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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 597264" data-attributes="member: 59">My group and I played today, and I noticed that play seemed to slow down to an almost glacial pace when we got to the dungeon.  The problem's mostly with the party and myself, not with the module (Of Sound Mind, I've read it about 4 times now and I'm convinced that the site-based portion of it shouldn't bog down like this) — in role-playing situations with NPCs and among each other, there's a pretty good level of energy, but once they got underground, they were over-cautious almost to the point of silliness.  Room by room, they sent the dwarf (b/c of his darkvision and hp total) in first to scout, if he said it was clear, they all went in and rummaged around a bit.  At the first sign of trouble, they left.  I don't mind the caution so much, but it's the repetitive m.o. that really gets me, as well as the fact that things grind to a halt.  Some things I noticed:* I was sketching out rooms for them (at their request), which took some time, as I was converting from a 10' scale to 5' scale.  I think in the future, they can map for themselves if they must know what things look like.  I'll only worry about drawing in-depth maps during combat, not for simple room exploration.* Memorize more room descriptions and contents.  Rather than reading it verbatim from the module, paraphrase.  Be more prepared with answers to odd and unexpected questions.* I think the party's scared to death of dungeons because they have no proper rogue (Dwarf Ftr1/Clr1, Human Pal1, Human Brd2, Halfling Mnk2, and Human Nec2).I guess what I really want to know is how do other people keep play moving in a dungeon?  How do you instill a sense of urgency and immersiveness but keep the pace of the game up?  We had some pacing issues in combat, too, but that largely came out of all of us growing into the rules (I'm familiar with the rules, but there's a lot of little things that I'm still learning, and naturally, all of these come up very frequently, whereas things that I know cold never appear at all <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />.  And in the second combat of the session, things moved much more quickly than the first).  Is this a common problem?  I don't want to discourage caution, but I'd like to at least make things a little bit more urgent/cinematic/tense.  Thanks,tKL[Edit — clarified where the problem is.]</blockquote>

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