RPG Talk: The RPG Marathon

I am somewhat jealous, and also not, of gamers who have managed to - once or regularly - marathon an entire campaign over a number of consecutive days. It sounds fun, but also exhausting. In the playing of it, I can see it working. You get together with friends (I know a lot of people who have done this as a sort of group reunion, with friends coming from out of town) and just run through a game with barely any breaks for meals or even sleep. If one can watch all the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movies over the course of a weekend, one can certainly do THIS.

But it's the poor GameMaster (hey, that's me!) who I feel bad for (self-pity, then) because the prep has to be enormous in advance of this event. Right away, I would be insisting on being around the same table. I currently game online, and though you can obviously just do theater of the mind, it's nicer to have visual props, battlemaps, etc., all of which doubles the prep time. But even if that's not a concern, it's much harder to keep players' attention for extended periods when they're staring at a monitor. It just hypnotizes you into a stupor. And stupor is already a problem for extended sessions in person!

There are really two ways to go about it to alleviate the pressure on the GM, but neither is perfect - a narrativist and a gamist solution. On the narrativist side, you prepare next to nothing and improvise the session. The players are in total control of what they want to accomplish, and the GM need only have a certain idea of what's possible in the setting, and threat stats he can pull out when needed. This requires either a simpler rule set or one the GM has mastered, and it may not be for everyone.

The more gamist solution is to use a published campaign adventure (by which I mean, a long one) and run the group through it in a fairly linear way. You read from the descriptions directly. You don't skip or add any parts in prep. When characters die, they are immediately replaced no questions asked. It's a video game gauntlet that probably works best with dungeon crawls, which requires the GM to do one read through beforehand, if even that (though it's dangerous not to).

Either way, one needs to be flexible. Life will get in the way. Players coming in late, family emergencies, inopportune phone calls, etc. EVEN IF you've rented a remote chalet location. The group needs to decide what to do in those cases and stay open to having characters phase in and out of reality without mention, or else putting the game on pause for a moment or more. If that's the chosen tack, I would recommend the GM prepare some activity for the other players. Plunge into someone's flashback, for example, or have an NPC start a conversation about some topic unimportant to the plot.

The other thing to watch out for is the ending. I'm guessing the marathon is a one-shot deal and if there's no closure at the end of the weekend, the story won't easily be picked up again later. So have a precipitous ending in mind and choose a time at which point you must absolutely start the climax. If you're improvising, that may be fairly easy. If you're following a published scenario, you may just have to enact a time jump, narrating what the characters have gone through in the skipped chapters (including everything necessary, like finding the artifact that defeats the final boss). Or get ahead of the problem by skipping the early chapters and starting in medias res. I somehow doubt you can actually get through one of those thick campaign books in the time allowed anyway. If you misjudged and have too much time on your hands, enable a flashback that restores one of the missing chapters. It might be a good way to reveal important information without having to go through time-consuming combats.

You've decided to run a marathon, and it's no easy feat (especially given adult and even teen schedules). And I'm no expert, cuz I've never managed one, only entertained the idea. But hopefully, I've thought about the pitfalls enough that my advice is sound. Let me know how it works out (or how it WORKED out if you're one of the lucky/cursed souls who have crossed the finish line already).