D&D General What wastes time at your table?

[Ralif Redhammer]

I swear, every time there will be someone that, after they've spent 30 - 60 minutes planning, will immediately proceed to ignore the plan and do their own thing, completely torpedoing the plan.

That's me. But also I find it funny when they come up with a plan then when they implement it, nobody actually follows it.

 

[Oofta]

One thing that I find that speeds up combat is to just roll all your stupid dice at one time. Buy a pound o' dice, they're cheap. Color code them and just roll all of them at the same time. Heck, when you know your turn is next, I'm even okay with you rolling ahead.

I had a PC in 3.5 that rolled IIRC 30+ dice for a single full round attack; if I hadn't color coded I think I'd still be rolling.

 

[R_J_K75]

Shopping has always been a time waster. 20-25 years ago we would take hours going on detailed and improvised shopping excursions. This was in an in depth Waterdeep campaign and our game style back then was to roleplay most every encounter. Sometimes it panned out and lead to cool encounters but most of the time it was a waste. Now weve streamlined purchasing equipment unless theres a reason to roleplay it. Matter of fact I created a table to handwave equipment and just make the assumption players take measures to equip themselve with mundane necessities.

 

[Malmuria]

Looking up spells and in some cases having to interpret how they would work in a particular situation. Players who cast the same three spells over and over and yet forget how they work

 

[aco175]

I keep getting this advice - but in reality even the longest seeming time to look something up is 3 to 5 minutes (and that is a high estimate). Usually, however, I give it about a minute and if I can't find it, then I just make a placeholder ruling. That works fine.

I can't imagine being satisfied as a player or a DM with "never look up rules at the table."

I cannot think of never looking up rules, mostly spells and conditions. I just tell a player to look it up while I'm having another monster go. This happened last session and now the players know what the fear spell does and that the caster has it, but, ok. Some chose to stay 30ft away while the fighter was getting beat on by the zombies and others using ranges spells instead of fear. Eventually they needed to get close and only one failed the DC.

I guess I could have let it be cast at 90ft and go with the; "This guy casts it this way and you cannot." "It's magic". But I want to play closer to the actual spell description so maybe I'll remember next time.

 

[Oofta]

Shopping has always been a time waster. 20-25 years ago we would take hours going on detailed and improvised shopping excursions. This was in an in depth Waterdeep campaign and our game style back then was to roleplay most every encounter. Sometimes it panned out and lead to cool encounters but most of the time it was a waste. Now weve streamlined purchasing equipment unless theres a reason to roleplay it. Matter of fact I created a table to handwave equipment and just make the assumption players take measures to equip themselve with mundane necessities.

I made the mistake of RPing shopping for some magic items because one of the down-time mishaps for a PC was that they had developed an enemy. So this other NPC was running around spreading rumors and I wanted to reflect it for that one individual. Of course I had to do the interactions for everyone that was shopping so the attitude stood out.

Then people had fun and wanted to do it every time.

 

[R_J_K75]

"This guy casts it this way and you cannot." "It's magic".

This line of thinking works once in a great while but IME do it too much and players will feel theres no sense in learning the rules if theyre just going to change. I do ad hoc rulings alot but make sure I look up ther rule before the next session.

 

[overgeeked]

I keep getting this advice - but in reality even the longest seeming time to look something up is 3 to 5 minutes (and that is a high estimate). Usually, however, I give it about a minute and if I can't find it, then I just make a placeholder ruling. That works fine.

I can't imagine being satisfied as a player or a DM with "never look up rules at the table."

You’d have lost you mind in the early early days. They made the rules up on the fly and guessed at the probability of things happening. There weren’t even rulebooks to look things up in, they had to reference a book on historical crossbows to find the range. That all sounds amazing to me.

 

[Blue]

If I could make some suggestions.

What used to waste a lot of time is me trying to figure out the initiative order for a fight since my brain gets overloaded with trying to put 8 numbers in order while listening to the players discussing strategy.

I used to just start writing them down as people tell me. "Okay, Rin has a 16" (writes "Rin 16" near the top of the sheet), "who's next? Nalya? You have a 4?" (skips down a bunch). "Mijelle, you've got a 15" (writes directly below Rin) ...

The only mental juggling is comparing the new one to an already existing list.

The even bigger time sink was players being surprised that it's their turn and taking two minutes to figure out what's actually going on in a fight and then another three minutes to decide on what they want to do with their turn, and consequently all other players getting bored and distracted and then being surprised that it's their turn... and so on until the fight is over.

Though to be honest, I don't do the above. I have partial index cards with everyone's names on them, and "Foe #1" and so on. Color coded cards for each player. When I used to use a DMs screen I had collored wooden clotghespins insead. When someone went, I just moved their clothespin to the end of the line so it was very obvious who was going next.

 

[el-remmen]

You’d have lost you mind in the early early days. They made the rules up on the fly and guessed at the probability of things happening. There weren’t even rulebooks to look things up in, they had to reference a book on historical crossbows to find the range. That all sounds amazing to me.

Well sure - but that is not the case anymore and if I went back to playing those rules, then I wouldn't bother looking up the rules that did not exist.

I never am like "I wonder if there is a rule for this, let me look it up!" More like "I KNOW there is a rule for this and we keep forgetting. Gonna take a minute to look it up."