.@mikemearls recommended leveling every 4 hours or so. Here’s a (statistically insignificant) poll on how often we do it now. #dnd pic.twitter.com/Oxz4NE4hAY
— SlyFlourish (@SlyFlourish) November 5, 2017
Correct
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) November 5, 2017
There’s also the simple fact that different people move through campaigns at different speeds.
Chris Perkins manages to run sessions of Dice, Camera, Action in only two hours, because he’s a highly skilled DM who purposefully paces sessions to take that long to make them watchable, while still allowing the players to get a lot done.
But at an amateur DM’s table with friends, the pace of play can be much slower. For my own example, I’ve never played a session of D&D that took less than four hours, and most trended more toward six, and sometimes even eight or more. This is both as a player, and as a DM.
The groups I play with simply prefer a slower pace. They get about the same amount of meaningful progress completed, but the sessions run longer. Why? Probably because there’s a lot of goofing off going on during sessions.
Someone makes a joke, it spirals into an out of character tangent for a bit, and we crack wise for awhile until we get back on track.
Someone gets up to grab a drink, and two or three other people ask them to bring back drinks or food for them, and things slow down a bit.
Someone asks the DM a rules question and it’s a real stumper, and instead of just picking a ruling and moving on, we all have fun getting into discussing it.
Someone takes a shining to a random NPC and we spend forty minutes roleplaying, while the DM smirks and thinks “I guess we’ll get to that big plot development I had planned next week instead”.