Pace in your game.

[Li Shenron]

As a DM, I don't do pacing. The players set the pace with their behaviour. Most of the times, the people I played with liked meticulous investigations, tactical combats and social interaction, and I don't see the need to fast-forward something they enjoy.

Only if I see the whole group stuck, clueless or undecided about how to continue, then I may push them forward. Otherwise I think the game should adapt to them.

There are definitely some players who are too afraid of making decisions, either because they don't want to be seen as prevaricating others, or they mistakenly think there is only one correct action to choose. Then it's up to me to remind everyone that the game is always fairly open ended, and not supposed to be a "guess or die".

 

[Umbran]

But I would say there is also a lot of DM pausing. Checking notes, working out how things work, dragging out interactions that have little meaning and generally moving at a glacial pace. I think that’s what shocked me more than the player decision making.

Yeah. I think in in-person gaming, we tend to cover over that with inter-player communication and table cross-talk, while in online games folks kind of sit silently and wait, and notice it more.

I'm just there to tell them what happens as a result of their decisions. The pace is in the player's hands.

In that kind of game, I still think the table is well-served if the GM takes on a facilitation role - we don't care what decision you make, but we help the players get there.

 

[John R Davis]

I do like a decent pace. I like to finish a session looking back seeing we have achieved some progress. It perhaps curtails some actual in character roleplay, but also stops a lot of faffing and spending 30 minutes haggling over the price of a cloak.
I haven't watched a lot of the cool kids playing games on twitch et al, but they do seem to play quite slow.

Each to their own

 

[el-remmen]

My online group claims to like the slow pace, though I think part of that is - as someone else mentioned - is no one wanting to step on others toes.

How slow? It has taken us 60 3-hour sessions over the course of 5 years to play out 15 1/2 weeks of in-game time.

 

[SteveC]

Oh my is this such a big deal to me, as both a player and a GM/DM!

I find that if a game doesn't have good pacing, I wonder what I'm doing there. Fortunately, when I'm running the game, I can pace things. I look at how much time is in the session and how much we have left, and try to make sure we get an interesting progression and can end on a high note. If you watch some good actual plays on YouTube or Twitch, you can see how that works. I really try to cut down things like shopping as much as possible.

When I'm playing, I try and move the game forward in an interesting direction as much as I can. I actively search out things to do. The thing that bugs me more than anything is when the GM/DM seems to go out of their way to not get to the point. I enjoy a good roleplay scene and relish some good interaction, but if it's pulling teeth to get there, I have to ask why I'm here.

The point for me, and for many other older people with job/relationship/family issues is that playing RPGs is a luxury. There are so many more important things that I could do, and in fact need to do, in my life that I want gaming time to matter. I use playing RPGs to relax and recharge to make all of those other life things easier, and when I finish a session and didn't have something interesting happen (and I'm painting with a really broad brush here) I think of all the things I could have been doing instead.

Now when I was younger? Spend an entire weekend playing and drinking Mountain Dew! Now? Let's do something interesting, please!

 

[Umbran]

How slow? It has taken us 60 3-hour sessions over the course of 5 years to play out 15 1/2 weeks of in-game time.

That sounds like it works out to to be about 2 days of in-game time per 3-hour session?

That doesn't sound so bad, unless there are also long stretches of time you elide over for travel or recovery or something.

 

[el-remmen]

That sounds like it works out to to be about 2 days of in-game time per 3-hour session?

That doesn't sound so bad, unless there are also long stretches of time you elide over for travel or recovery or something.

Personally, I love an opportunity to say something like "Several days pass as you. . ." (whatever it is the players tell me they want to do), but I guess like some others, I let the players set that pace and give me opportunities to move time forward.

That said, I generally only speed up time that way for a day or two at a time at most for travel. For me travel and what can happen during it, is a big part of the game - so i don't like to gloss over it too much and at the very least use it as a chance to spend 3 minutes setting the stage or establishing some element of the setting via narration before moving back to a more granular perspective as the PCs engage with whatever was described (or don't and we move on further).

Downtime is another case entirely and I do try to move that forward as much as possible - but my group rarely wants to take more than 1 or 2 days of that.

All of that said, I don't typically try to push the session to particular high point or event by the end (unless it is very very close) and we very frequently end mid-combat (which I personally like doing - I know that is a controversial opinion around here) b/c as I mentioned in another thread, I am not one to ever handwave the results of a combat just to make it end faster.