TTRPG sessions under 90 minutes have zero combat about half the time. Obviously a lot can happen in ninety minutes. A fight, however, mostly isn’t one of the things.
Add an hour to the session and the no combat share drops to about a third. Keep adding and it keeps falling until we get to the 3.5 to 5 hour session mark where we see only 20% of session have zero combat. It’s one of the steadier lines in this whole data set and it intuitively makes sense - the longer the table plays, the more likely our adventurers find themselves drawing swords.
Calling back to a previous post, we said 28% of sessions that never roll initiative. Part of that story is further revealed here.. a good share of those are the short nights.
However, the marathon sessions break the curve. If you play longer than 5 hours, counter intuitively, the share of no combat sessions climbs back up to one in four. We had certainly assumed the longest sessions would be the fightiest but that does not appear to be the case.
My only guess here is that these long sessions are those lazy all day games, where no one has anywhere to be, and the party inevitably spends an hour naming the inn they just “acquired.” But just a guess.
Half of the shortest nights, a quarter of the longest, and the stabbing concentrates in that four hour evening.