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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nevvur" data-source="post: 7381265" data-attributes="member: 6783882">Those are topics I touch on during session 0, and no two tables have been exactly the same. I treat the latter question as a simple majority preference. The former, I simply tell people I expect them to be planning their actions in advance and hope for the best. I might remind them of this before an intricate fight, or after one that felt more sluggish than it should have. If someone is seriously taking forever on a given turn, I'll suggest they take the dodge action, but across 150ish sessions, I've never penalized a player for taking too long.I'm not running a timer in the back of my head or anything, but indecisiveness begins to irritate me around 10 or 15 seconds. I'll probably say something at 30 seconds if the player's intent remains obscure. Ideally their entire turn will take no more than 1 minute to fully resolve, but there's nothing unusual about spending extra time examining a spell description or asking for a ruling on a niche situation. Doubly so when the combat arithmetic changes right before your turn comes up!For the record, my "15 second turns" remark above was borderline hyperbole. I appreciate it when my players handle their business quickly, but keeping up that rapid pace for an entire combat would be, to me, the equivalent of doing a speed run of a video game as opposed to playing it normally. My main point was just that rapid pacing on a meatbag fight can make up for the lack of interesting tactical options. My current group is meeting online on Roll20. It's a combination of long time gaming buddies and some players I met through LFG venues who are quickly becoming friends. They're all very experienced with 5e. They've been focused and responsive, so lacking body language/other visual cues, I assume they're engaged when I run combats. No noticeable problems with player indecisiveness. During session 0 they agreed that OOC strategizing would be permitted for the first few sessions as everyone got to know one another and people settled into their roles. These days they're limited to IC strategizing while in initiative, but I'm not draconian about enforcing the limitation, and pretty generous about how much they can say in a turn. It's mostly just gut feelings, not hard and fast rules. No one has questioned me cutting them off the few times it's happened. Tier 1 DM power: cast Silence at will.</blockquote>

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