Wednesday, 9 June 2021

You Can't Stand Still

In my experience, the single biggest cause of the game getting bogged down is simply player inertia, generally caused by decisions simply taking a long time. Part of that is that PC groups don't as a rule have a nominated leader (and nor should they), part of it is a lack of an obvious right thing to do (a feature, not a bug), and a large part of it is a simple lack of urgency - there's no need to take a decision, there's the fear of taking the wrong decision, and so they just wait.

The solution to this is fairly simple, at least in concept: apply that sense of urgency. If it's clear that a decision, any decision, is better than simply not making a decision, then there's suddenly an incentive to get on with things.

In D&D, my solution to that is mostly the use of the wandering monster, coupled with a clear statement that such encounters are a bad thing - they don't carry treasure and they don't grant XP. So you do need to get moving, because if you just stop then trouble will find you.

The next step to that is to reintroduce the formal Turn structure that older versions of the game had, where time is split into 10 minute blocks and the party is expected to do something (and, indeed, each party member does one thing) in each block of time. Which gives a nice, clear clock for events. I haven't got to that yet...

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