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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5256682" data-attributes="member: 18253">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.</blockquote>

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