Dungeons and Dragons

One of my regrets as a player ( @reverse was DM-ing this one) was when we only had one or two (we ended up only having one, IIRC) session to do Forge of Fury and one guy wanted our characters to spend so much time in the bar before the party set out and I was thinking “at this rate, we’re not going to get to explore the dungeon” and kept pushing us forwards. Which was dumb because it took away from that player’s fun. You can’t really “do” a module anyway, it’s just a location; what really matters is our play there, and that bar talk was part of the play for that player. I was stressed since it wasn’t a normal campaign, only a few limited sessions, but I was ultimately misguided there. When I myself prep for one-shot con games I bring a much bigger sandbox than we can ever hope to explore at the con. The important thing is what the players and their characters choose to do, not them finding or seeing everything,

But I’m of two minds. One of the two big beginner mistakes is not letting time pass. I’ve seen groups—not this one, where my fear was unfounded, but other groups—that just didn’t know how to advance the diegetic clock. Their characters are stuck in a cage? Well, then nothing happens for three real-time hours until a guard comes and talks to them. They’re wandering through a forest? Well, that’s gonna be real-time, too, with every meal accounted for.

That’s not great. The fix is to let time move as slow or as fast as it needs to to answer any salient or relevant questions the players or the DM have about a situation. “It’s a six day journey there. On the fourth day as you’re deep into the forest, you here a rustling in the undergrowth. What do you do?”

I try to make this feel more like fast forwarding or time-being-told-quickly than “cutting”; some people get really uncomfy with cuts forcing them to take their eyes off their characters.

Once you’ve learned the knack for that kind of zooming in and out of time scales, you can start finding out what part of the game and the game’s world you all find most interesting. If, for your group, that means zooming over the domning & doffing & praying, that’s fine. And other groups can make different choices and that’s also great.