Playing short form requires several shifts in technique and approach. My group typically does 2-3 hour sessions. A 4 hour session is a marathon for us.

Drop the Filler

The first thing to do is let go of filler material. Filler material includes setting up adventures that are "clue to clue to clue to oh actually interesting development". This is the default for a lot of play, and it wastes time. Let go of having the players play out haggling for everything, or explain each store they go to for supplies, and so on.

If there are encounters that would take up time but not actually provide interesting choices or hard implications? Cut them out.

There's also a lot of time wasting in putting in situations that make it unclear what the players should even be trying to do. "Where should we go next?" "I guess we keep searching until we find a clue of what to do next?" etc. Videogames used to use mazes to add extra hours of gameplay as a filler device, and this is the same kind of thing.

Let players get to the fun interesting stuff without this obfuscation and play not only goes quicker, it's more fun period.

Scene Framing

Scene framing is the next step. You no longer say, "Ok, where do you want to go next?" as the default question. If you know the general thing the players are doing, you skip up to the next part and get right into it.

For example, you know the players are trying to track down a cult:

"After three days of talking with shady people, listening to wacked out babbling of street preachers, and having to do some small trading in hallucinagens, you finally find out where they're having meetings. At dusk, you find yourselves outside an abandoned church where several people died of plague years ago..."

Think of how movies or tv shows will give you a montage - so you can skip the legwork and go RIGHT to the interesting stuff. This alone cuts out a LOT of time wasting material.

The Rules you use matter

If you're playing a game where combats take 45 minutes... well, one combat will take up a significant chunk of your time. Understand that many of the older games and traditional games expect you to be playing for 6-8 hours as session, so if they expect 5 combats in a session, and you've got 3 hours to play... it's not going to fit.

If you're playing a game where conflicts of all types, take 5 minutes? Well, then things move much quicker. So pay attention to what rules you're using and what their impact is, so you can plan appropriately.

Getting into character, exploring the world, etc.

I've been playing this way for several years now. My group gets into characters quite well, because the focus of our play is on characters, their issues and personalities, which is because a lot of our game time is putting the characters into crisis points and fun interactions.

I find a lot of people used to playing with lots of time, think the solution to character or world development is simply pouring on more time, when in fact, it's about directed and focused play. I've had several people say, "We've done more in this two hour one shot than I've done in entire campaigns, for years."

That's because I cut out the filler, focus on the characters' choices and actions, and try to give situations that are at turning points. Each scene should matter and have some impact.

I do several things to keep the player characters interested and invested in each other.

1. At the start of the game, I insist that players coordinate backgrounds (subject to my approval) such that each character know at least one, and preferably two or more, of the other characters. In general, I prefer these connections be positive; the most negative I will usually tolerate is on the order of a friendly rivalry. In general, I also prefer that if you start from any one character, you can get to any other character by following these pre-arranged links. (In graph theory language, the players are all connected, although indirect connections are fine; the alternative would be two more more sub-groups connected internally but not to each other.) And finally, I try to ensure that each connection is more than trivial, but not necessarily life-binding.

So for instance, "We met in a bar twenty years ago and never saw each other again," is trivial. "We are cousins who are best friends and we are rarely separated," is life-binding and more than I look for (although it's fine if that's what they want.) Things like the following are what I look for, and/or what I've seen in the past:

• Our characters served in the same unit years ago, and knew each other, but haven't kept in contact...
• I served as a mercenary escort once, while he was travelling with his master from here to there; along the way, this happened....
• We weathered the siege/plague/earthquake of wherever together some time back....

Now, some players are genuinely not wired that way-- if you ask them for backstory, they freeze; if you given the one, they can't connect to it. When I run into a player like that, I have to respect that, but I try very hard to get everyone to adhere to the guidelines.

That does not directly solve the problem. (It actually solves the problem of getting the characters all on the same page at the start of the game.) But it does often give me enough to work with to do the following:

2. With enough insight into character backgrounds, and with overlapping backgrounds, I try to give every character an mid-term to long-term goal or plot arc, and then I try to modulate that by giving at least one other character a minor to moderate interest in how the first character's arc plays out.

It's important (to me, for the games I want to run) that these arcs not be strictly opposing: If one character has sworn blood-vengeance on an NPC, I won't give another character the goal of keeping that NPC alive. But I might give another character the goal of getting something from that NPC before his death, or getting the NPC to do something, etc.

3. And I also try to modulate this in another direction by giving other characters-- ideally, not the same one-- influence over the plot lines. So continuing that thought:

   • Player A has sworn to kill Sir Odious, his parents' killer
   • Sir Odious has information that will help Player B in her quest to do something else
   • Player C knows someone who can be bribed into giving up information about where Sir Odious will be

In that way, for each of the various player sub-quests going on, at least one or two others will be involved somehow, even if only at the periphery. Ideally, Player B has some motivation for something to happen, and Player C has something he needs-- something at least moderately costly or risky. They are invested.

One thing I would not do-- at least not again-- is what you tried:

I've had players create characters (with backgrounds) completely secretly from each other with the hopes of allowing the character interaction to be heavily role-played at the table. Didn't work because of very incompatible characters.

I've never done that, specifically, but I've inadvertently done similar things and it never worked well. It seems like it should work, especially if you pattern it similar to what I've outlined above, but there's a structural weakness to it: If the players, starting out with the relative blindness of only knowing their little part of the background, they just might not see those connections you built in for them, and won't give themselves the incentive to start sharing information. And if your players were the sort that would do that naturally, you wouldn't have to go through these acrobatics in the first place.