How to prevent time wasting in a session?

[CharlesRyan]

Each time someone comes up, I say "Marcus is up, Aranel's up next, then a monster, then Kayleth." People have notice of when they should be ready.

Yeah, this is a good one. If nothing else, train yourself to always call out two names for init. Bad: "Bob, it's your turn." Good: "Bob, your turn, then Ralph."

 

[Rel]

I think that all of Piratecat's suggestions are good ones. But I also think that you need to examine why it is that people aren't more engaged in your combats and the actions of the other players to begin with. Maybe I'm just lucky but my group of players seem very invested in each others success and they are a bunch of cheerleaders for whoever's turn it currently is.

This sometimes has just a bit of bleedover into the "well I think you should use your X power because look at how the bad guys are arranged over here..." but this happens rarely and when it does I shut it down fairly quickly by just asking the players whose turn it is, "So what is it you want to do?"

I just find the assertion, "As soon as the DM stops describing the encounter, as soon as you know what the monsters do, as soon as all the surprises are known, the encounter *needs* to end fast. It needs to be over because its reached the point of rapidly becoming minimally interesting except to the person currently taking their turn." to be rather bizarre. If the combats are meaningful, diverse and exciting then they are something to be reveled in, not hurried through.

 

[Rechan]

One of my favorite little tricks is that at least once per fight, when someone reduces an opponent to 0, I say, "Describe how you kill this guy."

Usually that gets everyone at the table paying attention to the description, for the sheer, "Yeah!" factor.

Also, if you are the DM and you see everyone starting to get restless/bored... DO SOMETHING. Have something happen. It's difficult to have something happen in a routine fight in a 8x8 room, but have something unexpected (and not one-sided) happen, like the roof collapsing, or a new NPC run through the room.

 

[Negflar2099]

These are all great suggestions (especially piratecat's suggestion about the DM sitting on the edge of the table - if only I had a big enough table to allow this). My group has struggled with this problem for a while now. We've tried stopwatches and hour glasses, we've had the players track initiative, we've banned (and then unbanned) out of character talk during combat. None of it seems to work so far but I haven't given up. On my next session I'm going to try the following things and see if they work:

1) More pre-prep on my part. I've found that nothing stops an exciting encounter faster than preparing for the thing. Between rolling and sorting initiative, opening up the monster stats in the compendium, noting monster hp, and setting out maps and minis setup takes a long time. By the time I get done my players are already bored and the momentum is all gone. That's why from now on I'm going to have everything set up ahead of time. It may seem like a no brainer but it's surprising how long it took me to realize this might be a problem.

2) A little digital assistance goes a long way. Between the compendium, PDF's of important books and the CB there are plenty of tools out there to help DMs keep the game going and believe me I use 'em as much as possible. But that said there still isn't a way to track stuff in combat (yet). That's why I made my own little excel file where I keep track of rounds of combat, monster HP and rather they are bloodied or not. I also set it up so that it sorts by initiative for me. That helped speed things up a lot.

3) Everybody decides together. This is a strange idea I had. Basically I found that choice paralysis was hurting my group. Everyone was taking several minutes to decide what to do. I can't get them to decide ahead of time (no matter what bonuses or penalties I've used). So I'm done fighting it. Instead I'm going to allow the entire group 2 full minutes to decide what their characters will do on their turns at the start of every round. While they are doing that I will finish setting up for battle and decide what the NPCs and opponents are doing. Then combat proceeds in initiative order as normal but (hopefully) everyone has by that point figured out what they will do that round. We haven't tested it yet but I'm hopeful it will work.

 

[slwoyach]

Egg timer. When the egg timer goes ding the character is officially holding his action until after the next character/monster goes.

 

[Bishop Odo]

Sounds like grade school, I know, but assign seats by quickness, separate the time wasters, and use the old Grenade under the table rule...you say it, it happens no matter what.

 

[Baron Opal]

Set aside an hour for snacks, dinner whatever before the game. We all have dinner together first and that gets all of the visiting done and out of the way before the game starts. That gives them less to talk about beyond the gaming itself.

That made a big difference for me.

 

[CharlesRyan]

A little digital assistance goes a long way. Between the compendium, PDF's of important books and the CB there are plenty of tools out there to help DMs keep the game going and believe me I use 'em as much as possible. But that said there still isn't a way to track stuff in combat (yet). That's why I made my own little excel file where I keep track of rounds of combat, monster HP and rather they are bloodied or not. I also set it up so that it sorts by initiative for me. That helped speed things up a lot.

I think you might be going in the wrong direction here.

When I prep, I get all the stat blocks and notes I need on a single sheet of paper (two at most), which I keep on a clipboard.

I use one of those magnetic init trackers that Paizo publishes, and, like I said, I have one of the players manage init.

And, as someone else suggested, I avoid looking up rules whenever possible. Unless it's critical, if I don't know I wing it. (Fortunately, I'm pretty good with the rules and so are my players, so it's rarely an issue.)

Between these three factors, I'm never opening books, flipping pages, or scrolling through documents. In the odd situation where I do so, I feel it really slows things down.

 

[Mercule]

1) More pre-prep on my part. I've found that nothing stops an exciting encounter faster than preparing for the thing. Between rolling and sorting initiative, opening up the monster stats in the compendium, noting monster hp, and setting out maps and minis setup takes a long time.

When I prep, I get all the stat blocks and notes I need on a single sheet of paper (two at most), which I keep on a clipboard.

These. A change I made a couple weeks back was to make sure I had stat-blocks pre-printed and on a single sheet of paper. It probably cuts 1/3 of the time and 90% of the nose-picking (dead time) out of a combat.

For anyone who cares, my process is to use the DDI Compendium to pull up the stats, and capture the image with One Note (other apps work fine, but this is what I have). I paste the image of all monsters needed for an encounter into Excel and bold outline one cell per monster next to the image of the stat block. Why Excel? Because it is an unlimited surface on the computer that I can, with a single button click, tell to scale to fit a single print page. I haven't had an encounter big enough that such scaling affected the legibility, but I could always go to a second page quite easily.

For initiative, I've discovered that a 3x5 notecard, cut in half, is the same width as the cards the CB prints off and close enough in height. I have a few I re-use and just write the critter's name on it and erase afterwords. I don't record the exact init number, because it really doesn't matter -- the only thing that does is the actual order.

I use some tiddly-wink type chits for marks, quarries, etc. and hand out colored beads for save-worthy effects.

 

[Rechan]

I just use 4x6 notecards for monsters. I like having them there to shuffle through when it's not my turn. Very easy to reference Defenses (always in the same place).