talking during combat

[DonTadow]

My view is that it's acceptable to discuss strategy right in the middle of combat because I don't expect all of my players to have the knowledge that their characters do. The characters are experts in strategy, they are heroes who have spent their lives training and fighting. I don't think Bob from Cincinnatti should be penalized for working at 7-11 to support his family instead of studying SunTzu's Art of War all week. Allowing the players to spend an extra minute to work up a strategy, almost makes up for what I would expect Bob's Grand Archmage of the North with 18 intelligence to decide within a mere 6 seconds or less.

OH come on.. we're not talking about coming up with army tactics to move into an occupied country, we're talking about players fighting some orcs. If my players can't discuss tactics for attacking the beholder before entering the room, then they surely can't do it during combat. I've seen a few debates recently about realism, and I've strattled the fence on them, but this is one ofthose debates that just seems obvious. IHOw realistic is a 10 minute conversation in the middle of combat.

Jim "Ok I am going to sneak and hide up to the orc king and try to still the keys from him off of his waiste. NOw bob I want you..."
Orc 1" Um could you hurry this up we really would like to get to our sacrafices"
Jim "One minute we're trying to decide if we should flank with our barbarian or our rogue"
Orc 2" Sure take your time, by the way how are the kids"

It just doesn't seem logical, reaslitic nor fun as a player. Plus it slows the game down considerably. I think of the combat I ran last weekend where the players have all switched bodies and must deal with the abilities of their new bodies. The encounter would have been uninteresting and boring if I let the players talk and discuss with each other what they could and couldn't do in the othe bodies. Instead, I ran by my normal rules and it made for the most interesting combat I'd been apart of.

 

[werk]

Me too. What he said.

I don't really have a lot of meta-game talk at the table.

That is what ruined the last group that I was a player in (10min+/rd), so I've squelched it pretty well in my campaign. We will occasionally pause to look up rules or discuss how something should work, but no strategerizing or anything like that. Role play it.

6 secs is just a limit for combat, during init.

Now, the thread asked for rules about talking in combat...

Speak
In general, speaking is a free action that you can perform even when it isn’t your turn. Speaking more than few sentences is generally beyond the limit of a free action.

 

[Patlin]

One of our group's favorite spells is Rary's Telepathic Bond. We've ruled that telepathy is so much faster than speech, it removes essentially all restrictions from player to player communication in combat. Until this is available, we do somewhat limit the ability of players to confer, but tend to err on the side of fun rather than realism.

Another case of players conferring occurs when the DM asks us what we want her sorceror to do. She created her own character since we are down to three players at the moment, and she usually has that character do whatever is suggested first by any of the players.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Now, the thread asked for rules about talking in combat...

Posted as the first reply.

 

[werk]

Posted as the first reply.

I saw it after i posted, what can I say, you rule!

 

[LeapingShark]

If my players can't discuss tactics for attacking the beholder before entering the room, then they surely can't do it during combat. IHOw realistic is a 10 minute conversation in the middle of combat.

Jim "Ok I am going to sneak and hide up to the orc king and try to still the keys from him off of his waiste. NOw bob I want you..."
Orc 1" Um could you hurry this up we really would like to get to our sacrafices"
Jim "One minute we're trying to decide if we should flank with our barbarian or our rogue"
Orc 2" Sure take your time, by the way how are the kids"

The characters and the players are not the same. If Joe from Cincinnatti leaves the table to visit the bathroom, or picks at a bag of cheetos, that doesn't mean his Wizard must pee on the orc's leg or eat fried-halfling-fingers from his spell pouch. When the accountant, the nurse, and the tire mechanic in Joe's apartment take 2 minutes to discuss some of the options they see on their character sheets or point out locations on the battle map; that doesn't mean that the fantasy characters have said or done anything yet. When players take extra time to discuss meta-game strategies, or to dial for pizza on a cellphone, or to talk about Maria Sharapova's diamond-studded shoes; time and combat is frozen in the fantasy world.

I don't want to make the heroes of the story think and act like non-combatant civilians from planet Earth year 2005. The characters are expert fighting heroes in a fantasy medieval universe, fictional supermen who stand face to face with goblins and elves on a daily basis. The conclusion of a 2 minute meta-game conversation between Wilma, Fred, and Barney in Cincinnatti, is the equivalent of what a magically-enhanced Fighter, Cleric, and a Rogue will do in 6 seconds without opening their mouths to speak a single word.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

This is strictly an outside observation, but from similar discussions like this I find that most people who have a problem with 'too much talking' are really referring to metagame talking, and not in-character talking....

Yeah this is how I see it too.

We allow IC talking, i.e. shouting orders/giving replies but discourage OoC talk especially stuff that exposes the bones of the combat system.

Then again I have a houserule that says you can't communicate or even die noisily when you are flatfooted...

 

[Gansk]

Did anybody see the most recent WotC Rules of the Game article? Skip contradicts the SRD by forbidding any talking outside of a player's turn.

As for myself, I allow any talking within reason on a player's turn, but a maximum of six words per round outside of a player's turn. This is a loose guideline - if a player uses eight words in a moment of forgetfulness, they are not vaporized. But it allows clerics to ask if anybody needs healing and get immediate feedback, fighters can ask if the wizard is going to blast this bad guy or that one, etc.

I also ruled that flatfooted characters cannot speak, but I think I am forgetting to enforce the rule!

 

[DonTadow]

The characters and the players are not the same. If Joe from Cincinnatti leaves the table to visit the bathroom, or picks at a bag of cheetos, that doesn't mean his Wizard must pee on the orc's leg or eat fried-halfling-fingers from his spell pouch. When the accountant, the nurse, and the tire mechanic in Joe's apartment take 2 minutes to discuss some of the options they see on their character sheets or point out locations on the battle map; that doesn't mean that the fantasy characters have said or done anything yet. When players take extra time to discuss meta-game strategies, or to dial for pizza on a cellphone, or to talk about Maria Sharapova's diamond-studded shoes; time and combat is frozen in the fantasy world.

I don't want to make the heroes of the story think and act like non-combatant civilians from planet Earth year 2005. The characters are expert fighting heroes in a fantasy medieval universe, fictional supermen who stand face to face with goblins and elves on a daily basis. The conclusion of a 2 minute meta-game conversation between Wilma, Fred, and Barney in Cincinnatti, is the equivalent of what a magically-enhanced Fighter, Cleric, and a Rogue will do in 6 seconds without opening their mouths to speak a single word.

I don't think that having your players role play out strategy before combat has anything to do with the players and characters and its a far reach to compare the two.

With your logic though, why even go through the combat? Why role play for that matter? If You are correct they are a fighter and a rogue and they obviously have experience fighting. They know how to flank people and avoid aoo and how to fight so that no one dies. Their base attack is +11, just skip the combat too while we're skiipping things. And why role play? I mean they obviously have a high intelligence and charisma of course all the NPCs tell them what they want to know. Let's just fastfoward through most of the game session right to the XP.

Dms run the type of game they like. Im fine with that. But dont justify the fact that you allow your player's to metagame by trying to say that player's shouldn't treat their character's ingame with intelligence and as more than just a character sheet. In my game my players are in character unless otherwise said so. THat's why I presumed they call it ROLE playing. Strategizing beforehand is just being smart about how your players play their role. If you assume they "know better about that" you might as well assume they know better about most role playing things in game.

 

[Infiniti2000]

DonTadow, you make good points, but still there must be some compromise. Requiring at most 6 seconds of real-time and only during your turn is clearly one extreme. Allowing an unlimited amount of time is the other extreme. Different groups have different ideas on what they expect, and this is in large part due to the variety of gamers. There are groups out there who are all RL combat veterans (we used to have an special forces veteran in our group looong ago), others are groups of high schools kids (I'm old so I can call them kids), and still others, like my group, are all working professionals out of the university for 5-10 years, with kids. So, in my group, if the DM said, "Shut up, your 6 seconds is over" It would go very far because our primary purpose is to get together with friends. If one player wants to take an extra 20 seconds, heck, even 5 minutes, to look up a spell, we let him. If another players takes the extra time to extoll the virtues of Moradin in a thick Scottish brogue (and he does very well at it) for a full minute, we let him. And we enjoy every second of it.

I have seen groups that require the spellcasters to know the spells they have prepared. And I mean know. There's no looking up the spell as you cast it to make sure you have the range, etc. right, nor are there allowances for "I assume you'd know the cure light wounds is a touch spell". Yes, that's when new gamers (particularly females) quit early because they can't possibly memorize all this useless crap, nor would they want to. As any good professional knows, you can't/don't memorize everything, you have references ready.

So, the point of me rambling is to just say what I think we can all agree on, and that is that there is a middle ground and it's up to every gaming group to find there own middle ground. Don't underestimate the importance of this, though, especially with respect to new members. Really strict and rigid time constraints are HUGE turnoff for new gamers.