Logistics for a Game-Based Training Day: People, Time, Room, Materials

The materials checklist for our second pilot of Operation Aetherfall runs fourteen lines. One of them is dice. The rest are the unglamorous kind: six half-page character sheets, twelve secret cards handed out face down, reference cards, reflection cards, an X-Card, pens, a notepad. Adam White and I spent months designing the scenario. The checklist decided whether the day worked.

If you want the workshop planning checklist in one paragraph, here it is. Plan for six participants at a single table. Budget about seven and a half hours: an hour of pre-game instruction, 30 minutes of rules teaching, roughly four hours of play, a 90-minute debrief, and 35 minutes of breaks placed at natural seams. Use a room with one table and no projector, and print everything a player touches. Send the pre-work three to five days ahead, and do your own prep the evening before. Everything below is the detail, pulled from the run-of-show behind how to run a tabletop RPG training session.

Why is six players the design point?

Six players is the number the scenario was built around, and the reason is hidden information. Operation Aetherfall carries six secret motivation cards and six secret information cards. At six players, every gear is engaged: each person has a private agenda pulling them somewhere specific at every decision point – urgency, promotion, humanitarian conscience, reputation, team preservation, control – and a piece of intel nobody else holds. The disagreements the day exists to practice are generated by that arrangement, on purpose.

The design tolerates two to six players, but below six you're triaging. Some pieces of information are load-bearing – the fatal-flaw analysis is the evidence that makes the whole managing-up scene with the commander work – and some are supporting. Drop to four players and you have to decide which motivations and which intel the learning design can survive losing. Go above six and someone sits down without a hidden agenda, while everyone's airtime shrinks. When I asked Adam how many players Pilot 2 needed, his answer was two words: "6 players ideally."

How long does the day actually take?

Budget seven and a half hours, and be suspicious of your own urge to promise less. Ours splits like this: 60 minutes of pre-game instruction (framing, safety tools, two core concepts, a bridge to the game), 30 minutes of rules teaching, about four hours of gameplay, a 90-minute debrief, and roughly 35 minutes of breaks threaded through.

Notice what that math says: play is barely half the day. The four gameplay hours divide into three chunks – a 60-90 minute briefing act, a 75-90 minute execution act, and a 60-75 minute finale with a short in-character resolution. The 30-minute rules budget only holds because everything's been simplified in advance: pre-generated characters on half-page sheets, with the GM handling every mechanic the players don't strictly need (the approach is in how to teach game rules to non-gamers). And the 90-minute debrief isn't a buffer at the end. It's the part the whole day is for, and when a session runs long, we shorten the game before we touch it.

Where do the breaks go?

Three breaks, each placed at a seam in the day rather than a seam in the clock. Ten minutes after rules teaching, before play begins. Fifteen minutes mid-game, between the execution act and the finale. Ten minutes after the game ends, before the debrief starts. About 35 minutes total.

The cognitive-load research we synthesized before designing the scenario recommends a 10-minute break roughly every hour of instruction, and puts adult attention on a single stimulus at around 20 minutes. Our gaps run longer than that standard because gameplay refreshes its own attention – the activity changes every few minutes without anyone calling a break. What kills momentum isn't playing for 90 minutes. It's breaking mid-scene, so a half-built disagreement dissolves while everyone refills their coffee.

Two of the three breaks are secretly work. The mid-game break is when the facilitator reviews the notepad: what happened during the confrontation with the commander, how the team actually made its decisions, who's been quiet. The final break is mandatory decompression – participants still emotionally activated from the game can't analyze their own behavior yet. Let people stretch and talk about the fight. Then start.

What does the room need?

One table that everyone can sit around, and almost nothing else. In the first minute of framing we tell participants they're not going to sit through slides – so there's no projector, because the room should keep the promises the facilitator makes. The only screen belongs to the facilitator: a laptop running the encounter manager and holding the enemy stat blocks. Everything a player touches is paper.

Paper is a cognitive-load decision, not an aesthetic one. A half-page character sheet keeps everything a player needs in one place, so working memory goes to the interpersonal dynamics instead of the interface. And the X-Card sits in the center of the table where every player can physically reach it. If someone can't reach it, the table's too big.

What goes on the materials checklist?

This is the full training workshop materials checklist from our second pilot, organized by who uses it.

Printed, per player (×6):

• Pre-generated character sheet, simplified to half a page
• Secret motivation card, printed separately, handed out face down
• Secret information card, same treatment
• "From Strong Ground" reference card – conversation-opening phrases
• Positions-vs-interests quick reference card
• Written reflection card, for the transition into the debrief
• Implementation intention card, for the debrief's final phase
• Pen or pencil

On the table:

• One X-Card, placed in the center
• Dice sets

Facilitator only:

• Facilitator copy of the session plan, including the motivation-to-decision map
• Enemy stat blocks
• Encounter manager loaded on a laptop
• Notepad for tracking key moments during play

Digital, before session day:

• Pre-game assessment sent to participants three to five days ahead
• Completed assessments collected before the morning of

Buy more pens than you think you need. They walk off.

What should the facilitator do the evening before?

Read the whole session plan and the whole adventure the day before – not the morning of, and not a skim. The most important prep item, though, is the note-taking sheet for the debrief. During play the facilitator jots three to five specific moments across five categories: a question that changed the conversation, someone challenging authority (or visibly not), how the group actually reached a decision, someone holding back when they had something to contribute, and a disagreement that started to feel tense. Our session plan puts it bluntly: generic questions produce generic answers. Pointing to "that moment when Bramm pushed back on Korr's timeline" produces real analysis. Those notes become the spine of the analysis phase in how to debrief a training exercise.

The evening before is also when you confirm the pre-work came back. The baseline assessment went out three to five days ago (pre- and post-training surveys covers the instrument itself); tonight's job is chasing stragglers, because a baseline collected during arrival eats the first fifteen minutes of your day. Load the encounter manager. Count the cards.

I'll be honest about why I care this much about the boring parts. Adam runs the table – he's a licensed professional counselor and a far better game master than I'll ever be. I'm a product manager, not a GM. The plumbing is the part of this project that looks like my day job, and morning-of prep fails quietly: you can improvise an NPC's voice at the table, but you can't improvise six missing motivation cards.

Can you split the day into two sessions?

Yes, and the cut point matters more than the split itself. The natural seam is the end of the first act, right after the team commits to its plan. Session one covers instruction, rules, the briefing scene, and the plan decision – about three hours. Session two covers execution, the finale, and the full debrief – about four and a half. The story cooperates with the calendar here: session one ends on a decision made, and session two opens with the team walking into its consequences.

The split you must never make is separating the debrief from the gameplay that feeds it. The gap between the game's end and the debrief is a 10-minute decompression break, not a week – the specific moments that make the analysis land are exactly the details a week erases. Protect that adjacency and the two-session format costs you almost nothing. The research corpus suggests it may even gain you something, since distributed practice beats massed practice for retention, and a few days between sessions gives the first half time to consolidate.

Both of our pilots ran as single days, so I'll flag the split as designed but not yet piloted. Still: if your calendar can't hold seven and a half hours, cut the day there. Don't trim the debrief to make it fit.

The checklist is the point

None of this is design work. It's printing, counting, and reading a document the night before while the interesting work – NPC dialogue, encounter balance – happens elsewhere. But a training day has two kinds of failure. The interesting kind, like a scene that falls flat or a group that won't argue, gets diagnosed in the debrief and fixed in the next revision. The boring kind – a missing card, a baseline that never got collected, a debrief with no notes to point at – can't be fixed at all.

The checklist exists so every failure you're left with is the interesting kind.