Pacing is tricky.

No matter what medium you’re working in — whether film, theater, prose, or roleplaying games — pacing is ephemeral, subjective, and devilishly difficult to get a grip on. Even absolute masters of pacing will struggle to teach it, and the few rules they offer seem to be more honored in the breach than the observance. Entire books about pacing in film have been written where the practical advice more or less boils down to, “Make the cut at the moment that feels right to you,” and, “Watch movies with really great pacing until you get a feel for it.”

How much more difficult is it, therefore, to teach (and learn!) effective pacing in a roleplaying game? A medium in which, even with the advent of actual play broadcasts, most of the artform is experienced only by those immediately participating?

Nevertheless, pacing is incredibly important. Even pedestrian material can be made compelling with effective pacing, and otherwise brilliant material can elicit glazed eyes and bored players if the pacing is plodding or unfocused.

So I’m going to do my best to give you some concrete, actionable advice for pacing your sessions.

Here are some basics of scene structure in RPGs that we need to understand before diving into pacing:

First, RPG sessions are made up of scenes.

Each scene is framed, introducing the location where the scene is taking place and the characters who are participating in it. (Characters may, of course, come and go as the scene continues. Some scenes will even change location, although a change of location more often suggests that a new scene is beginning.)

Each scene has an agenda, which is the reason we’re playing the scene. This can often be thought of in the form of a question that the scene is answering:

• Can the princess be wooed?
• Will Hou defeat Chaohui?
• Can the goblins convince the PCs to help them fight the dragon?
• Will Jack Hammer find the murder weapon?

If you can’t figure out what the agenda of the scene is (or if the answer is trivial or obvious), then it’s probably not worth playing it out and you should move onto the next interesting question and frame that scene.

When a scene is finished, the GM will either cut or transition to a new scene.

Broadly speaking, pacing can be understood as (a) the choice of when to end a scene, (b) the choice of how to start a new scene, and (c) the speed at which the scene plays out. Collectively, this also encompasses the speed at which the entire scenario and/or session plays out. (You may notice the emphasis on “speed.” That’s why we call it pacing. It’s all about controlling the speed of the narrative.)

THREE TIPS FOR THE BEGINNER

As a beginning GM, you’ve got a lot of balls to keep in the air. Pacing is one more ball that you need to figure out how to juggle, so I’ll give you a bonus tip before we even get started: You might want to leave the Pacing ball in the cupboard for a few sessions while you get a grip on everything else. To at least some extent, pacing will take care of itself, particularly if you’re starting with location-crawls (as I recommend in Prep Tips for the Beginning DM) and it can make a lot of sense to focus on just the essential balls (like making rulings) rather than trying to master everything at once and dropping all the balls on the floor.

When you’re feeling confident, though, here are three practical pacing tips to get your started.

If the scene is about achieving a logistical goal (e.g., interrogate a prisoner until they give you the information), cut to the next scene within one minute of the logistical goal being achieved. (Often you can cut immediately on the goal being achieved, but a little denouement/cooldown is often a good idea.)

Advanced Tip: If the PCs have a logistical goal whose achievement may not be immediately obvious (e.g., searching for clues or an interrogation; have we gotten all the information? or could we learn more?) hold up a sign that says WRAP SCENE on it. (You’ll want to explain this to the players ahead of time.) This gives players “permission” to exit the scene, while also giving them the space to wrap up any loose roleplaying ends they’re interested in.

If it’s a roleplaying scene, cut on the second lull. The first lull in the scene — that moment when the players seem a little uncertain about what they should be doing or saying — is often a pivot: The players have learned what the scene is about and the “uncertainty” is actually them figuring out what they want to do about it. Once they find that new direction, the scene will start chugging again and will often drive forward to a clear and satisfying conclusion.

If you hit a second lull, however, that’s a good sign that the scene’s function is done. Or, at the very least, that the question asked by the agenda cannot be answered this time (e.g., the princess is neither wooed nor unwooed, but no further progress on the wooing will be happening at this time).

If it’s a combat scene, your overriding goal is to resolve the fight faster. No, faster than that. Even faster. Faster. Faster … Okay, that’s not bad.

A few core techniques you can use to achieve this:

• Write down initiative (or whatever other form of clear recordkeeping your initiative system requires, like using a shot counter in Feng Shui). “Anybody going on 17? 16? What about 15?” is absolute death for pacing in combat.
• Put the players on deck. “The goblins are going and then it’ll be your turn, Rob.” Giving players the heads up that their turn is next helps keep them focused and speeds up both perceived and actual waiting times in combat — the former because they’re getting reengaged before their turn; the latter because you actually will be cycling through the initiative order faster.
• Get ahead on resolution by multitasking. Are you waiting for the PC fighter to roll their attack roll and damage? Roll the goblins’ attack dice so that they’ll be waiting when the goblins go next.
• Roll fistfuls of dice. Roll all the goblins’ attacks at the same time and/or roll attack & damage at the same time. If you can get the players doing the same thing, even better! (Check out Random GM Tip: Fistfuls of Dice for more details on this technique.)

As I said, the most important thing here is to keep combat moving as fast as possible. The quicker you cycle through each round of combat, the less time each individual player will be waiting to take their next action. Get it fast enough and the benefits will compound (as the players remain more engaged and can, therefore, resolve their actions faster, resulting in combat going even faster). But the reverse is also true: If combat is too slow, players will disengage, take longer to resolve their actions, and combat will slow down even more.

Advanced Tip: Roll initiative last. Instead of rolling initiative at the beginning of combat, have everyone roll their initiative at the end of the fight and then use those initiative scores for the next combat. That way, when the new fight starts, you can launch directly into it at full speed, instead of pausing to generate, record, and then sort initiative values. (You will, of course, need to anticipate upcoming combats and get your NPCs’ initiative scores recorded while, for example, the PCs are still walking down the hallway towards them.)

FOR THE INTERMEDIATE GM

You’ll have noticed that all of these tips are strictly about speeding things up: Shorter scenes. Faster scene transitions. Quicker combat resolution.

Speed is not, of course, the be-all and end-all of pacing. Quite the opposite: Sometimes you want a slow scene. Sometimes you want to build tension (and release it!). Sometimes you need to find the quiet moments. Sometimes the players need a breather.

But, as a beginning GM, the biggest and most effective improvement you can make to your pacing is to just get all the drag and dead air out of your sessions. So just focus on that for right now!

Once you’ve got everything tightened up and your sessions are humming along like a well-oiled machine, you’ll also be in a much better position to start thinking about where letting things relax is the right choice (and why). To put it another way: A slow-paced scene is only meaningful if (a) it’s a deliberate choice and (b) it stands in contrast to the other scenes in your game.

When you’re ready to take that next step, check out The Art of Pacing.

FURTHER READING

Prep Tips for the Beginning DM
Prep Tips for the Beginning GM: Cyberpunk
Failure for the Beginning GM
The Art of Pacing

The awesome thing about failure in roleplaying games is that it provokes creativity, heightens the stakes, and drives the adventure in interesting directions.

I would even go so far as to say that an adventure without meaningful failure is, all other things being equal, inherently worse than one with it.

Unfortunately, this may not be immediately obvious if you’re used to scenarios prepped as plots (i.e., a predetermined sequence of events). In a scenario prepped as a plot – particularly if the GM is using railroading to enforce that plot – there is only one path. And if there is only one path, any failure must be interpreted as temporary and, therefore, meaningless.

Failure is meaningful (and interesting) when it creates an obstacle or consequences, and therefore requires the creation of a new path.

Once again, if you’re used to prepping and running plots, this can sound incredibly daunting: With a plot you have to figure out how to reliably route the PCs from Scene A to Scene B. That’s non-trivial and if the pre-planned routing fails, improvising an alternate route on-the-fly is tough.

But if you’re prepping situations instead of plots, then the pre-planned route doesn’t exist. And if the pre-planned route doesn’t exist (or isn’t important), then it’s not even your job as the GM to come up with the alternate route! It’s the players’ job.

Despite this, though, you may find that failure is still just causing the wheels of the game to spin. Why?

Well, another common way in which failure can become meaningless is when unnecessary action checks are being resolved. As described in The Art of Rulings, action checks should generally only be made when failure is either interesting, meaningful, or both.

If you’re a beginning GM trying to figure out how to make failure meaningful, here’s a couple of simple techniques that you should be able to rely on.

INTRO TECHNIQUE #1: NO RETRIES

The easiest way to implement meaningful failure is to simply not allow retries: If you failed to pick the lock on the door, that failed check tells us that you’ll never be able to pick that lock. You did your best; it didn’t work.

Now what?

Kick it in? Cast a spell? Look for a different entrance? Look for a key? Seduce the housekeeper? I dunno. You tell me.

But as you can see from these example alternatives, each of these new paths creates interest: The PCs are leaving evidence or engaging in further exploration or creating new relationships. Arguably all of these are, in fact, more interesting than if they had simply picked the lock and gone through the door.

Note: A trap that you can fall into here is thinking, “Well, if failure is better, then I should just force everything to be a failure!” There’s a longer discussion to be had on this point, but the short version is: Success is also important if, for no other reason, than that the players will become increasingly frustrated if they can never actually accomplish anything. So let the dice fall where they may.

To be clear, this technique is not the be-all or end-all of how to adjudicate failure. There are more advanced or gradated techniques that can be used to good effect with practice. But if you’re just getting started, you don’t have to make it complicated.

INTRO TECHNIQUE #2: QUICK-AND-DIRTY FAILING FORWARD

Okay, so you’ve done that for a few sessions and you’re starting to get a feel for what meaningful failure looks like in actual play, but you’re also starting to chafe a little bit under the straitjacket of never allowing retries.

You’re ready to make it a little complicated.

What we’re going to use here is a technique called failing forward: The mechanical result of failure (e.g., rolling below the target number) is described as being a success-with-complications in the game world.

A simple rule of thumb for when you should use failing forward is whenever disallowing a retry feels a little weird to you: Why can’t the PC just try to pick the lock again?

In our first technique, the intended path fails and the PCs need to find an alternative path. Failing forward is a different way of making failure meaningful because you don’t annihilate the intended route (whether you prepped it or the players chose it). You just complicate it.

Coming up with interesting complications on-the-fly, though, can feel intimidating. So, when in doubt, just impose a cost: You succeed, but…

• You have to pay extra.
• You took damage.
• Your equipment broke.
• It took extra time (if that’s relevant).
• Someone knows you did it who you didn’t want to know.

If you have a better idea, great. But if not, these five broad categories can cover like 90% of fail forward checks. In fact, you’ll usually have multiple options. When picking a lock, for example:

• You open the door, but trigger the security trap. (You take damage.)
• You open the door, but your lockpick snapped off in the lock. (Your equipment broke.)
• You open the door, but it took twenty minutes and now you only have ten minutes before the Count returns home. (It took extra time and it was relevant.)

If nothing works and you can’t think of something outside the box, that’s fine: Either don’t make the check in the first place (just let them automatically succeed) or default back to no-retries-allowed and move forward.

Advanced Tip: You can get a little fancy here with a fortune in the middle technique by offering the cost to the player. For example, “You’ve almost got the lock open, but the hacked security camera is going to come back online. Do you stay and open the door or GTFO before the camera spots you?”

INTRO TECHNIQUE #3: BASIC PROGRESS CLOCK

A progress clock is a simple, visual way of tracking how close a particular outcome is to happening. There are a lot of different ways that you can use a progress clock, but for today, when the PCs fail their first check during an endeavor (e.g., sneaking into mansion, tracking a band of orcs, investigating a cult’s activities in Dweredell):

1. Create a progress clock by drawing a circle and dividing it into four, six, or eight parts.
2. Set a significant consequence or overall fail condition. (For example, security at the mansion realizes there are intruders and the alarm is raised, the PCs lose the trail of the orcs and can no longer follow them, or the cultists succeed in summoning a demon who begins rampaging though the Great Market).)
3. Whenever the PCs fail a relevant check, fill in one part of the progress clock.
4. When the progress clock is filled, trigger the consequence or fail condition.

This technique can be used with any type of action check, but for our purposes primarily provides a default consequence for failing forward: If you can’t think of any other consequences, just fill in the next section of the progress clock and explain the connection.

Progress clocks can exist in one of three states at that table:

• Open Clock: When you create the clock or fill in a section, you show it to the players. This is often the easiest method, making it crystal clear what the consequences of a failed check are with no fuss.
• Hidden Progress: When you create a clock, you directly or indirectly tell the players that it exists. (For example, when they’re sneaking into a mansion you can clearly state that there’s a risk the security team will detect them.) But the clock itself remains hidden. The players don’t know how large the clock is or exactly what the progress on the clock is. However, because the clock’s progress is hidden from them, you will need to clearly communicate the consequences of failure to them. (For example, if they fail forward on a lockpicking check, you might describe how they managed to get the door open, but they’ve left clear signs of tampering that might be noticed. Such explanations, you’ll note, will also inform exactly how the failure condition plays out – in this case, it’s possible that the alarm is sounded because someone noticed the damaged lock.)
• Secret Clock: You create the clock without telling the players it exists; it serves strictly as a tool for you to keep track of things. As with a hidden progress clock, it’s your responsibility to continue clearly communicating the consequences of failure to the players in your description of the game world.

Advanced Tip #1: Other events or actions can fill in sections of the progress clock even if there isn’t a failed check. If something happens that logically moves events closer to the progress clock’s outcome, fill in a section. (Similarly, particularly terrible failures might fill in more than one section at a time.)

Advanced Tip #2: It’s also possible for progress clocks to “run backwards.” If the PCs do something that sets back the plans of the cult, for example, it may make sense to erase one of the filled sections of the progress clocks. (On a similar note, progress clocks are not inevitable: If the PCs break into the mansion and get out before filling the progress clock, the alarm doesn’t sound. If they wipe out the cult, the demon is never summoned. And so forth.)

Many moons ago, I wrote Prep Tips for the Beginning DM, a super-streamlined set of guideposts for a first-time DM to follow. The advice was aimed specifically at D&D/Pathfinder GMs, and over the years I’ve received a number of queries about how GMs can get started with other systems. The truth is that the advice is largely transferable. For example, here’s how you could get started running a fairly typical cyberpunk campaign where the PCs are a crew that runs heists and similar jobs in the style of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

(You might be starting up a new Shadowrun campaign. Or maybe you’re hyped about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 and want to run a game like that for your friends. Whatever works. This advice is widely applicable.)

(1) Start with a simple run featuring a location-based crawl. Keep it simple! Make it a single building with maybe a dozen rooms. Keep the challenges inside the building firewalled (i.e., the PCs can generally muck around in Room A without also bringing everything in Rooms B-Z down on their heads) with the possible exception of a roving security patrol that will also respond to triggered alarms. Keeping things compartmentalized will make it easier for you to run; it’ll also give your players a chance to figure out their characters and the system.

(2) Do a couple of those. You can slowly start building the complexity. Introduce adversary rosters so that the complexes become more dynamic and active. This will increase both the challenge for your players in planning out their runs and the complexity for you in actually GMing those runs.

(3) Take a look a the Three Clue Rule and use it to create a linear investigation scenario: Go to Location A, find clues that lead to Location B. At Location B, find clues that point to Location C. Repeat until you reach the conclusion.

LINK IT TOGETHER

It’s okay to just run a purely episodic campaign where each run is independent from the last. But here’s a simple example of how you can link all of these things together: The PCs are hired by somebody to do a couple of jobs. Then their patron calls them with another job, but when they show up for the briefing they find him dead. Now they need to figure out who did it.

Discovering who their patron was, what he really wanted, and why he was killed will either wrap up the mini-campaign or wrap up Act I of the ongoing campaign and give you a nice launchpad for the rest of the game.

Note: You don’t need to prep all this before you start play. In fact, you shouldn’t because you’ll be learning stuff in play that you’ll want to implement in the next scenario you design.

All you need to get started is #1: A simple run.

As you’re wrapping up Act I, take a look at Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design. Use those to build an Act II.

Read More at Gamemastery 101

For a beginning GM, the location-based method of adventure prep is the best way to go: Draw a map. Number the rooms. Key the rooms (i.e., describe what’s in each room).

(1) Start small with a Five Room Dungeon.

(2) After a couple of those, go a little larger. And, when you do, start thinking about Xandering Your Dungeon.

(3) Okay, that’s getting awesome. But this map-and-key thing is a little too static: Monsters are just sitting in their rooms and waiting for the PCs to wander by and hit them over the head. So mix it up by prepping an Adversary Roster that’s independent of the map key and then run the monsters in the complex actively (so that goblins from area 6 might run across the compound and reinforce the goblins at area 1). At this point, it may also be useful to broaden your encounter design to give yourself more flexibility in how you use encounter groups.

At this point you’ve probably run about a dozen adventures and you’re starting to get comfortable as a DM. Awesome. Now you can start exploring non-location-based methods of adventure prep. For some basic priming check out: Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and Don’t Prep Plots. Or, for another classic alternative, check out Hexcrawls.

And if you’re really ready to jump into the deep end: Game Structures.

HOW TO PREP

Throughout all of this, however, don’t over-prep. I think it’s really important to NOT use published adventures as an example of how to prep: Professional adventure writers are trying to communicate their vision to you. If you’re prepping notes for yourself, however, you can trust your creative instincts in the moment.

For example, it’s not necessary to elaborately work out and write down all of the different tactics that a group of orc fighters might use. You can just jot down “8 orcs” or “8 orcs, they’ll try to kick over the pot of boiling stew to burn the PCs” and then trust yourself to be creative in the moment.

Rule of thumb: Details are overrated (with the proviso that essential details and awesome details should always be jotted down).

Similarly, you don’t need to spend a lot of time customizing every stat block. You can take generic stat blocks out of the Bestiary and make them interesting through context and use and creative description. (The one-eyed orc chietain wearing the steel-plated skull of a wyrmling is pretty awesome. But there’s no reason you can’t just use the stat block for an orc warrior from pg. 222 of the Bestiary.)

Another rule of thumb: If you’re spending more time prepping it than your players spend playing it, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Read More at Gamemastery 101