Player Who Read Every Rule Except Scheduling Poll Weighs In on Session Length

Oren Pratt filed 1,400 words on ideal session length Tuesday morning, roughly three hours before the fourth scheduling poll he was sent expired without his reply.

The document, sent to a five-person group chat that had not requested it, argues that a session should run three hours and forty-five minutes. It cites a supplement he does not own and a page reference he flags as "approximately," and includes a phrase, "decision-point density", that he defines twice and applies once.

The document does not mention the campaign's record: nine sessions have been held, and four ended after about a hundred minutes because the group could not confirm enough attendees to start the second half. Pratt has attended eight of the nine.

In session zero the table voted, by poll, to make a shared poll the official way to confirm a Tuesday. Four polls have gone out since. One succeeded, in June; Pratt's reply arrived four minutes after it closed. The other sessions were arranged by phone, by text, and, twice, by a housemate.

"I'm not opposed to the poll," Pratt said. "I'm opposed to being asked to vote on a session that hasn't been scoped. Session length is a rules question. You don't vote on a rules question."

Ada Rourke, who issues procedural rulings for a standards board that no member of the table has joined, ruled separately. "Session length is a matter of table standards, not attendance," Rourke said. "It is not subject to the poll. The poll is for attendance."

Together, the rulings leave session length answerable by neither mechanism, which Pratt calls an "open question" and a poll calls a failure to reach quorum.

At Tessa Caldwell's shop, the poll link sits in the backchannel just below a rules question about contested grabs. Pratt answered the rules question in ninety seconds, at 11:40 p.m., with a citation. The poll is still open.

Ada Gable, who lives with one of the players, has forwarded the link twice. "He'll read a nine-hundred-word argument about how a shield interacts with a mounted charge," Gable said. "The poll is underneath it. It's been underneath it since March."

Pratt is not a no-show. He is the most prepared person at the table, and his courtesy is genuine, which is why nobody presses him and why the poll keeps closing without him.

In Kiran's First Questions, I ask newcomers what decides how long a session runs. At this table, the answer is four adults refreshing a link.

The document ends with a proposal: that sessions end at the nearest decision point, regardless of the clock. In a follow-up an hour later, Pratt raised a question he says has been "overlooked in prior rulings": whether a poll reply counts as a free action or costs your reaction.

The poll, now on day forty-one, has three of five responses. It closes Thursday. Pratt has asked for an extension, which he has agreed to answer by email.