Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7303806" data-attributes="member: 97077">Generally, I try to think of game play in terms of challenges - combat, exploration, social interaction. A challenge is any situation that the PCs can win or lose. Something is at stake that matters to them. At any given point in my game, the PCs are either in a challenge or in an exposition scene. That's a scene where I'm doling out information necessary to form the context of whatever adventures lay before them. For challenges, I welcome the players to take the time they need within reason overall (but to take their individual turns fast and don't hog the spotlight outside of combat). For exposition scenes, I try to dispatch with those as quickly as possible - get the information out there and move on to the challenges the players want to tackle. If a player wants to do anything that isn't these two kinds of scenes, which may be miscellaneous mundane tasks or scenes for color or flavor, we don't play those out. A brief statement will do. Sometimes even a "flashback" of sorts is just fine e.g. "Oh, when we were back in town, I bought a..." I'd much rather be lenient with that than spend time shopping. I hate shopping when I'm not gaming, so I'd really rather not have in my games if I can avoid it.While it's good to have breaks from challenges just to keep things varied, I try to keep the focus of my games on bold adventurers confronting deadly perils. It hurts the play experience in my view to spend too much time on mundane things. To underscore this, I recommend using XP rewards in ways that incentivize overcoming challenges and explaining to the players that completing more challenges per session will result in faster advancement. Assuming that is something they are interested in, you may see some more focus on getting out there and adventuring.Now, that is what I do generally. In certain campaigns, like the city-based one I'm running now, I handle tasks in town via a town task system that breaks the basic tasks an adventurer might want to do in town into a mechanic that resolves quickly while providing some meaningful choices and outcomes. Much of these are based on downtime activities, more or less. I set some kind of limit on the number of tasks that can be performed per PC per day and make sure that Team Villain's agenda is on a timer, too. So it's like rounds of combat and just as quickly resolved. Of course, spending too much time on this kind of stuff, while beneficial, just means that the antagonists get further along with their plans and are that much stronger when the PCs face them. (The town tasks are also not worth XP whereas pursuing adventure and its inherent challenges is!)</blockquote>

Verification