NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DinoInDisguise" data-source="post: 9439779" data-attributes="member: 7045806">I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what pacing is, and how it is managed within a TTRPG. Pacing is, at it's core, a response to the human attention span. Human's have an attention span of roughly 9 seconds. They can choose to refocus that attention on the same thing, repeatedly, for, on average, around 5 hours. These are just general guidelines, of course.Pacing is the DM incentivizing players to continually refocus their attention on the game being played, over their phone or other distractions. Almost every case of a bored player is caused by a pacing error.Often you see pacing described as high and low beats. This is a simplfied version of the concept. You do, generally, want to alternate between high and low beats, but that is not the extent of pacing and only doing that can leave other glaring errors. Tension building is another aspect of pacing, you see this in novels and how they are structured, but that can be ignored here. It's not really relevant to the point.A common example of a pacing error is the over narration of a scene. Going into depth, and describing every detail, is almost always wrong. If your narration exceeds around 9 seconds, you are asking the players to refocus on the same narration. Instead your pacing will be better if you narrate the basics and leave the specifics to questions from the players. The reason this is the case, is its easier to refocus on the answer to a question you asked than to maintain focus on a continued narration. In essense, the players are more invested in their question than your monologue.This can be extended into the idea of buckets, each bucket is a player. And you put chips representing time in those buckets. You put these chips in these buckets whenever that player is being engaged directly, when they have the spotlight. Anytime the DM is narrating, you are only putting those chips in the DM's bucket. A player that goes too long without a chip being added to their bucket, will lose interest and become bored.The entire point of my rambling is that pacing is independant of game mechanics. You can use mechanical aspects of the game to facilitate aspects of pacing. But those mechanics themselves are irrelevant beyond their ability to fill that role. Your example of "pacing" issues within 5e's mechanics are simply not pacing issues at all. They are perceived game balance issues, and are completely unrelated.EDIT: I could have addressed why this also doesn't apply to the rhythm of the story aspect of pacing. But I can do that later if needed. In short, it's largely the same reasoning. The rhythm of the story is largely disconnected from mechanical interactions.</blockquote>

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