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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Negflar2099" data-source="post: 4725758" data-attributes="member: 65944">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. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /></blockquote>

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