Player Who Read Every Rule Except Scheduling Poll Weighs In on Session Length

Oren Pratt filed 1,400 words on ideal session length Tuesday morning, roughly three hours before the fourth scheduling poll he was sent expired without his reply.

The document, circulated to a five-person group chat that had not requested it, argues that a session should run three hours and forty-five minutes. It cites two editions of a core rulebook he owns, one supplement he does not, and a page reference he flags as "approximately." It includes a paragraph on concentration spells, a paragraph on tracking consumables, and a phrase, "decision-point density", that he defines twice and applies once.

What the document does not mention is the campaign's actual record: nine sessions have been held, and four ended after about a hundred minutes because the group could not produce enough confirmed attendees to justify starting the second half. The average session this campaign has run two hours and ten minutes. Pratt has attended eight of the nine.

He has attended all of them without once using the method the group agreed to in its session zero. In that opening meeting, the table voted, by poll, to make a shared poll the official way to confirm a Tuesday. In the eleven months since, four polls have gone out. One succeeded, in June, when two other people remembered to answer it. Pratt's reply to that one arrived four minutes after it closed.

The other eight sessions were arranged by phone call, by a text thread, and, twice, by a housemate.

"I'm not opposed to the poll," Pratt said. "I'm opposed to being asked to vote on a session that hasn't been scoped. Session length is a rules question. You don't vote on a rules question."

Ada Rourke, who issues procedural rulings for a standards board that no member of the table has joined, was asked whether session length counts as a scheduling matter.

"Session length is a matter of table standards, not attendance," Rourke said. "It is not subject to the poll. The poll is for attendance."

Read in sequence, the two rulings leave the length of a session answerable by neither mechanism, which Pratt's document describes as an "open question" and a scheduling poll describes as a failure to reach quorum.

At Tessa Caldwell's shop, where one of the players picks up dice, the poll link sits in the shop's backchannel between a rules question about contested grabs and a photo of a painted miniature. Pratt answered the rules question in ninety seconds, at 11:40 p.m., with a citation. The poll was posted eleven minutes later. It is still open.

Ada Gable, who lives with one of the players and has become fluent in what not to say, has forwarded the link twice on request.

"He'll read a nine-hundred-word argument about how a shield interacts with a mounted charge," Gable said. "The poll is underneath it. It's been underneath it since March."

Pratt is not a no-show. He is the most prepared person at the table, arrives early, brings the encounter notes nobody else asked for, and has never once been the reason a session slipped. His courtesy is genuine, which is why nobody wants to press him about the poll directly and why the poll keeps closing without him.

In Kiran's First Questions, I ask newcomers what they think decides how long a session runs. The beginner's answer is usually the game master's plan, or a chapter break, or bedtime. The accurate answer, at this table, is four adults refreshing a link.

The document ends with a proposal: that sessions begin at a fixed length and end at the nearest decision point, regardless of the clock. Below it, in the follow-up Pratt sent an hour later, is a question he says has been "overlooked in prior rulings": whether a poll reply counts as a free action or costs your reaction.

The poll, now on day forty-one, has three of five responses. It closes Thursday. Pratt has asked for an extension, which he has agreed to answer by email.