Rogue Two (Part 3)

I was working on a new process to handle episode releases but it wasn't really working so we're rolling back. Apologies for the technical issues with the last few drops.

Anyway, Rogue Two rolls on. All these Rogue Two episodes have been way longer than I meant them to be. It's a consequence of the three storyline thing, I just can't judge how long we'll end up running. It's actually a pretty hard thing to judge in general. We've professionalized the show over the years, but I still try to keep a loose vibe in the room. So that means a lot of long breaks and lots of not-in-game chatter. So we often record for three and a half hours, but thirty minutes were technical prep and wrangling everyone, and there's forty five minutes of us on break and chatting about our lives. Plus you cut down the episode a bit and you end up at a reasonable two hours. The point is I can't just look at the clock and know, oh, we've been recording for two hours, time to wrap it up, but I've sort of developed a sense for it over the years. That sense is totally thrown off by having three storylines recorded at different times. I thought keep the stories to a 60 - 90 minute session, if we have thirty minutes of prep and a little chatter, that means each story is 30 - 45 minutes of game and that works out perfect. Except we run a little long and we're a little more efficient with the smaller groups and we end up with a solid hour for each and suddenly three hour episode.

It's not the worst thing in the world. It's just funny because I've been moving to try to keep the episodes shorter, aim for ninety minutes rather than two hours, and I have completely failed in that initiative. The thing that usually happens to me is that when I feel it's time to wrap up, I often go looking for a nice little button, some significant plot point to end on. And that ends up taking a while to find. That's not really been the case with these Rogue Two episodes, but that's been the case a lot in the past.

But you tell me, what's the ideal reroll episode length to you? Do you like the three hour marathons? Prefer that 2 hour sweet spot? Think we should tighten it to 90 minutes? Or 60 minutes??