You may think this article is going to be about finding the time to make sure your plot’s coherent, knowing when it’s worth giving a character a full stat block vs a summary, a backstory vs a general impression. Or about balancing work and the rest of your social life and your game.

It’s not.

This is about metagame time management: balancing the time that everyone is getting within the game itself. It’s a tough balance, after all. You need to balance the PCs’ time with the NPCs’ time with the world’s time. Too little time with the world, and nobody gets how it works; the setting ceases to matter. Too little time with the NPCs, and they start seeming like cardboard cutouts rather than interesting characters. Too little time with the PCs, and the PCs start griping because this is their story.

But that’s not all. Then you’ve got to balance time between The Group and The Individuals. Some time is a group thing; everyone’s suited to the task, everyone’s on, and as a result there’s no real “star”. Then you’ve got time that focuses on individuals. Maybe someone’s getting the spotlight because something on his character sheet says he’s good at this stuff and the rest of the characters haven’t invested in skills good for this situation. Maybe it’s a situation that requires cunning or lateral thinking, and one of the players just happens to be particularly good at that, so she’s taking the lead. Perhaps the current plothook is something that inherently grabs one of the PCs more than it does the others, so he’s the one who’s getting the time.

And as if spotlight time wasn’t tricky enough, then there’s balancing between types of scenes. Unlike balancing between players, this one can be a lot more uneven, depending on what people like. If you’ve got a whole bunch of combat-evading social monsters who want to know how the world works, then social scenes and scenes that showcase the world can far outnumber combat scenes, and when you’ve got a group that’s all about finding new and interesting ways to bash their foes and look awesome doing it, having lots of combat and not too much of anything else is pretty much expected. But when people have different priorities, that gets trickier. Maybe one person loves combat and isn’t too fond of this whole talking thing, while another just wants to poke the world and see how it reacts, and yet another wants to see how their interpersonal dynamics with the other characters (both NPC and PC) works out.

On the plus side, there are ways to balance the factors. If most of your group are explorer-types, you can allow a lot more time for world, since they’re losing spotlight time but are getting Fun. If you’ve got a situation where one person’s the one the story follows most closely but another is better suited to the challenges being thrown at them, played to appeal to another’s metagame rewards, everyone gets something they want at once.

There’s no one true way to manage time in a game, but there are a few general rules. One: make sure you know what everyone wants. Is there someone who’s a particular spotlight hound, or another who doesn’t mind being support? What sorts of metagame rewards does everyone favor, and how many different ones can you sneak into one scene? Two: see if you’ve got anything that creates natural imbalances. Is there a character you tend to focus on, because their style is similar to yours or they make more connections with the NPCs, and how can you balance for that? Is there one who tends to try to take the spotlight when left alone? Do you find yourself giving particular amounts of screen time to a certain NPC, and if so is there a character that NPC is most closely tied to? Three: Watch out for overcompensation. Just because one character dominated the game a year ago doesn’t mean he’d still dominate it now if you weren’t taking steps to avoid that; in fact, you might be leaving him out because you’re so busy worrying about him you don’t realize how much you’re favoring another. Four: How much do your players care about the balance? Would they be having fun anyway?

You’re probably not going to be able to get perfect balance, but if you can find where the imbalances are and which ones matter, you can at least make an effort to try to rectify them. And how are you going to find them if you don’t know where to look?

Looking for more on dealing with a game group? RPG Blog Carnival this month is all about the community.