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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9796819" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Yeah, I find it helps a lot. Another thing that helps is when you do prompt the players for an action, prompt a specific player instead of the group as a whole. Much like how in CPR training they teach you not to say “someone call an ambulance,” but to tell one specific bystander to call an ambulance. When you ask the whole group what they do, there tends to be a pause while everyone waits for someone else to be the first to speak. Then once someone does speak up, it’s often to ask the other players for approval on their suggestion, and you get a bit of above-table discussion while everybody tries to negotiate what their next action should be, which if you’re lucky might eventually result in a declarative statement, but at least as often just spirals into waffling until they all kind of shrug and vaguely suggest something highly noncommittal. But, if you ask one specific player what their character does, you usually get a much more prompt, much more decisive response, which you can add to a to-be-resolved queue while you ask the next player what their character does. Do that for each player in turn, then work your way through the resolution queue, rinse, and repeat. Way more efficient.Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Personally, I feel like cyclical initiative makes this even worse, because players often check out until their turn comes up, and then you have to remind them of information they should have already known if they had been paying attention on the other players’ turns leading up to theirs. More dynamic initiative systems can help keep players on their toes because they don’t know from one round to the next when they might be called upon to act. Though dynamic initiative systems can have other problems, so it’s always a tradeoff. I can’t imagine any initiative system feeling great to run in a pickup group like at a con game.Makes sense.Yeah sounds like our pacing is probably similar on average then, just different top speeds.</blockquote>

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