Liches Wot Lunch: my work lunchtime D&D campaign

For the last ten months I’ve been trying to run a tabletop RPG at work over lunch. Specifically, a small group of people, 45m sessions, weekly.

I did not think it would be easy.

It was not easy.

Purpose

Playing online has a good number of advantages, the tools are great these days, and it’s very convenient to find the exact game you want to play. However I find it difficult to connect to people I don’t know online. I can play with existing friends easily, but new ones I just can’t quite relax in the same way. I think it’s not knowing when to talk and pause - for some reason that’s easier for me with friends.

So I went on the work message boards, started talking about RPGs; and had people come out of the woodwork. Then I started suggesting concrete plans and system and dates, and they all crawled back in again. That’s fair, I’ll talk about RPGs more than I’ll commit to playing!

Doesn’t mean it’s motivating, mind.

Plan

Briefly:

• Old School Essentials
• weekly (schedules permitting)
• 45m session at lunch
• pre-written dungeon (less effort for me)
• minimal accounting
• telegraphed traps

Those last two need some explaining. Given the short amount of time, I wanted to maximise the amount that could happen in each session. I did not want a session to be arguing about shopping, or about exploring one corridor because they’re sweeping for traps and arguing about rock types. So I made a promise along the lines of “there will be traps in the dungeon, but you’ll be able to see them”.

A few people have written blogs on trap design in TTRPGs and how it’s more fun for the party to plan how to defeat/bypass a trap than it is to get killed by one. Or have to return for healing due to maiming, etc.

The accounting part is “we’re not tracking food, XP, light, encumbrance”. Straight down the “Rulings not rules” well we go! I don’t think that it is a great fit¹ with Old School Essentials - I could have used something like The Black Hack or Maze Rats for a lighter game, but I only had players that wanted to play “D&D” (or a few games I didn’t know).

The actual adventure I used was the Tomb of the Serpent Kings. I’ve run it before, minimal thinking required on my part.

Tools

Pen, paper, and the OSE SRD.

Results

So, the good news. It’s still fun to run Tomb of the Serpent Kings! Not sure why, but it doesn’t quite grab me as a concept, but the players have enjoyed it. They didn’t trigger too many traps, and in fact avoided some of the monsters.

They did not spend a whole session searching for traps and secret doors for each room, so I think that method of “you will be given hints of traps” worked pretty well.

Perhaps because there were only 2-3 players in the sessions, they also thought much more carefully about exposing themselves to danger? Very novel for me. Also playing on an actual tabletop meant they could draw their own map. I find some of the older (or old school) dungeons a bit too intricate to describe, but it worked out.

The bad news though is the scheduling was a pain. Either I would be waiting for players to arrive, or only realising a few minutes beforehand that I had forgotten the game. We would all cancel different sessions quite late due to sudden meetings that were going to prevent playing.

Also a 45m session is about 10-15 of turning up and unpacking with one person being late, and 30m of playing. This just about worked, but definitely OSE as-written would have been too much, and I’d still be interested in playing Troika, MÖRK BORG, or something where we don’t have to hand-wave around shopping².

Conclusions

I won’t try a lunchtime game again - it’s just too short for me. I would like say a 90m session at the least with enough people to have a West Marches style of “the party is whoever turns up”, but that still requires quite short quests that I’m not sure are terribly satisfying.