Something that Needs More Consideration - Pacing

[Umbran]

That would be correct. If the players spend two hours discussing a course of action, then two hours pass in the game world. Time sensitive activities require that the players actually respond to what is going on with alacrity.

Ah. Sometimes I do that for specific effect, but generally I assume that the characters know a whole lot more about the world than the players (the characters live in the world, the players merely visit for a few hours every other week). I simulate this by generally allowing the players significant amounts of planning time, if they want it.

Plus, to be honest, not all of my players are tactical geniuses with an intuitive grasp of the numbers. Sometimes, they need a while to work things out.

If they start going in circles, or cannot agree for some reason, such that the planning ceases to be fun for the players, I'll move things along. If they are enjoying the intellectual exercise, it seems good to me.

 

[IronWolf]

I know what you mean, though- if a player is regularly involved for four hours while the other five players are bored stiff, something's not quite right, even if the involved player is different each time.

Yeah, this is a good case where it is probably wise for the DM to speed things along just a bit.

In our group there are some things that one player might want to do and take some time on that can be handled on our group's message board forums. Obviously this doesn't work in every case, there are many times some of the longer, more involved plots that only involve one or two characters that that will unfold in big chunks on out message board forums and then the highlights come out in our face-to-face game time.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Continuing with the 'degrees of abstraction' thought upthread, what is the major restriction on the GM preventing him from moving between levels of abstraction? I'd say it's the rules. And perhaps also custom, or the expected form of gameplay.

D&D has detailed rules for combat so it's expected that the GM follow them, playing out each individual 'to hit' and damage roll. Declaring a fight over and that the PCs have lost X amount of hit points and spells is Not The Done Thing. D&D has a pretty well set level of abstraction for combat. If you wanted a lot more, for a one-on-one duel against an arch nemesis, playing out each individual feint and parry then you're outta luck. If you want a lot less, say for a massive battle against wave after wave of chaff, then that's quite a tricky thing for the GM to adjudicate.

It's expected that a dungeon is played out room-by-room, corridor-by-corridor, fight-by-fight. For a GM to handwave a whole section, just declare X PCs dead, X amount of treasure found, etc would be Very Not The Done Thing. It would be very close to Not Being D&D At All.

That said, it's something I've experienced a few times. In a D&D oneoff, we went from level 6 to level 9, the GM simply declaring time had passed, so we could have the climactic final encounter against our old nemesis. Not having anything bad happen in the handwaved period seems key to making it acceptable to the players.

When I was running a systemless* superhero oneoff, the PCs got involved in a huge battle towards the end of the session. Prior to this I had been describing each fight in a fairly detailed, blow-by-blow sort of way, but for this I just declared the PCs to have lost, after a huge struggle. But then one of the players asked if they could please win instead! So I said yeah, okay, but you're all really badly beaten up.

<- Ratbastard GM!!!


*This is a huge advantage of systemless, that it's so easy to move between levels of abstraction, even in areas which have traditionally been rules heavy ie fights. It was around 2000, and I was heavily influenced by Amber at the time.

EDIT: Incidentally with the last fight I had a fair bit of difficulty explaining to one player that I was shifting the level of abstraction. I asked her what she was doing and she wanted to describe her actions at the blow-by-blow level. Understandable given that's how I had been handling things up to that point and that that is how rpgs usually are run. But not understandable at all given the scale of the encounter and how long it was obviously going to take if it were described in detail. At the time I struggled with my words rather trying to explain the concept using terms like 'summarise and 'fast forward' but I couldn't really get thru to her.

 

[Chainsaw]

Is the example of one player involved for extended periods of time while the others sit idle really a pacing issue - or more of a problem player issue that manifests itself by screwing up the pacing? Seems like the sort of thing that should be handled outside of the game by the DM and the player. DM says, "Look man, there are four other guys here, bored stiff while you chat it up for 25 minutes with every single NPC regardless of how immaterial they are. I just can't indulge it every time." The example could easily be about over-investigating a trap or whatever as well.

As others have said, the DM and the players need to be mature about taking cues for when this sort of thing is becoming disruptive.

 

[Haltherrion]

I heartily agree. It's great when one of the players makes sure things move along (although as a player who does do that at times, it can be touchy because it can put you in the position of bossing around other players). Clearly the ref can keep an eye on passing with subtle and not so subtle methods.

Most players will consciously or not appreciate a good pace to a game. Certainly makes for more memorable sessions of five interesting things happened during it rather than two or three.

My current campaign is more sandbox-ish than I have run in a long time. Much more so than my friend's last campaign which was pretty linear (it was a good game, just a different structure). I've given the players lots of choices which makes for lots of discussion and which makes for a very different pace than the previous campaign. I'm fine with it but I'm trying to keep a close eye on the players' tolerance of it since, in the end, our combats per session has dropped dramatically and while we like RP as a group, combat has always been an enjoyable part.

One things I've taken to to keep things moving along is abstracting some of the secondary stuff out of game. For instance, the players last session cleverly avoided a combat and in the process got a ritual that lets them excavate a mud filled room they want to get some inscriptions from. They have already seen once such room and the next session will be shorter than usual due to some travel conflicts so rather than have them travel to the place, read the inscriptions and move on as I might normally do, they will just have done that before the next session.

So to your specific pacing point, in addition to trying to keep certain activities to a reasonable amount of time, it is also possible to abstract non-critical elements entirely to keep things move.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Old school D&D has an important feature to speed up pacing - the caller. Completely outwith the hands of the GM, too.

 

[Chainsaw]

So to your specific pacing point, in addition to trying to keep certain activities to a reasonable amount of time, it is also possible to abstract non-critical elements entirely to keep things move.

This makes sense to me (as long as everyone's agreed to what's non-critical). In our game, we completely abstract everything that happens out of the dungeon: getting back to town, selling equipment, buying equipment, etc. Again though, it works well because we all agreed before hand that this campaign was going to be about exploring the megadungeon, not haggling with the merchants, marrying a girl in town, starting your own thieves guild or whatever.

 

[Doug McCrae]

As a player, about half of my problems with slow pacing have come from the GM and the other half from another player.

I gamed with one in the past who particularly troubled me because his play preferences almost make him a perfect storm of immobility. I'll call him Al because that's his name.

1) He loves to talk. He's the exact same IRL as he is in an rpg. I've seen him talk to a wrong number on his phone for five minutes. Mang does he love to talk. His ideal rpg session seems to consist of the PCs discussing theories about What's Really Going On with one another. Or a moral dilemma. Anything, so long as there is no substance to it at all and no actual facts. In a way he's a godsend for a GM because so little material has to be written. Like there could be a mystery, and one clue will be revealed. To Al, this is now the time to talk, to discuss theories. No need to gather more clues. No concept that we might only have a part of the picture.

2) Al is incredibly cagey with information. His major purpose as a PC seems to be to be the strictest bouncer possible at the door to the nightclub of knowledge. He's not just cagey with information to do with his own PC, personal secrets and stuff like that. No, no, no. He's cagey with everything. Like if an NPC tells Al's character where the adventure is, he will keep that a secret from the other PCs for the duration of the campaign. He clings to facts like a frikkin limpet.

3) Al and his characters trust nothing and no one. Everything must be questioned. The other PCs' claims to knowledge are always in doubt. At no point do we ever have enough info to take action, unless it came from his character. Obviously he won't tell the other PCs what that information is. Ofc not, that would violate #2.

The combination of these features essentially means he talks endlessly about nothing, just theories and questioning the validity of what the other PCs say.

 

[Hussar]

Great ideas everyone. Chainsaw - yeah, I can totally see that. Like I said, I've done the mega-dungeon thing, so, I can see it being a blast. I certainly had fun with it.

I'll give you an example of play grinding to a halt and see what you guys would have done.

In a recent campaign, I was playing a rogue (4e). The party was dungeon crawling and found a room where there was a trap - a pair of brazier's on tracks that would advance slowly down the room, shooting jets of flame between them at intervals.

Now, during the fight in the room, this trap was a factor and very interesting. But, after the fight was done, we wanted to disarm the trap so that if we had to run away, we had a clear line of escape. So, being the rogue, I proceed to disarm the trap.

I roll high and look expectantly at the GM. He looks back and says, "Well, what else are you doing?"

"Um, what?" I reply.

"Well, the trap isn't disarmed yet."

"Um, what? Err, did I fail my roll?" I'm confused.

"No, you succeeded, but the trap is still active."

Now, this proceeds a few minutes of fumbling around, with me totally confused. I detailed that we jammed swords into the tracks to block the braziers and... ummm... tried to break the mechanism... uhh ... uhhhh...

What had happened was that the GM had decided to turn disarming this trap into a Skill Challenge but hadn't actually informed us of this fact. So, the group (everyone else was just as confused as me) was playing one game and the GM was playing another.

We wound up spending about an hour fumbling around until we finally managed to disarm the trap. A trap, I might add, we didn't really have to disarm in the first place, but, we had disarmed it as a precaution. We could have just as easily left it.

Afterward, I questioned the GM about this, wondering what was going on. I was rather frustrated by this point and perhaps less polite than I might have been, but, I'd just blown about an hour on something utterly pointless, so, I wasn't really all that cheerful.

He replied that he wanted the skill challenge to seem natural. To announce it as a skill challenge would have broken immersion in his opinion.

And, really, I can see his point. It probably would have.

But, at this point, IMO, pacing is more important. Wasting an hour on something totally trivial is not worth preserving five minutes of immersion.

What is more important to you?

 

[Chainsaw]

Probably have to defer to an earlier comment about the DM and the players being mature enough to take clues from each other from time to time. If the DM's decided to improvise something (like say, turning a simple "I jam a piton into the rails" into a full blown, multi-step skill challenge) and it's not working out, he may need to tone it down. If the encounter/skill challenge's been improvised, there's a decent chance it may not be working out because it's flawed either in mechanics or presentation.

Note: I don't play 4E anymore, but I did play about ~100 hours or so last year/earlier this year. Like you, I can appreciate the idea of not announcing a skill challenge, but this can be tough to pull off if the DM's improvising. My group found them cumbersome (or contrived) sometimes even when they were professionally devised and fairly obvious.