Recently on the various forums, I’ve discovered that I seem to be getting through modules much faster than most of my fellow gamemasters. For example, I’ve run Fate of Cthulhu--a game that suggests players have four major missions to complete in order to save the world--in four three-hour sessions (and one four-hour one). I ran the first chapter of Pirates of Drinax in three hours, and the first adventure in The Masks of Nyarlathotep (the prologue in Peru) in a little over two.
Since people keep asking me, “How did you do that?” I thought I’d assemble my thoughts. WARNING: This will contains spoilers for a few classic adventures, because examples help.
I’m aware that not everyone will agree with my way of doing things. I like narrative and story arcs more than goofing around, and I believe that we are busy adults who want to walk away from a session feeling like we actually did several interesting things. Also, these suggestions are not in any particular order and they are a little repetitive in places. Take what seems useful.
1. Don’t Fart Around With Player Characters. You emailed/texted everyone ahead of time, so they should have characters ready and you should know enough about them to start. So don’t ask about which advantages they took or every detail of their loadout. No one wants to watch another player go shopping. You don’t even need to know a PCs backstory, which can sometimes get long, self-indulgent, and technically irrelevant. (If you’re just running Module G1, who cares if your ranger wants revenge on her traitorous half-brother?) If you know the bare outlines of what sort of characters you’re dealing with, that’s enough to start with. The rest will emerge naturally.
2. Use a Fast System Like Fate or Into the Odd. Fate combines to hit and damage in a single roll. Into the Odd only rolls damage. Same effect; it’s really fast either way. Players can only take two or three hits, so fights shouldn’t take very long when they happen. If you have to use a more detailed system, find a way to truncate it. When I play D&D 5e, everyone always does average damage (double on a 20) and I like to max out hit points at third level...oh, and healing rolls are always max as well. When I play GURPS, I eliminate block and parry rolls--they take up extra time and rarely do anything. Eliminate die rolls wherever you can. Make sure the ones that remain actually matter. (Example: in 5e, certain bless-style buffs make the affected PCs add a d4 to their d20 rolls. That’s idiotic; just give everyone a +2 and be done with it. D&D has always been too in love with randomness for randomness’s sake.)
3. Let Players Find Everything. Far too often, GMs make players roll perception rolls in every single room, and it’s pointless, especially once you have five players or so. One person always makes the roll and informs the others, so the end result is as if everyone made it, and you just wasted a minute rolling for no reason. Most things should be fairly obvious if you’re looking. A cautious adventurer will always notice the giant spider on the ceiling; a trap you can detect is way more fun than a surprise fire geyser. On the rare occasion when you’re looking for something genuinely hidden (an invisible capsule at the bottom of a false drawer), roll the perception roll and the result will tell you, not IF the players find the thing (the thing you’re finding is usually pretty fun to find and makes a good story), but WHAT IT COSTS to find the thing. (On a low roll, the player hurts their hand and has to switch weapons for an hour, or the enemy has time to reinforce themselves, or the clock has moved closer to doomsday. And there’s always wandering monsters.) 4. Determine the Story Beats and Aim For Them. Every chapter of an adventure should boil down to something like four or five beats (about two per hour of play). Find those and keep them in the front of your mind so you don’t get lost in the weeds. When there’s a dead spot, do a single descriptive thing to make sure the players feel the scene, then do a hard frame and move the players to the next beat. (“You make friends at the party--the champagne is flowing, Sully is flirting with an IT manager and Twanna, you’re getting deep into a discussion about 5th century archeology with a docent from the museum, and it’s great fun. Then, at midnight, the mayor rises to the podium to make an announcement...”) This can be especially key in player conversations. If a conversation with a significant NPC is revealing new information or new character, keep it going. If the NPC isn’t important, or the questioning is going into pointless extra innings, shut it down.
Examples of story beats from adventures I’ve run:
Lost Mine of Phandelver (D&D 5E)* [*Updated because a commenter pointed out an error]: The first adventure has only three essential parts: the initial goblin attack on the PCs, the encounter with the traitorous lieutenant in the lair, and the bugbear boss. All those bits are related to the overall story. Everything else is creative opposition. Assuming a three hour session, you have time for those three scenes plus three more scenes inside the lair. To maximize their impact, I'd tend to emphasize the bridge and the water trap, which are visually interesting, and get the players quickly past the guards out front and the wolves inside, which are both much more familiar. I would also keep all the scenes a little light, just because the bugbear could take up a lot of time. Masks of Nyarlathotep (Call of Cthulhu) 1. Players meet Jackson Elias, who is helpful, de Mendoza, who is mysterious, and Augustus Larkin, who is creepy. The PCs also get to know each other (briefly, please) while at dinner. 2. Then it’s bedtime, so players can sneak around and try to figure out what’s up with Larkin and/or de Mendoza. If they don’t, cut to 3. the Museum scene. The fallout from this could lead to further scenes with Larkin or de Mendoza (4./5.). If not, cut to the team arriving at the ruins (i.e., skip Puno) and face the showdown with Larkin (4.) and/or the Father of Maggots (5.) Most of the details in this adventure are good for color, but it doesn’t feel especially necessary to worry about what sort of public transportation the PCs use to get around. The important parts are Elias, Larkin, and deMendoza. Everything else (like the father and son in Puno) can be dispensed with. There is a lot of material to get through, so keep conversations relevant and move combat swiftly.
Pirates of Drinax (Traveller) The players are prisoners called before King Oleb, who are given the opportunity to earn their freedom by serving as privateers. Scene one: interview with the king. Scene two: brief interactions with Princess Rao (good) and Wrax (difficult). Scene three: introduction to the ship and/or crew. Scene four: finding a ship to attack and board. The piracy begins! This is actually a very simple introductory scenario to run, because you can time the difficulty of the first piracy by how much time you have left after the various introductions. If there’s not much time, the ship goes down quickly (but it’s not worth much). If you don’t want to finish early, there’s a complication--the ship is full of dangerously sick people, or it’s alien and hard to take over, or the crew threatens to blow themselves up or something. If you need to fill further time, one of the nobles critiques their piracy technique, and of course you can always set up the menu from which players may choose their next mission.
By the way, if you're not running a premade adventure, the beats in your story are some combination of the story's beginning, middle, and end, peppered throughout with opportunities for every player to shine at least once, and twice if possible. In Fate games, writing a plot is sometimes as easy as choosing six to eight character aspects it would be fun to compel.
5. Start as Close to the Action as Possible; You Can Always Do Flashbacks Later. Usually this means starting with the call to action. In Fate of Cthulhu, for example, I’ve heard people in actual play recordings start with the moment the time travelers come back through time and encounter their modern-day helpers. I can understand why this might be fun, but to my way of thinking, this section can be skipped because a. The game isn’t primarily about time travel hijinks (it’s an action-horror game with a time-travel excuse, not a game about paradoxes and seeing your own double), and b. We already know the players are going to work together, so there’s no dramatic benefit to belaboring the obvious. Start them in the briefing room--or, better yet, the second they’ve entered the hotel in Cairo and have to prep for the evening’s party. Do the briefing in flashback. Its best to start games with the team already assembled and wheels down.
6. Focus on Weird Visuals and Hard Choices. When you have to decide what to keep and what to toss--or, perhaps more accurately, what to stress and what to deemphasize--try to give the players something memorable. Horror and fantasy games often have terrific visuals, so make sure you hit the writhing tentacles and the vast statues of forgotten gods. The less important a location or an NPC is, the less you should describe it. Instead, cut straight to the question of which choices a party will make, and at what cost. If you have a choice between three museums to visit, the order isn’t going to matter very much. But if they have to interview two diplomats, and they’re across town from each other and both are leaving tonight, the PCs will feel the agony of decision. (In a related note, if a bad guy is going to have an important speech, make sure you write it down. Devastating insults and horrifying implications are more memorable when they're not improvised.)
7. Don’t Waste Time on Riffraff. If there are low-level flunkies involved, make sure they basically go down with one hit or flee as soon as things turn against them. You don’t even need to worry too much about where everyone is standing, since they won’t be around for long. Most of the classic TSR modules have entire rooms that are dedicated to nickel-and-diming players with minor encounters. Eliminate them; they were never going to be important or memorable anyway. It is enough to establish that your characters are badasses; beyond that, no one gives a damn about the 10gp locket some gnoll has in their satchel. They attack, they flee, they leave a matchbook behind. Move on.
8. Keep NPCs Manageable. NPCs are very similar to choices: they should matter, and there shouldn’t be too many of them. Three is the maximum number of NPCs anyone can keep track of in a scene, so watch out if you’re running something like 5E’s Out of the Abyss, where players start the game in prison surrounded by ten other prisoners. TEN. That’s ridiculous; choose your three favorite and let the others fade into the background so the players can focus on escaping instead of engaging in a lot of possibly-pointless conversation with unhelpful NPCs.
9. Never Be General or Make Players Ask Stupid Questions. You should never never ever say something like, “Okay, you go to the warehouse. What do you do?” That’s going to lead to minutes and minutes of players asking questions that are mostly obvious (the lights are on, there are people milling about, there are three exits, etc.). Instead, every time you start a scene, describe everything they would eventually figure out anyway, and then give the players two or three distinct choices. “The police chief has asked you to investigate the murder of a noted philanthropist. Do you go to the greenhouse where the body was found, to the morgue where the body currently is, or do you interview his widow, who found the body? Please do not split the party.” That way, instead of wasting time describing a scene one question at a time, you can focus on what matters: player action.
10. One Socializing Scene is Plenty. There is usually a downtime between scenes when players are going to be hanging out by the campfire or sitting next to each other on a plane for a bit. This is when the players who want to roleplay can get a chance to learn about each other in character and to reveal their interesting backstories. I like scenes like this because character definitely helps ground the action, and these scenes add to group cohesion. But I also like the scenes to feel squeezed in between two important activities, because that means they don’t outlast their relevance; the players know this is only a breather. This encourages focus. And focus is what you need to get through an adventure without wasting everyone’s time. In my experience, players will thank you.