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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7503141" data-attributes="member: 29398">And if these characters were real people doing these things they would treat every single situation as important as going in they'd have no way of knowing otherwise.  In hindsight yes, some things will be shown as less relevant than others...but that's hindsight, which doesn't apply to the here and now.And while 50% of the combat situations might not be relevant to the plot, 100% of the combat situations are going to be relevant to the PCs who are in the process of fighting through them.  Combat failures tend to have rather more dramatic consequences than do social failures or exploration failures.I took the liberty of inserting numbers in this quote so as to make it easier to break the different points out; because while streamlining out some of these will improve the game, taking out others will accomplish the opposite:{1} for this one, do you mean metagame debates or in-character debates?  If you're referring to in-character debates these are naturally going to arise as a function of playing characters as people capable of independent thought, and stripping these out somewhat curtails the players' ability to roleplay their characters.  If Falstaffe wants to go after the evil wizard next while Grog wants to take out the southern orcs and Halfred would rather deal with the bandit troupe in the east marches, not allowing the characters to sort this out among themselves - even if it takes all session - cheapens the game IMO.  Ditto for a smaller-scale debate e.g. do we go left, right, or straight ahead at this 4-way intersection of gloomy passages.{2} this one's worth trying to curtail to some point, though it'll never be eliminated as no DM (and a shockingly low percentage of boxed text) is ever going to perfectly describe every environment in such a way as to answer every player's potential questions.  That, and as a DM it's probably better to err on the side of giving too little info than too much (though either is bad) because giving too much info too soon can ruin the exploration and-or social sides of the game.{3} if the characters are to be played as if they were real people engaging with the dangerous situations we put them in they should at all times be worrying about the things you like to call gotchas - assuming they have any sort of self-preservation instincts - because the parts of the game world that adventurers tend to interact with are otherwise likely to kill them dead.{4} this one's a variable.  Sometimes NPCs are straight up and easy to deal with, other times they're not so simple, and sometimes they're actively trying to mess up the PCs; all based on these NPCs' own motivations and personalities.  It gets old fast if every NPC is dishonest or hard to deal with, but it also gets old fast if every NPC is an open book.{5} reducing or eliminating this makes for a better game, though maybe not any faster.{6} reducing or eliminating this makes for a better and faster game.Lan-"slow down and smell the flowers...and then harvest them and turn them into deadly poison"-efan</blockquote>

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