Haberdashery

Question: I'm thinking about putting together a one-shot day-long game. Do you have any thoughts on how much content I should try to cram into one quadruple-sized game session? I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight involved scenes, but only three of which are likely combats. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.

Marathon game sessions are rare and elusive in the world of gaming; they take a sure hand and a bunch of people who are willing to do nothing else for twelve hours at the same time, which are more challenging things to get than they sound. But they're also almost always awesome events and sources of many stories for years to come, so I encourage everyone to try one at least once!

The most important piece of advice for plus-sized game sessions is not to do them very often. You mentioned that this is going to be a one-shot, and that's good; all-day games almost always function best that way, so that the whole thing is one epic day of badassery and afterwards everyone has as much time as they need to recover. I speak from experience when I say that running marathon game sessions several in a row, as we did at the inception of the Strawberry Fields game (players, remember the nineteen-hour session that ended at 5:30 a.m.? you probably don't, because you were probably half-conscious and running on only hope and tortilla chips), will kill everyone faster than moonshine. It's an endurance run, and while it's fun once in a while, it's not fun every week; people get tired, stop paying attention, stop being able to move the story and eventually stop caring. It burns you out very quickly as a Storyteller, as well - having that much story and planning stored in your head all the time quickly becomes exhausting.

But once in a while, it's great! My advice is to have an idea of what you want to accomplish over the course of the whole game, but not to sweat how many scenes that might break down to or what segments you need to make of it. Players always destroy pretty much any attempt by the Storyteller to decide how many scenes there are going to be anyway, since they're prone to ignoring some things you plan and doing others you didn't, so instead have big-picture ideas: the goal of the game is X, they need to do at least Y, Z and Q before they get there, and you have Storyteller tools L, V and H to help nudge them there if they need it. If it looks like things might drag on too long, cut something you had planned and add its clues or important characters to another scene; if it looks like things aren't taking long enough, have a few extra scenes available that you can throw in there if they need them. All of this goes for combats as well; by all means plan three big badass battles that they'll have to indulge in, but be prepared to add another if they seem bored or need some more action in their lives, and be prepared to cut one if they decide to solve a nonviolent problem unexpectedly violently and create a bunch of extra combat time on their own. Preparation is key for a long haul like this; you are going into the Storytelling desert alone with no camels, so pack well.

I need to pause now for a second and explain what haberdashery is and why you need to avoid it in marathon games.

In one infamous session of Skeins of Fate, the group managed to spend five-plus hours of real-world time doing nothing useful, getting no plot accomplished and learning no information, because they were busy making hats. You see, they had decided that they needed money for something, so Vivian came up with a brilliant plan to make hats and sell them to the local hatshop, which involved everyone going on a wild goose chase to hunt up hat-making materials and get started. Vivian and Kettila scoured the city for materials, Woody created a workspace for everyone, and John Doe got a job at a bakery making croissants in order to earn enough money to buy several meat pies so Kettila could summon goblins and turn them into hatmaking slave labor. In the end, they ended up with thirty fancy hats, of which the local hatshop would only buy a few because it's not like they have that great a demand for hats. They tried to sell the extras on the street for a few hours, and eventually all just grimly wore fancy hats for the next few days just so they could feel that they were getting some use out of them. When Aurora pointed out from beneath the giant brim they'd put on her that John Doe had somehow gotten a job, made money, and spent that money on making hats which they were only doing to make money, everyone stopped speaking to one another until monsters attacked and they had to start being effective again. John, who somehow managed not to strangle anyone to death with a dice bag, had to run game until 3 a.m. just so something significantly interesting could happen in that session.

So when we refer to haberdashery, we're talking about when players start randomly goofing off and get nothing accomplished. They're basically just fucking around, and while they have fun with it in the beginning, it quickly becomes a lost cause; they're just doing a whole lot of nothing and clearly have no idea what to do to get themselves back to the story and start its ball rolling again. Haberdashery is the great killer of marathon games; the more the players don't know what to do and start doing random things, the more disconnected from the story they become and the more likely they are to start getting bored or realize that they're tired and they've been here a long time. That doesn't mean you should never let them come up with their own ideas or pursue side trails, or that they have to be victims of constant, pulse-pounding adrenaline, but in long games a Storyteller has to keep a very close eye on the haberdashery scale of the game. One to three hats is fine; four to seven hats is getting problematic; if they're on a full-blown twenty-chapeau adventure, you probably need to guide them back to the story before you lose it forever. Nothing sucks more than a giant, marathon all-hours game that ends with no payoff, and that's what inevitably happens if the haberdashery gets out of control and you run out of time for the big cool stuff to happen because everyone is asleep in their chairs after a long, hard day of millinery.

So really, the most major things to watch out for in a marathon game are keeping the players and the story together and being flexible enough as an ST to collapse scenes or expand them as necessary.

Also, snacks. Snacks are very important. You all need rations out there in the Storytelling desert.