Tips on Pacing Your Adventures

One of the hardest parts of making a story satisfying is the pacing. Pacing is how you interact with time: do you make a moment stretch out to dwell on a specific idea, or do you speed things up to move the story along? It’s a delicate thing. You’re trying, in a way, to find a speed at which all your players simultaneously have the most fun possible. It’s an art, being able to find that sweet spot, but the payoff is always incredible.

But learning this art is difficult. The road to mastering it will require practice, and lots of it. That means GMing lots of sessions, and ideally, with lots of people and with different goals for playing (serious roleplay versus tactical battle simulator versus tool for improve comedy). Practicing in these varying conditions will help you to see the ways that the game itself helps you to control the pacing of your story. Ultimately, this is not a fact that you can know, but a skill you must learn, so get yourself that practice. But of course, there’s more to it than practice. To start, let’s talk about some key ideas and tools to help focus your practice.

Let’s start by setting a goal. We want good pacing. But what does that look like? How would we define good pacing? I think our best metric for measuring that is with player enjoyment. We want to pace the game in a way that our players enjoy. What do your players enjoy? You know best as their GM. I’ve talked before about how to help players find their fun, and you want to use those tools to figure out what they generally enjoy. More generally than your players in particular, there are certain things that most people respond to that we can use.

One thing that people tend to enjoy in tabletop games is a balance between intense moments and down moments. This looks in practice like a period for the party to regroup, heal, and potentially rest between combats, or a quiet moment over a meal following a dramatic discovery. If things get too intense for too long, it can burn your players out, so always be ready to allow a moment of respite to keep people feeling balanced. If you notice that your players’ stress in dramatic moments is not the fun stress of being involved in a narrative but instead stress from being overwhelmed by the emotional experience of the game, it’s time to slow way down so that everyone’s okay. Remember, it’s supposed to be fun for everyone.

Another mark of good pacing is that it can change the flow of a scene. You are the GM, and there is really nothing to stop you from interrupting any moment or instantly resolving most any issue. If you have players who are in desperate need of being shaken up a bit—maybe they’re considering doing something you don’t want them to do, or they’re bored and need something to do—you can insert an NPC with something to say that changes the moment. Perhaps it’s a guard who turns up as they’re about to do something illegal, or a minor questgiver as they’re winding up for time wasting. Now you’re added something to the scene to influence its pacing.

You can also go the opposite direction and resolve an issue. Let’s say you’ve got players who are really failing to see an easy solution to a problem, or maybe they’re arguing out of game about what to do (and I don’t mean “discussing”—I mean arguing). You can resolve the problem that’s facing the party through your narrative means as GM. The players who can’t see the obvious solution get a whisper from a deity, or one of my favorite tools, the “common sense check,” where I have my players roll a Wisdom check, and as long as they roll above a 5, their character figures it out without their player. Or in the case of the arguing players, we can bring a halt to the real life argument by solving the dispute; if they’re arguing over whether to opt for stealth or an all-out assault, have them be overheard, taking the choice away. (In this situation, you’d also want to delicately broker some peace between your players. Again, remember that it’s supposed to be fun for everyone.)

So when do you need to change the pacing? This depends on your playstyle. If you’re running serious roleplaying, you’re going to be pacing the game based on a combination of player experience and story demands, meaning you weigh the needs of the story’s pacing with the emotional experiences of the players themselves. If you’re doing hardcore combat, you’ll be varying your fights and making sure that there’s time to decompress between fights, which means you want a range of enemy types and amounts with plenty of time to sit around the campfire and heal up. And if you’re running a game for casual adventure and laughs, pacing is all about player experience and balance of in- and out-of-game talk, meaning that you make sure everyone is having fun and there’s neither too much out-of-character goofing around nor too much forced focus on the game. Let’s look more at how to handle situations in each category.

Roleplaying

The players are here to really become their characters and see how they bump up against the world. They want to become part of a story and help define it. To meet them there, we need to take into consideration their goals and their moment-to-moment experience.

Their goal is to be a vital part of a story, so we want a story that really includes them. You might build your campaignaround their ideas, or you may try to build a campaign that makes room for them. So when the adventure is happening, we want everyone to feel as included as possible. That means minimal time focusing on individual characters and maximum time with everyone in the scene (thereby making them capable of acting in the story). So when you have players who are separated, give the scene its due—be sure to make them feel included in the story—but try to get through the main points relatively quickly so that everyone can be in the scene together again. By the same token, allow the players as much time as it reasonable when they’re all together to capitalize on their ability to influence the story.

Another extension of this desire to be a part of the story is that the story is very much the emphasis of the experience. That means that when the story-rich scenes are happening, you can really dig in with the details and let the scenes breathe. In practice, this means waiting longer to reveal plot elements and discoveries and more time while the players build up the tension of these scenes. Conversely, if it seems like non-story-related time is being spent without much zeal, you can speed along these scenes to get back to what stimulates the players.

Speaking of which, the players’ experiences are also a vital part of the pacing equation. The thrill of roleplaying is often in disappearing into the character, and that means that the experience of the character impacts the player on a different level. As a result, the balance between moments of tension and moments of decompression becomes vitally important.  I recall that during sessions in my roleplay-focused campaign Listen Check, which was broadcast live on the radio, my players were prone to getting exhausted. We were responsible for a three-hour broadcast in prime time on a weeknight, and I was trying to meet radio standards of what made good pacing. But that was hard on my players at times, and I have always maintained a more calm pace in campaigns since.

So when you are GMing, pay attention to your players as well as their characters. Ask yourself how they’re acting. If everyone is having fun, proceed with the pacing you think is appropriate. But if people seem underwhelmed or overwhelmed, you need to respond by changing the pacing. Introduce new dramas to the lives of characters who aren’t up to much. Give a moment’s rest to the characters who are getting rained on. This is an especially good time to remind you that not everything needs tobe ruled by dice—you can make a decision based on what your players need.

Combat

The best thing about playing a combat campaign for many players is the satisfaction at making strong tactical decisions. The feeling of besting a foe is the feeling we chase, and the satisfaction of getting stronger only leads to the anticipation of using new abilities. How can we use pacing to manage those goals? We need to stay consistent to ensure the game stays rewarding, and we need to give rewarding experiences their due.

In combat in my story-heavy campaigns, I fudge a lot of dice rolls. The point is story, after all, and sometimes a good story calls for something different than chance declares. The goal there is to enhance drama. But if you’re going to fudge rolls in a combat campaign, you’d better have good reason, otherwise you make success less meaningful (beating a foe when you know the rolls were fudged is like doing nothing at all). And as a result, you’re going to have some combats that are much shorter than anticipated, and some that are much longer than anticipated. Randomness will do that. So you’ve got to make a choice: do you create a combat that’s exciting as possible, or as fair as possible?

Making this choice should depend on your players. It’s them who you’re trying to give fun, and again: that’s the point. So if you’re going for flashy combat, keep your dice rolls close to the chest, and decide what to do based on the feeling of the table. If people are starting to lose the thrill of combat, maybe your NPC enemies start rolling poorly. Or introduce an ally to join the player characters—that will shake things up and give them something to talk about. But if you’re opting for honest combat, you will need to accept that pacing is going to suffer. Some fights will drag on, and some will wrap up too soon. You can combat this to some extent by having the enemies use different tactics to different levels of success, but mostly, I would just directly tell my players that I’m opting for a very strict “no fudge” policy and that it’s going to have effects on the campaign’s pacing.

There’s also the matter of feeling rewarded. If a player character discovers some new magical weapon after a hard-fought dungeon, you don’t want to simply say, “It’s a +1 Longsword of Fireball.” That doesn’t pay the moment its full respect. The players have fought hard to get here, and they want to feel the coolness of the rewards. Instead, carefully describe the longsword—“You see a longsword pointed up, with a silvery blade and a black hilt. Engravings of flames lie in the metal of the blade. When you touch its hilt, your hand grows warmer, and the blade seems to hum in the darkness.” I would then introduce a very weak enemy, perhaps the blade’s final guardian, and allow the player character to use the new sword to terrible effect. This slows down the moment of finding the treasure considerably, but it’s also far more rewarding to the player, and that’s what they’re seeking. Accepting that scenes that empower your players will slow down the game is vital if we’re going to give them what they want.

Feeling rewarded also has to do with getting stronger. Let’s say that a character has just leveled up. They’ve earned a new ability—let’s say just for an example that it’s a bard who has just unlocked “Magical Secrets,” an ability that allows them to learn spells from any class. This opens a pretty insane number of doors to the player, and they would be right to be really psyched about it. There are hundreds of spells they suddenly have access to. You might be tempted to have combat start almost immediately so that the bard can experiment. But they might not be looking for a combat scenario for testing. They may want to try their hand at the dozens of spells which could change the situation of the party in huge ways—let’s not forget “Wish” is out there—and we should allow them to experiment a bit at their own pace. Of course, the important thing here is that the player is able to feel as though they have a meaningful stake in their character’s growth, so dedicating a beat to the demonstration of that growth only makes sense.

Antics

Sometimes, tabletop games are a vehicle for friends to hang out and be silly without much else in the way of goals. But this approach still needs pacing to work, and perhaps moreso than any other approach. Consider this: the roleplayer or tactician is dedicatedly seeking an experience and will be patient if they can get it. But a casual player has little investment, so serving their needs through pacing is a vital part of the GM’s job.

One of the most important things in a casual, silly game is in making sure everyone’s having fun. This is different from the character-centric experience I discussed above in the roleplaying section; now we’re discussing the player themselves as detached from their character. The likelihood of a casual player being closely emotionally linked to their player is lower; what we really want is the moment-to-moment feeling of the player. To track this, we want to pay attention to body language, facial expression, and how the player’s behavior compares to their baseline normal behavior. If anything seems off with someone, nudge the game a bit: give their character more to do if they seem bored, or give them a breather if the player seems overwhelmed. If a player or players aren’t having fun, change the pace up. I’ve dropped silly side quests into flagging storylines before, and it can really help get some momentum going again.

Of course, everyone won’t be having an incredible time all the time. It’s impossible to achieve, no matter how we may strive for it. And that’s okay. Getting most of the people most of the time is great. One of the things I’ve learned as I bounce back and forth between playstyles (for most of the last year, I’ve been playing in a serious roleplaying campaign, GMing for a casual campaign, and GMing for a combat campaign) is that you need to match your players where they are most of the time. I’ve hurt casual games by trying to push too hard. If you’re going to GM a casual game, you need to be a casual GM. Let go of focus on stories if people are having a good time.

Which is my next point, actually—very often in casual games, you need to loosen up the reins. I’d say that in my experience, casual games require a light but constant touch; let the players guide most things, but always be right there to pick them back up when they falter. In practical terms, that means that you’ll be letting the players do a lot of out-of-game talk. In a casual campaign I currently GM, we meet in Google’s online meeting client, which allows the participants to share a “jamboard,” a shared version of what basically amounts to MS Paint. Over the course of playing, we all keep the jamboard open, adding in images that refer to shenanigans in the game. The additions to the jamboard often cause people to start laughing in the middle of narration, and a distraction of several minutes tends to follow as we continue to joke around. It took me several sessions to accept that this was what my players wanted—they really were there to goof around, even if it means ignoring the game. Embracing that had helped me GM for them, and now our game sessions are more raucous than ever.

There is, of course, a limitation to this idea. If you get a group of people together with the intention of playing a tabletop game, and then you spend 10 minutes gaming and nearly three hours goofing around, someone is going to end up pretty bummed out that they didn’t really get to play. There have been sessions I’ve GMed where I’ve really just let the players do whatever they wanted, and I never stepped in to mess with the pacing because everyone was having fun at the time, and then at the end of the session, a few people were frustrated that we’d spent so much time goofing around and hadn’t really played. So you as GM will need to consider the situation; have you achieved much as a party this session? If not, perhaps it’s time to get everyone focused for a while. If they have, maybe let them enjoy their shenanigans. It just depends on what the table wants, and there’s no rule that says you can’t just ask your players, “You want to get back to it or take a break? We seem to be having a pretty good time just talking.” There doesn’t need to be judgment in the asking—we’re just trying to maximize everyone’s fun.

So there you have it. With these ideas in mind, you should be able to manage the pacing of your game. When in doubt, build suspense, and then release it. Let your players guide what happens if you can. And if you’re really at a loss, trust your gut. You’ve probably seen enough movies and shows, played enough games, and read enough stories to know how a story tends to work: it rises and falls, rises and falls, like the chest of a person as they breath. Just listen to your players, and you’ll be fine.

That’s all for now. Coming soon: how todeal with player character deaths, stereotypes in my homebrew setting, and howto balance plot and exploration. Until next time, happy gaming!

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