Nessun Dorma
During the school year, we could only play Fridays and Saturdays. But when summer came, every single day was up for grabs.
Not for scheduling normal games — those we could play any day of the week, even during the school year. No, I’m talking about the most magical of beasts and that staple of my gaming youth, the all-night game.
Arrive in the evening and just keep playing until the sun comes up. Hunker down in some room and just stay there. No one enters, no one leaves. No distractions. No supervision. The distilled elixir of pure game space.
These were not sleepovers. No one brought pajamas because no one was supposed to go to sleep. Did it happen? Yes. Did we play games where the DM had to wake up multiple people in a row just to get through a single round of combat? Yes. Did people fall asleep in their seats, hands clutching dice, until they were roused and bolted upright croaking “I hit it with my sword!!!” (even if there wasn’t a fight) and lobbed their favorite d20 across the table, all the while claiming, swearing, that they had not been asleep, that they had “only been resting their eyes for a minute”, and they knew exactly where we were in the game? Yes. But those were the exceptions. The sleepyheads were mocked. We knew we were not there to sleep.
I played all-night games almost as soon as I started playing D&D back in 1980. The very first was unplanned, almost accidental: we just kept playing and playing and playing until the sun came up, because we were blessed with the intense focus and lack of real world responsibility that came with being 11 years-old in the summertime. That game started as a mundane dungeon crawl, but as the magical hours of the night unfolded we transformed it into an epic saga, complete with back stories for wandering monsters and a plot invented on the spot.
That set a high bar for me and all-night games were a core part of our repertoire ever since. Here’s how common it was for us: in middle school and high school, if you asked someone if they could play “Saturday”, it automatically meant Saturday night i.e. overnight. If you said “Satur-DAY”, with a weird emphasis on the second half of the word, that meant a day game. Sure, we played a lot of day games, but the all-night games were the treasured times.
I’ve often said that one of the most educational things about playing role-playing as a kid is that you have to figure out how to deal with other people right quick or the game falls apart. When I was a kid, we never played with adults (except maybe councilors at Shippensburg, but even though they looked like adults to us most were just college kids). There was no calming, mature figure at the table to keep us from acting out. We had to keep ourselves and each other in line just to keep the game going. To our credit, I can only remember two times that our games broke down into actual physical brawls (yes, there were two), but there could be a lot of arguing and not paying attention and assorted other bad behavior. Because we were kids. The GM was ostensibly the authority figure, but yeah they were kids too.
All-night games had even less supervision. The parents of whoever was hosting the game were asleep. We were in the bedroom or basement or den, entirely up to our own devices. We were a law unto ourselves.
As kids, the focus that an all-night game creates, when all the world’s asleep and there are no distractions or interruptions and nowhere else to go, was magical. Pure gateway-into-fantasy stuff. But as adults with busy lives and cell phones, all-night games are even more powerful. It’s one thing to declare “gaming is sacred time, no interruptions”, but when you’re gaming at 3 am you don’t even have to worry that someone is going to have to field a call or have somewhere else to be. All the world’s asleep. West Marches, New Century City — both had their share of all-night game sessions.
In middle school and high school in the early 80s, our regular gaming group was almost entirely male (though ironically my first all-night game was 50/50 male/female). Would we have been allowed to have mixed-gender all-night games, at that age, unsupervised? It seems unlikely. In college the gender ratio changed entirely and almost every game was mixed, probably because A) college, but also because we did a ton of legwork to bring all sorts of new people into gaming via the Reed Game Society and the Anon. But that’s another story.
We didn’t have internet back then, so every gaming group existed in a kind of isolation, establishing their own culture of play without even realizing other people were playing differently. So looking back now I wonder, was anyone else even playing all-night games? Was it a thing, or was it just us? Are there gamers out there even now, hunkered around a table, playing until the sun comes up?
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I had a few all night games in college and grad school. Mostly they were not planned that way.
One all nighter was an all night session of the board game Barbarian Kingdom and Empire (a board game that can be played endlessly).
One notable one ran over 20 hours, we had started sometime after lunch, around 10 or 11 PM we started a big fight with undead, which wrapped up sometime around 9 AM with then an hour or two of book keeping after.
Then one of my friends and I took a power nap because we had planned to take a spring break camping trip starting that day…
These days, with a wife and kids I’d be shot if I even entertained the idea of an overnight game…
p.s. I have a question or two on the West Marches in the comments there…
“My question is this – when was the last time YOU had an overnight game?”
That’s a good question! 2012 I believe. It’s like everyone else got normal jobbbbbbbs. I also suspect traditional adventure RPGs are a better fit for all-night games than story games. Story games tend to be shorter and denser.
Ben – Some of my best memories were in those all night gaming group with you and the guys. We had so many classic moments that still come to mind – and I think I was there for one of the “brawls” you mentioned, although I’d say it was more violent-pending. :)
My question is this – when was the last time YOU had an overnight game?
-Don
Friday after school. Hawthorne, NJ. Circa 1981. Brett and I had discovered, befriended, and gathered a whole new crop of like-minded nerds into our gaming group after starting the very first Hawthorne High School D&D club. The Satan worshipping stigma was in full force then. I recall my vice principle asking why the game was called “Demons & Devils”. Yikes. Anyway…back to Friday… We gathered at Steve’s house. Steve’s family had the house on the hill with the full finished basement and, if memory serves, a pool table with a ping pong table played over the top. Just right for long D&D sessions. At dinner time, Steve’s mom would yell down the stairs, “You boys want some supper??!!” And minutes later we’d all be roleplaying around steaming mouths full of awesome home made lasagna. An hour or so later she’d deliver a tray of warm brownies and glasses of cold milk. That was pretty special.
We all enjoyed dm-ing on occasion but that night Brett was in the hot seat. He was the best of us, but simply stating that fact is a gross understatement. Brett was an endless font of story ideas. And he’d been involved in theatre at school since 4th grade – usually in the lead role. Our sessions were typically in character about 75% of the time.
But that first time we pulled an all nighter…we had no idea it was even happening. We were so involved in the game, isolated in that basement…not a window in sight…eventually one of us said, “I’m getting a little sleepy, maybe we should wrap it up for the night.” We said our good-byes, and walked out Steve’s front door to the bright ray’s of morning sunlight. We were stunned and all laughed our way to the nearest diner for breakfast. I’ll never forget it.
My friends and I would do all-nighters almost every weekend back in middle school and early high school. They were responsible for more than a few late school assignments :D
I will always look back at those sessions very fondly. They really did have much more energy and focus than our normal day sessions. I couldn’t help but chuckle at your article, because we did have one friend who would always fall asleep “hands clutching dice”. He was very difficult to wake up, so we just wrote it off as his character getting sudden bouts of narcolepsy. The only time I was able to keep him up was when I ran a horror one shot. It was very fun. I’ve never tried running an all-nighter as an adult, but I think I may have to see if I can recapture some of that magic.
I’m loving hearing about everyone’s gaming experiences. Big thumbs up. Keep it coming!
We hadn’t really discovered D&D yet when we were doing it, but this post brings back memories of all-night marathons of Risk, Axis & Allies, Battletech and Heroquest
Yes, played in a few all nighters back in the 80’s. Small town in Indiana. The poor gm, us players would sort of rotate naps but he had to stay awake the whole time. Haven’t done any all nighters as an adult though. Played pretty late many times when I was a younger adult, and we’d often play an entire weekend with breaks for going home and sleeping, but no more all nighters these days.
Hi, Ben.
I just recently came across the West Marches game style talking with a new gaming friend. Working on a home-brew campaign setting, going to adapt some systems I’ve played into a system for it over on Roll20.
I’m 57 and we were LARP/role-playing cops and robbers, C and Indians, etc… My older brothers had an HO scale train with army guys, and had made up rules for that. Then my elder brother had spent a year secretly painting the Soldiers and Indian figures from a Fort Apache toy set for my Christmas present – what a guy! I found a copy of the Chain Mail Rules, at a garage sale, and my best friend / next door neighbor and I role-played all sorts of adventures with our toys, models, and figurines.
Later when D&D came out, we were ensconced in developing worlds for each other to explore.
All night games were an awesome thing, I had done that right through college with pick-up games where ever and when ever possible. So many systems over the years.
I’m looking forward to using the West Marches format for Troupe play going forward.
Thanks, Ben, for rekindling the memories! And inspiring me to follow-up on a new system and campaign format.
My introductions to both D&D (2E) and Magic: TG were during all-nighters in high school, fall-winter of ’93-’94, with a group of upperclassmen. They were one-offs, no follow-through and scant prep from the GM, but the guys were decent people and the mood just crackled with that thrill of afterdark.
Have never done an all-night game, though I know they happen occasionally at Ambercon. I have gamed until 4am a few times, and thus learned through experience that I am completely useless as a gamer much past 2am — just too tired to think through what I am doing. As a result, when I am running games I try very hard to have everything wrapped up by midnight.