#RPGaDay: Day 8

8. What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2 hours or less?

Answer: I don’t have a good answer for this one. There are potentially a lot of games out there I haven’t played that would facilitate this, but I haven’t heard of them. The average game of Monopoly lasts at least two hours. I think this boils down more to a style of play or particular type of adventure/mission. If the idea is to “finish” the session at place of relative resolution in 120 minutes, you’d either need to present a small-scale, compact challenge or something incredibly straightforward and potentially deadly. Something like the characters start the session captured in a house/stronghold/dungeon and they need to escape before “x” happens which will kill them if they haven’t escaped.

Alternate question: What do you look for in a review of an RPG?

Answer: I’ll answer an alternate question today too since I didn’t have much to offer for the regular question. What I want out of any review of an RPG are the following:

• A detailed description the genre or setting of the game is given and how similar or distinct it is from other games in that genre/setting.
• Ideally, the reviewer has read through the entire book/product, if not actually played a session or two, and can point out interesting details.
• In a video review, I like to see a flip through to get a sense of the layout and the frequency and nature of the artwork.
• I want to hear about how complex the core mechanics are. How much crunch is there?
• How long does it take to create a character? Is there a ton of depth? Too much?
• How much mileage will I get out of this product? Is this a run-once-and-never-again module, or is this a campaign setting that will provide hours/days/weeks of gameplay?
• The reviewer should be able to be critical and considered even when giving a positive review.
• Finally, I want to know how much it costs, what formats it’s available in, and where I can get it.

My favorite reviewer is probably Questing Beast. I think he pretty much does everything I mention above in a brief and articulate manner. Here's his review of Maze of the Blue Medusa.