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Liquid Awesome
Kid Charlemagne said:This is very, very true, though sometimes its because of what delericho brings up - waiting till your turn to see how things stand, and only then figuring out your action. I run a pretty big group right now (8 PC's with 3 cohorts) and I always try to give a "who's on deck" notice as I run through initiative ("Jade is up, Dante will be next, and then Callum").
[tangent]I do this as well and it helps. But I've also noticed that this is going to vary by where different players fall in the turn order and the variety of combatants. If your turn order looks like this:
Player 1
Player 2
Player 3
Bad Guys
Player 4
Player 5
then I would suspect that Player 4 will have more changes to take into account than Player 3 did because the tactical situation may have changed considerably on the bad guys turn. Now what if your bad guys are not all "off the rack" orcs? What if it's some Orcs, some Worgs and an Orcish lieutenant? And they have different places in the initiative order? Like so:
Player 1
Worgs
Player 2
Player 3
Orcish Lieutenant
Player 4
Orcs
Player 5
This results in the tactical situation changing between most players turns so they have to absorb those changes and then react in whatever manner they see fit. So I'd expect for players to need a bit more time to decide their course of action. Also some character classes will "shape the battlefield" more than others. You may have known exactly who your Fighter was going to charge on his turn until the Druid in your party cast Entangle right before it got to your turn. Now you need to adjust.
Now I'm a tactical player and I enjoy complex tactical situations. So that doesn't bother me all that much because meaningful tactical choices for myself and others that I play with are a big part of what makes the game fun. But others may differ on that.
One thing I encourage is for players who don't enjoy having to make those kinds of choices to limit their choices to as narrow a set as possible. So don't play a fighter type with a wide variety of complex moves. Play a fighter type that hits hard well and just default to that most of the time. Don't play a Wizard, play a Sorcerer. Because it's easier to choose between 5 spells than it is to choose between 12.[/tangent]