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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5259969" data-attributes="member: 42582">I still don't agree. For example, it is possible for most of the table to be engaged in something that is not worth playing out. One example that I'm not myself familiar with, but that others have apparently experienced, is grind in 4e combat. One example that I am familiar with is dungeon-crawl style searching, marching orders, door opening procedures etc.You are assuming that the reason that the players spend time on things like this is because they enjoy it. My own experience is that they spend time on it because they learned to play from the Moldvay Basic Set or 1st ed AD&D rulebooks, or among players who were familiar with those rulebooks, and that certain ways of playing the game are conventional or received wisdom. I've never finished a session and heard the players talking about the session higlight being the twenty minutes it took to resolve the looting of the bodies and searching of the room after the combat finished. Nevertheless they get sucked into playing out this stuff because they just see it as expected.Like I said in my first post, I'm working on ways to just eliminate this stuff from my game (eg by having a lot of items and money be upgrades, or rewards from allies, rather than loot in the traditional sense, and also by following the 4e convention of allowing anyone to identify an item's properties out of combat). It's gradually working - and every half-hour saved in a 4-to-5 hour session is a reall payoff.As for the wandering monster point, I'd rather do the watch order something like this: if an encounter is a result of a skill challenge, then the PC on watch is determined at part of the logic of resolving the skill check that led to the encounter; otherwise, just roll a die to see which PC is on watch, and perhaps allow one player to spend an action point, or a relevant utility power, to have their PC be the one who is on watch.</blockquote>

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