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Post by spin on Feb 8, 2021 23:44:31 GMT -5
How fast does your game run? How fast does combat run? Or how long does it take to search a room or decide what way to go at an intersection in a dungeon? Do your players debate every decision as it comes up or do they have a plan that they follow and only tweak if needed?
What do you do to help your game run quickly?
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Post by Death Even XIII on Feb 10, 2021 12:23:30 GMT -5
I like the game and combat to run as fast as possible. My players do not spend a lot of time debating things and have devised a plan, such as go right at every intersection, if they leads you in a circle, then tweak, rinse and repeat. The biggest thing I have done to help my game run quickly is to choose my friends wisely. I just don't warm up to indecisive people and I don't invite them into my life. I just consider people that are indecisive to be bad influences. I didn't want them around my children and I don't want people like that around my grandchildren. I always opt for being able to make decisions and if it cannot obviously be made quickly, then you go get the information you need to make a decision. If it is not worth doing the digging, then it is not a decision that needs to be made.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 13, 2021 7:30:51 GMT -5
There is no real way to make a game run fast when doing a play by post game. I wish all my pbp players could game with me face to face. I like to run a game where the speed varies. Some of it can be quite leisurely and we joke around and have a lot of fun, then it comes to other parts of the game especially to combat and encounters like when they are being chased or when they are giving chase. I like to run that at a breakneck pace as fast as humanly possible and it really heightens the tension and leads to deep immersion in the game to do that.
When players get used to making decisions it can all go extremely fast and players are amazed at how much territory you can cover in even a really short 3-4 hour game session. For me I consider 6-7 hours as being a medium length game session and my preferred length game session is 8-10 hours. I like it when the players triage a dungeon, where they use the clues I toss out to know when to spend time searching and when to go "OK, nothing of interest here." I try to give enough information so that good players run like they have a spidey sense that tingles when something could be interesting.
I like it when players have standard practiced actions so that when something happens they are not doing the deer in the headlights thing, but they are combat ready and know what they are doing. I like it when players go into a dungeon and they have a plan of attack for the exploration and so they do not dither at intersections or other things that could lead to more random encounters.
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Post by Gar Guz on Feb 14, 2021 0:25:59 GMT -5
As a player, I like a fast game, I hate it when people "dither" and waste a lot of time. When I sit down to game I want things to happen. I tried 3E and after a three combat for what could have been handled in 20 min I swore off all modern forms of D&D. I thought AD&D was bad, but I found out it could get worse, a lot worse.
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Post by youngbuck on Feb 21, 2021 18:23:58 GMT -5
I would also say, as a player, I like a fast moving game. When so many of my contemporaries have their noses glued to the screen of a smart phone, you need the game to move fast enough that not putting the smart phone away will get you killed often and quickly. Getting my generation to focus on anything in person is a puzzle. People sitting right next to each other texting instead of talking is IMO insane. I guess I was born to the wrong generation.
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Post by hengest on Aug 9, 2021 23:51:26 GMT -5
I like to think my future game would run reasonably smoothly, with joking and stuff, and that I would be prepped and awake enough to run combat at a reasonable or even quick pace, although I don't even dream of the lightning pace that The Perilous Dreamer describes. I doubt any of this would happen, but I hope so. As a player, interminable combat makes me want to leave the table and never come back, and I also don't particularly enjoy "phone-it-in" role-playing, like when no one cares about it but there's an obligation to chat with some NPC in-character. To me those are totally needless and painful parts of a game.
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Post by Traveroark on Sept 8, 2021 21:29:53 GMT -5
As a ref, I like the game to go really fast, the less time my bright players have to think, the better for me.
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Post by restless on Sept 9, 2021 9:40:52 GMT -5
I ran my first game in almost three decades this last weekend, and I was glad to see that I still run a pretty quick game. We got through almost all the material I had prepared for the one-shot in about six hours. We kept it pretty fluid, and that included some investigations, exploration and interactions with several locales, a group of humanoid monsters rather than fighting them, and dealing with two hauntings, one of which spread over multiple encounter areas. I was pleased.
What I'd love to see is a thread on is game prep. How long does it take everyone to prep? I've seen people say it's about one hour of prep for every four at the table, and given that I way overprepare, spending about a 1:1 ratio of time on prep to game. That's a a recipe for burning out as a DM (and why I hadn't run a game in 29 years), so I'd love to see how people prep.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 9, 2021 11:13:37 GMT -5
As a ref, I like the game to go really fast, the less time my bright players have to think, the better for me. I really agree with this, when you have one mind trying to entertain 3 or 7 or 20 other minds, speed is a good thing, because it helps keep them from out thinking you and when they are you can recover better. If you can go really fast and your improv is strong you can keep them off balance and they don't have time to fall into being nit picky. IMO it forces them to play like children, have fun and not be critical. It is an immersive tool IMO.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Sept 9, 2021 11:15:03 GMT -5
I ran my first game in almost three decades this last weekend, and I was glad to see that I still run a pretty quick game. We got through almost all the material I had prepared for the one-shot in about six hours. We kept it pretty fluid, and that included some investigations, exploration and interactions with several locales, a group of humanoid monsters rather than fighting them, and dealing with two hauntings, one of which spread over multiple encounter areas. I was pleased. What I'd love to see is a thread on is game prep. How long does it take everyone to prep? I've seen people say it's about one hour of prep for every four at the table, and given that I way overprepare, spending about a 1:1 ratio of time on prep to game. That's a a recipe for burning out as a DM (and why I hadn't run a game in 29 years), so I'd love to see how people prep. Great to hear that your game went well. Awesome and 6 hours, almost no one plays that long anymore. As I have mentioned elsewhere I do very little prep, sometimes none at all.
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