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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3284896" data-attributes="member: 38357"><img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> I find that statement highly amusing. In my experiences with AD&D and 3.x the cyclic initiative system is much, much slower than declare-then-resolve. I will freely admit that this has everything to do with how the players deal with the system, but it's been so constant that I have to feel that the system is at least partly to blame...Now in AD&D there where penalties laid out for "delay of game" in terms of declarations. Honestly I was always pretty lenient in that regard, and so where most other DMs I knew. However, woe be to the player forced to admit that he didn't know what his character should do, because he hadn't been paying attention! I'm tempted to bring this kind of pressure to bear in my 3.5 game, but then I'm also prone to thinking that may well be a really bad idea. How is a player likely to react if in response to his "What where we fighting, again?" by skipping his action? Or, even more extreme, if I decide that if you don't have your basic combat stats (like, say, the total attack bonus with the weapon you use every single round...) recorded on your character sheet and need to stammer ever-increasing numbers at me until I say you've hit... then, well, you don't hit? I have one player who tends to call "At least a ##" before he actually does all his math... How about just taking the first total you call as your final total (Well, bar the actual die roll... You still need to call natural 20s and 1s, as well as critical threats...)?The other time-wasting issue is taking back actions. Especially movement. Typically a player will "step through" his movement, and then back up to the last square if a possible AoO occurs. So you can have a player trying 4 or 5 routes trying to avoid taking an AoO... And counting diagonals always seems to cause confusion. In AD&D we always used to handle (almost) all movement as simultaneous at the start of the round. There where some exceptions where part (or all) of a character's movement had to take place after attacks, but usually the DM would just adjudicate where everyone ended up based on their declarations, and then attacks would get rolled. I've tried not letting the players move their own minis in the past, but honestly it's more of a PitA than it's worth; drawing an AoO still turns into several minutes of the player trying to argue that the PC could reach that square some other (safer) way, followed by changing actions completely...</blockquote>

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