Wow. Just. Wow.
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Eight minutes per person is insane.
We have a couple of guys in the group who are dependably slow. We have taken to assisting them in their decision-making process...
Wow. Just. Wow.
<snip>
Eight minutes per person is insane.
Dispel everything and all the mods are gone, easy-peasy. Variable round duration spells are easily monitored with polyhedrons used as countdown trackers.
Part of what causes the problem is the "everything is a spell" design structure of 4Ed. In previous editions, most of your modifiers were either right there on your sheet (your sats & magic), conditional due to a combat maneuver, or from a spell- usually cast by one of the 2-3 casters in the group or 1-3 enemy casters.
In 4Ed, every character on the battlefield- or close enough to it as doesn't matter- can impose modifiers or conditions that need to be tracked.
In a sense, its one rep forward, one step back.
One thing to not forget as well, is how these status changes are handled.
Something that is +X this or -Y that can be fiddly, but, with a bit of prep (like using status cards/chits) can be pretty easy to track.
Cast Enlarge or Polymorph and things get a whole lot trickier because so many different things trickle down.
Yes I have a player who uses MapTools when he DMs and he swears by it.Oo, yeah, forgot about the polymorphing thing. Yeah, that can screech a game to a halt. Totally appreciate any player that takes the time to figure out before hand a few stock shapes and what the new stats will be be.
Maybe my 4e issues aren't as pronounced because I play on Maptools. The framework we use tracks 90% of the status effects we need to worry about. Drop a quick note on the battle map and you're good to go. To be fair, I have seen a bad guy with 9 status effects on him after the first round. It's pretty funny because the framework we use places each status effect in one of 9 grid points on top of the mini. So, basically, the entire mini is nothing but status effects.
But, that's also not all that common either. Without the computer tracking this stuff though, I could see how that could get really hard to track.
Do you use status cards or something similar? That might help a lot. Just chits with status effects that you can place under the mini. Maybe a status track sheet on the side marking down everything and tracking it. That wouldn't be hard to make.