Moving the game along

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

Well, I think if everyone is having fun then there's really no problem. One of the things I like best about an "old school" type of game is the emphasis on cautious exploration of unusual environments that invite thoughtful speculation, and coming up with a plan before leaping ahead. I like it a lot when players discuss their options and plans at length, and to try to speed this along would lose a lot of what I enjoy about these games.

And to be honest, sometimes if I haven't prepared a lot for a given session, or the players go off in an unexpected direction where I don't have anything prepared, I'm actively trying to drag out the exploration and discussion scenes to fill time!

Really, you just have to keep an eye on your players. If they are losing interest and disengaging from the game (checking their smartphone, playing with dice, doodling, etc.) then that's a sign that you should try to move things along to something more exciting. Unfortunately, different players find different aspects of the game more interesting than others, so you may end up with times when half of your players are bored and the other half are listening to you raptly and participating 100%. You can't always win!

Combat is another story, and should always be kept at a nice clip lest you lose the intensity of it. But even there, I'm pretty lenient about letting players discuss their plans and actions - I view it as an abstraction that covers the fact that the characters are right there in the heat of combat and the players aren't, as well as the fact that the characters are much more competent at fighting than the players. So OOC discussions sort of abstractly represent the characters' intuition and situational awareness that the players don't themselves have.

 

[fba827]

does the group (in character or out of character) have any sort of team leader ?
If not, perhaps rotate that responsibility -- someone who can "call the shots" on those simple decisions like opening doors and such. In an ideal world, the person who is team leader for a given dungeon crawl is the character most invested in the particular plot of the moment (i.e. if you're raiding an ancient evil temple, then the paladin could be the leader for that dungeon, if you're hunting the werewolves that killed the mage's family, then the mage should be team lead for that adventure, etc). of course, the responsibility should get rotated around with equal time for everyone...
but in general, the way I read the situation, it just sounds a lot like people are being too polite on some simple things and therefore every decision is taking group concensus when that is overkill for the really small choices.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

This is exactly the problem. We once spent about an hour and a half naming a boat.

Our group had this kind of problem, and a 3-minute hourglass fixed it. (The mechanical version didn't work. They had to see the sand physically falling.) But I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for an online game.

Anyway, we like to do some talking back and forth. But what we decided was the problem was going over the same ground again and again. So I flipped the hourglass as soon as I observed redundant discussion. The players could then either make a decision in 3 minutes, or if someone really had something new, they could talk about that, and the hourglass was reset.

Discussion can be fun. Redundant discussion rarely is, even in character.

Edit: Also, redundant discussion is often caused by trying to decide with insufficient information. Sometimes some mild prompting of, "I don't think you know enough to decide that yet," will get this point across. Leave it up to the group how to solve that problem, now that is has been identified.