RPGaDay: Rest

I was wondering what to write about for this one, as all I could think of was the concept of long and short rests from D&D 5e, and as someone who rarely plays D&D 5e I don't really have any opinions on that..

And then Simon Burley nailed it.

#RPGADAY2020 - 13 - REST - “Shall we take a short comfort break there?” Important words at a con. More important is to finish your Saturday night games by midnight if you’re committed to playing a game Sunday morning. Playing on into the wee small hours doesn’t make you clever. pic.twitter.com/4vh24C27UN

— Simon Burley (@squadronuk) August 13, 2020

Taking breaks is something I'm trying to improve on as a GM, although it's going slowly.  It's not a thing we do in the home group.  People just wander off to the loo and the coffee machine as required with no actual breaks other than a short pause when the takeaway order arrives and we spend some time passing boxes around the table.

It's only recently, now that I've started regularly running convention games, as well as a campaign at MK-RPG, that I've had to start remembering about breaks.  In a three-hour session, you need at least one break around halfway through.  In a longer session you might need two.  This applies just as much to online games as it does to in-person games.  Maybe more so, especially if you don't have cameras on and can't see if people are still there.

The problem is that once I'm immersed in running the game I tend to forget about pretty much everything else.  Generally I'm reminded by one of the players requesting a pause, at which point I call for a five minute break, but I really need to start doing it without being reminded.

Alien is the game where I have the least trouble with this.  The three act structure serves to remind me to take a break when we come to the end of each act and I have to change everyone's secret agendas.  It's a fixed point in-game, so I'm not going to forget about it.  Which suggests that I should do the same thing for all my convention scenarios.  I know what the main plot beats are and roughly when things are going to happen, so if I add into my notes, 'when the players reach location X, we take a break' I'm significantly more likely to remember than if I'm merely depending on noticing the time.

This is a bit trickier for campaign play, when it's a lot harder for me to predict how long things are going to take, but I'm doing enough conventions that I'm getting practice, and with practice I should get better at remembering to check the time.