know which parts people will cheer, and which ones they'll tear into. Let the games begin...

We had a similar two-tier situation with a Robotech game that I played.. umm sometime a while ago.  The group as a whole for that game was our core group plus the GM's stepson and about four of his (much younger than us) friends.  Generally, a session would start after dinner, including the younger crowd, and contain a lot of mission-related activities, mecha fights, and general combat.  The kids played the grunts, mostly young pilots, and low ranking in the setting.  The core group played the NCO's and Officers of the squadron.

After bedtime for the kids, the core group of us would continue playing, usually covering the command, intrigue and political aspects of the game.

On top of that, one of my friends who was playing/co-gm'ing the game spun off an entirely different side of the game for our own amusement, and the effects of that would be brought back into the main game sometimes.

It worked out well for us, since the kids wanted combat, the core group wanted combat plus the more serious roleplay aspects, and the two of us liked pure roleplay and had a lot more time on our hands for playing (we lived and worked together, so we were constantly around each other).

The downside to it was that there were a lot of times where the sideline would have to be paused because the logical progression was to involve the core group, which meant we couldn't continue to advance our sidebar.

Surely, its not so much that ACKS is the best system for this, as that RC D&D (which is what ACKS essentially is) works really well for this.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;568108Surely, its not so much that ACKS is the best system for this, as that RC D&D (which is what ACKS essentially is) works really well for this.

ACKS is a bit more streamlined, though. Not a really huge difference, but enough that I think it would definitely be noticeable when you have a very limited amount of time, like an hour long lunch break, when every little bit helps.

Quote from: The Butcher;567700If I know the RPGsite crowd as well as I think, I know which parts people will cheer, and which ones they'll tear into. Let the games begin...

Well I don't like the part where he's talking about plotting an hour of play, because I don't like RPG conceptualized as "stories", obviously, but the substance of the advice is sound nonetheless: don't sweat the big picture stuff. That's what it comes down to. Just have a level of your dungeon ready, maybe an idea of where the main passages to other levels/dungeon areas arrive at, broad strokes throughout, and run with it from there.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;568312ACKS is a bit more streamlined, though.

"Streamlined" rules are overrated, IMO. What matters is for the DM to be familiar with the rules in TSR D&D, and from there to keep the game moving forward. The players actually don't need to know the intricacies of the rules or even count if you are using to-hit matrixes instead of THAC0 and whatnot. You just roll from there.

Quote from: Benoist;568315"Streamlined" rules are overrated, IMO..

in a four hour game session, maybe. In a one hour game session, I am not so sure.

Streamlined matters if all things are equal; I'm willing to admit that just purely the respective books' organization, if you give the RC and ACKS to a guy who has never used either before, he'll have an easier time getting through ACKS and using it in play with less time needed to study it.
On the other hand, if you give ME the RC and ACKS, and tell me to use each in a one-hour game session, I'll do much much better with the RC, because I've used so much of it that I know where everything is almost by heart.

RPGPundit

I like this approach, without the "story" concentration, but my concern is the time. A lot of us do not have a lunch hour, we have a lunch half-hour. Where an hour would be pushing it time-wise, I do not think a half-hour is enough time at all.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;568335in a four hour game session, maybe. In a one hour game session, I am not so sure.

A much bigger deal is made of streamlined mechanics in discussions on the web than really matters at an actual game table, I think. As long as the GM knows the rules and is excited about them, and that the n00b is into the game, it's fine. We were playing stuff like Rolemaster when we were 12 years old and it wasn't like we were a bunch of genius kids playing the game, yet we could play the game and have a great time together. Likewise with AD&D and other games. And we could play real fast, too. So I just don't buy this whole notion that streamlined rules are some type of Holy Grail of game design, "objectively" better, or whatever other nonsense like that. Imagination games just don't automatically work that way, IME.

Quote from: Benoist;568517A much bigger deal is made of streamlined mechanics in discussions on the web than really matters at an actual game table, I think.

Maybe, but extremely crunchy combat systems that require a lot of time to adjudicate probably won't fit.

Quote from: mcbobbo;569084Maybe, but extremely crunchy combat systems that require a lot of time to adjudicate probably won't fit.

Probably, but extremely crunchy combat systems that require a lot of time to adjudicate are not the opposite of streamlined mechanics. The opposite of streamlined mechanics is a system in which you have no unified mechanics and no "one size fits all" mentality, which may mean a number of things, such as the ability to use and discard some or parts of the system in question, and tailor the exact game play experience to what you want out of the game session.

Streamlined mechanics represent a complete package. You either take it or leave it. If you don't like the core mechanic of a 'streamlined' one-dimensional system, you're out of luck. Too bad, so sad. Tough to be you. If you have a multi-dimensional game system, you have a better chance to find what it is that makes you and your friends happy with the game's concept.

I wasn't playing a game of opposites, though.  Not everything needs be diametrically opposed.

When you know you have limited time, it makes sense, to me at least, to slim things down.  That in no way means that you'd make the same choice with unlimited time, etc.

I am definitely in the familiarity >>> streamlining camp.

If anything, ACKS' mechanical clean-ups should be most relevant in a long-running game, and not so much in a shorter game (or in a game delivered in hour-long parcels).

I love ACKS, it's currently my favorite version of D&D, but this is a case in which it has little to do with the authors' excellent job of smoothing over a venerable and time-tested system, and everything to do with TSR-era D&D in general being second nature to veteran gamers.

I'd like to hear whether anyone here has experience running games under such time-constrained conditions.

The afterschool class I run is 80 minutes long once a week; a little more than a lunch hour. It's for kids 8-12, which is different in many ways from gaming with adults, but lots of what Greg is talking about there resonated with my experience nonetheless.