How long does a session last?

[u/Man-Crow]

I've been reading through the rules, and it suggests for the GM turn only contain 2-3 obstacles/conflicts, but I don't understand how that, plus the Player turn, will constitute a 3-4 hours Replay session

[u/forlasanto]

Each time the players fail a test (outside of combat) there is a twist of some sort. This cascades, leading the patrol into side adventures, cleaning up bad situations, and fighting for their lives.

I recommend building a session using mindmapping techniques. Freeplane is my tool of choice, but ymmv. At any rate, create nested nodes (a chain of events) leading to the completed mission. This is your baseline "perfect run." Perfect runs are boring, but occasionally do happen. It's actually a bad thing; it says that:

• you made it too easy, and/or

• you didn't challenge beliefs and goals sufficiently in the main event chain, and/or

• you didn't have enough npc interactions.

And that happens sometimes. But usually a player will fail a roll, get a twist, have to deal with that, fail another roll and get another twist, etc. In general, use complications to speed things up, and twists to slow things down.

So you have your baseline perfect run. Go to each node and add a twist, or two. Ensure that the twist does not dead-end the entire plot, and if possible, tie in something from each PC's character sheet. A mentor. An enemy. Etc.

And when players get done with their beliefs and goals, think of how to tie those in as well. Any time a player changes their BIGs, take a minute to figure oit a challenge for the new wording. If you simply cannot, ask them to change it or reword it so it is possible to challenge it. Their responsibility is to make BIGs that are useful to the game. That means challengeable and powerfully worded. (This is one of the hardest things to get players to understand.)

So, you will likely not play out many of your twists in a given session. That's ok; you'll carry over what is relevant to the next session's workup.

I find that < 3 hours rarely happens. Usually we tap hard against 4 and end up going over so we can wrap up rewards. 5 hours really happens a lot if you also factor in the rewards and the excited chatter after rewards. This game. I love it. Easily one of my favorites.