I was asked if I have any thoughts on pacing games for TTRPGs and I have to confess that I do, and that it’s probably a little unhelpful. My short answer is: don’t.
There are two kinds of pacing that immediately come to mind, and as I started writing this, I was thinking I had nice, nuanced, slightly different answers for both of them… but I actually don’t. We’ll get to that, though.
The first form of pacing is the pace of an individual session. This one varies by personal taste, and I don’t know if you can give a hard and fast rule because you’ll need to feel out what works for your table. My own feeling—and this might be my taste biasing me—is that most players want a fairly fast pace, and even players who say they want slow and cosy enjoy being challenged with an action-packed session (for whatever your system’s definition of action is), at least now and again.
However, my own policy is to try and treat each session like a one shot to the extent that I want a nice range of different things to happen every time, even in an ongoing campaign. Whatever else happens, I want there to be variation within the session—neither a full session of downtime, nor a ceaseless breakneck pace for three hours. There can certainly be action and tension for three hours and no mechanical rests or resets, but I try to find some variety within that. I think often when a session feels slow or bad-stressful, what players are actually reacting to isn’t the pace, but a lack of variety.
The second form of pacing is that of the overall arc, either from the wider GM perspective or the character-focused perspective of a player. When should big changes happen? How long should you hold off reveals? How long do you maintain status quo and when do you break it?
I’ve come to realise that my answer to both of these pacing problems is, as I said, the same: seize opportunities when they arise. Surrender to your most capricious collaborator, the dice.
On a session-by-session basis, this does contradict my advice above somewhat. If there’s a good moment for things to slow down, take it—because if you put it off, events might escalate and suddenly you’ve missed the chance. But on the other side, if things have been going hard and then the players stumble into the perfect opportunity for you to spring a trap or bring in a twist… well, go for that, too. It’s not the end of the world if a given session is completely chaotic. It’ll feel even better when they finally get a breather.
I think this defies our storytelling instincts more when we approach it on a bigger scale, a narrative arc or a character arc. But the same thing is true in the micro as in the macro: if you don’t seize opportunities that the dice or improv present when they happen, they might not come back.
To give an example from my own recent experience (and the thing that got me thinking about this), I’m currently playing in a game of Masks, the PbtA game about teen superheroes. My character is struggling with being unpopular and not a great student in her normal life, while as a superhero she’s a beloved member of an illustrious line of heroes. She got suspended from school for beating up a bully, so she decided early last session to seize the opportunity to try being a superhero full time. Her plan was to not tell her parents she’d been suspended and just secretly never go back to school. I figured she’d spend a few sessions sneaking around and beating up baddies until her parents finally caught her.
But then, at the big fight at the end of the session, an opportunity arose for her to absolutely hit rock bottom. She failed basically every roll in the entire encounter and maxed out her negative conditions, which is what the game uses instead of tracking physical health. I had the chance to make her completely crash out, or avoid that and stick to my plan of letting her be a truant vigilante for a while. My novelist brain said it was silly pacing to have her only get to enact her plan for one session; my TTRPG brain said, the chance for her to get slapped in the face by the consequences of her recklessness is right here and might not come back. She ended the session with lashing out at one of her superhero relatives and then getting crushed by a giant robot. Hurray!
I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but I know that I’m much happier having let the story push itself forward than I would have been if I’d flinched and tried to stick to what felt like ‘better’ narrative pacing.
I always feel the same way as a GM when I just let the story develop as the players have earned, rather than as I planned. The instinct to control pace can lead to artificially withholding information, being stingy with positive rewards or with earned negative consequences, railroading or letting NPCs take over to make sure the party gets where they need to go (or doesn’t get where you don’t want them to go), and a lot of other things that make the game less fun. While it has sometimes taxed my improvisational abilities, I have never regretted it when I’ve just let the players make a leap I didn’t plan for them to make yet and let the story change shape to accommodate the new pace.
And I mean this wholeheartedly! I once played a mystery-based game where a player rolled a nat 20 during the first session and thus uncovered a piece of lore that was meant to be revealed in the endgame of the entire campaign. This didn’t ruin the mystery, it just changed it. They had one answer, but they still didn’t know what it had to do with everything else going on, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have known how to stop it. There was still plenty of story to tell, just a different one than I’d anticipated.
And this connects to some of my broader interests in narrative in TTRPGs. I asked once what the structure of a TTRPG is, narratively speaking, and a bunch of people chimed in to say that it’s an emergent narrative, which of course is partly true. But I think it’s only partly true, or at least only partly gets at the question that really interests me. Yes, the narrative emerges, but where does it emerge from? By what structural principles is it shaped as it emerges?
A TTRPG is often but not always driven by character. The the key choices come purely from what a character chooses to do, and the abilities provided to them by their character sheet.
It’s often but not always driven by external factors controlled by the GM: plot twists, random encounters, lore reveals that force the characters to react and change the nature of the story in spite of or in reaction to them.
And I guess what I’m arguing here is that it’s often and maybe always should also be driven by random opportunity. Not emergent narrative in the sense of something that gains narrative cohesion after the fact and as you go, but in the sense that the crisis points, the moments of change, the successes and failures and their attendant emotional states, are things we know the story will contain, but we can’t decide when they will happen. The dice tell the story, not just in providing random events from which we derive narrative meaning, but by pushing us into an order and structure for the ideas that emerge away from the table, too.