Game Pacing

Game pacing is a crucial, yet often overlooked aspect of planning a game; and one that I need to start paying more attention to.

Game pacing is all about how fast the story moves in your world and also controls how the world feels. A setting or campaign that is non-stop action and adventure can quickly wear out players and characters. Much like real people, characters need downtime to heal and recuperate; to purchase and craft goods for the next adventure. If you're constantly throwing catastrophes and climaxes at the players, it can rob them of needed time to process information. On the flip side, if the world moves too slow the players will lose interest. If they have nothing to do, they won't want to do anything and may become lethargic or slow to react when something does need to happen.

Pacing can also shift from session to session. Everyone knows that there are slow, planning sessions and then their are frantic, the plan has gone to hell sessions.

So why does this matter? When our group was gaming on a weekly schedule, the slow sessions didn't matter as much, since next week we'd be moving onto the next part. Now that we're gaming every other week; the slow sessions become more of a burden. That means that everything that happens during the session needs to have some import to the overall story. Random encounters that are nothing more than an xp gain need to be removed. I'm not saying that each and everything they touch or talk to needs to be crucial to the story, but anything that takes a significant amount of time needs to be looked at before decided whether to use it or not. Roleplaying out an encounter with an innkeeper? Short and easily doable. Making high level players actually fight with low level city guards? A waste of time. Assume they win, have them each take a negligible amount of damage and move on.