Pace of Play, Engagement and "Excitement"

Is class really a solid indicator as to player type? Superficially, Bards map to Socialisers, but I wonder how often that mapping is true. Particularly if you have players who want to stretch themselves out of their comfort zone. I can imagine a Killer who wants to min-max a bard to dominate battles and social interactions.

Yeah, I'd suggest there's some trends in class-based systems, but trying to take that too far is going to give a whole lot of false positives.
 

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But classes aren't just mechanics, there's also the perceived fantasy of the class 🤔

The problem is that there's a lot of variation in what that perceived fantasy is, especially with modern games with a lot of internal variation. I'd expect this both with D&D5e and subclasses, and PF2e and the various subchoices you get within a class.
 

It depends a lot on what players want and their expectations. For example, if someone came to D&D from Critical Roll, they will likely get bored easily with long combat turns.

But, a big part of the problem IMO with speed is not always with the mechanics themselves, but with players who are indecisive, unprepared or don't know the system well. Also GMs or rules lawyers who insist on spending a lot of time looking up/verifying the rules, instead of just making a ruling and running with it.

While you're not wrong, the flip side of that is that a GM who is too casual with the rules can teach players that their decisions lack weight, because its all about the GM deciding how things will go rather than their understanding of the rules. This is a constant sorepoint between people who are focused even moderately heavily on the game elements of RPGs and those who don't care about them much.
 

Though a class is an indicator of roleplaying needs, it's not necessarily an indicator of player type. You can be a Socialiser and a Fighter. You can be a Killer and a Cleric. Explorers and Achievers can be any class.
Not only that, but those preferences can change from session to session or even within a session depending on mood, external influences, amount of beer consumed, in-fiction elements, and so on.

This might be a difference from the video-game environment for one major reason: with a video game the player much more often gets to choose when to play, meaning the player is more likely to be in a similar mood as last time. With a typical RPG group the sessions are prescheduled, and the player shows up in whatever mood or frame of mind happens to be the case that day.
I think there's a separation here between what the GM needs to deliver for the player based on their class, and what they should do to serve different player types.
I'm not sure how, other than in generalities so vague as to be meaningless, a GM can try to serve specific different player types given how quickly and easily the same players can change types from one week to the next.

And even within a session. A cautious diplomatic player at the start of the session might, as and if the beers go by, turn into a raging killer player by the end of it. My partner is one of these. :)
 

Can player moods and needs change from session to session? Undoubtedly. Concedo. But surely they are not consistently inconsistent? Surely they trend towards a mean?
 

Regarding these questions, I'd be interested in hearing from those who can share what they've constructively done when:
  • Running a game at a con
  • Running school club games
  • Running one-shots
  • Running time-limited sessions (e.g. at most ~2-2.5 hours)
to keep things exciting, keep players engaged, and when pacing in a scene happens to be organically slow, in above situations.
I've never run school club games (I didn't discover roleplaying until I went to college) but for the other three categories, what I aim to manage is the level of tension the players are experiencing. Fights that look dangerous are the easiest way to raise tension, but they tend to soak up playing time, so I'm quite sparing about using them.
  • For one-shots, you need a fight early on so that the characters can learn what to expect from each other, but you don't necessarily need any ,more than that.
  • If the scenario is about finding something out, solving a mystery that isn't a murder, or calming down a social problem, then I frequently dispense with fights entirely.
Without fights, tension can be built with strangeness, specifically breaking what seem like rules of the setting. Here's an example, described in terms of the plot structure, rather than the events:

Earlier this year, the Occult WWII in India party were up in a tiny mountain kingdom, trying to find out what was really going on. They actually had accurate information, but did not entirely believe it because it seemed implausible. It was also socially and religiously unacceptable to the majority group in the area, although a minority group - where the unacceptable thing had happened - were fine with it. Nobody wanted to start a pogrom, because everyone was behaving like adults, but an acceptable public explanation had to be created.

As outsiders, not dominated by any one viewpoint, the PCs were acceptable investigators to all the locals. They went about it methodically, and found the shaman who'd created the situation. He was willing to confide in them, reckoning they would find out everything for themselves fairly quickly if he didn't - he'd had some foreknowledge of them. That was a means of keeping the scenario to one session.

The problem I had was how to manage the transition to the place where the unacceptability was concealed. The story took over from my thinking, and the shaman led the PCs to a spirit realm, quite close to reality, but apparently occupying the space of a large mountain between two valleys. That was new: physical reality had been quite solid in the campaign up to that point. The players understood, and acted accordingly; the truth became obvious, and the whole problem was dealt with to everyone's satisfaction.

That is, apart for one PC who agreed that this seemed like a case of ethically acceptable spirit possession, but was having trouble with his religious doctrine on the subject. That's a further plot thread, to be dealt with when a few other PCs have progressed their individual threads.
 
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