Mike Mearls Games
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Twenty Minutes of Fun, Four Hour of Play
🕑 Added 2025-03-29 16:07:49 +0000 UTCRyan Dancey, architect of the OGL and head of the D&D brand team in the halcyon days of 3e, once said that TTRPGs are twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours. That comment resonated back when he said it, and it continues to loom over TTRPGs. Our games are a great value per hour, but it takes a lot of hours of play to make meaningful progress.
The typical TTRPG session is around four hours. If you look at trading card games and miniatures games, both offer play formats that dramatically reduce the time needed to play. I can fit in several games of Magic in an hour. I've played Warhammer formats that fit a game into an hour.
If you've followed this Patreon for a while, you might recall that one of my primary goals for Odyssey is to support one hour play sessions. I also talked about the Threat system I had developed to drive play forward.
Based on my playtests at Gary Con, I think that system is working as I intended with a number of adjustments I made to it. I don't have rules fully written out yet, but here is an overview:
During play, I have a timer set to ring every 10 minutes.
When it rings, I roll a number of d6s in front of the players.
I start with one d6 and increase by one each time I roll. I top out at six dice.
For each six, an event or encounter triggers. If I roll more than one six, that event is more dangerous.
As an example, in combat I can add some minions or immediately take an extra turn for a boss monster.
I have not yet tested this, but I'd like to give the PCs a benefit for each 1, such as recovering an exhausted spell or healing up a bit. I'd love for this to replace short rest and other recovery mechanics.
I also use a "free" threat roll for when the players want to stop and rest to recover spells and other resources. I need to put more thought into this, but it played well at the table when I added it.
In play, the effect was amazing. The players were locked in on the game, pushing ahead with the action and engaging with the environment. When combat began, they were on edge that the alarm would trigger and make the encounter worse. I had some of the most glowing playtest feedback I have ever heard.
Even better, that feedback improved across each game. I tweaked the system between sessions, and it felt like each adjustment translated to much better results in play.
I think this mechanic might be the core to resolving the "fit a session of play into 60 minutes" problem I've been trying to crack. By adding a real time element, the players treat time as a precious resource and try to make the best use of it.
Thinking back to Ryan's quote, I think solving that basic dilemma might be key to keep the growth of TTRPGs going. If you look at miniatures games and TCGs, they've grown larger and larger as they have adapted to fit into gamers' busy lives. I have high hopes for this mechanic and plan on sharing a playable version early next week.
Comments
Robert Erik Blank
Normally I don't love real world timers. Game time flows at various paces depending on what's going on. It can be that a minutes go by in seconds of game time if the players backtrack or are exploring large uneventful areas. But things that take second in game can also require many minutes of dialogue as people come up with plans and the DM asks them questions. The problem with having the timer be a torch or some real world thing then (like in Shadowdark) is that sometimes you end up with torches that last for days or torches that go out immediately based on things that are going on in the real world and it feels weird. The nice thing about the way this mechanic runs is that it isn't tied to a real world thing--who knows when something bad is going to happen? And also just because you roll the die doesn't guarantee the bad thing happens--in fact it's probably not going to happen until there's a few dice being rolled (sort of like in Betrayal how you roll dice whenever there's an Omen Card, but the actual bad thing doesn't usually happen until you've rolled several times). That feels much nicer.
Mike Mearls
YMMV, but in play it replaces random encounter rolls for me. The key is that it moves control over the flow of time away from the players. If they spend a long time arguing, I'm still rolling every little bit instead of waiting for them to take actions and move the turn sequence along.
Dr. OO
In theory these kind of threat clock mechanics sound good to me, but in the end I think they are too gamey for my tastes. I can imagine using something like this for a specific adventure where it is thematically appropriate , but not as a consistent feature of the game. But maybe I'm wrong and if I tried it, I'd like it enough to use more often.
