When do you make your action choices?

[S'mon]

I'm pretty much always ready to go when my turn comes up, having formed a plan in between the enemy's last action & my own. If the enemy goes right before me that might be slightly harder, but I don't like playing very complex PCs anyway. As DM I have to think on my feet and act immediately* to keep the game moving, I do the same as a player. Although as DM I rarely worry if my monster actions are sub-optimal; as a player I don't want to let the side down.

*Roughly once in every 10 sessions or so there's a battle where I as DM have to take a moment to think before I have the monsters act. This is usually where it's a complex battle & I'm playing very intelligent, tactically minded monsters with complex abilities, who wouldn't do anything stupid.

 

[Riastlin]

Like the others have said, I try to plan ahead and am always calculating my move (often changing during the round based on what happens). That being said though, sometimes the guy going before you (be it an ally or an enemy) simply messes things up. Or sometimes, you realize that the monsters are not as tough as you thought they were.

I had a recent encounter where the party had 6 flying creatures coming at us from all sides. Most of them had drifted into my Close Burst 3 area for my level 5 daily. When the warden came up right before me I asked her if she could move the one that was out of range into the area. She says yeah as long as she hits. *Roll. Hit.*

DM: It dies.

Warden: Oh, uh, well that's my turn me.

Me: Minions? Shoot. Uhh. . .

Seriously though I'm usually ready to go pretty quickly, but as [MENTION=65726]Mengu[/MENTION] pointed out, the higher up in level you go, the more things there are going on. Of course, its even worse when you are playing a runepriest and you have to go through a nearly identical analysis on each player's turn. "Did you count the +1 because its adjacent to me? What about the +2 from this effect? Did you add in the +2 to damage from my heal? Oh you rolled an 8 on your save, well that's good because you are adjacent to me and bloodied, so you make it. Would a 24 have hit? Did you count the +2 to defenses I'm giving you? Sorry, I'll shut up now."

 

[Saracenus]

It's great when players are ready to go on their turn. But in D&D Encounters (DDE) sometimes that is way to much to hope for.

As a DM and player I have been teaching players to roll their attack and damage dice all at once. Sometimes just getting a player to do that is a big time saver.

As a DM I call out imitative turns and let the next person know they are up soon so they start concentrating on what they are going to do.

As an organizer I have started putting up resources for players (Tent Cards, TheWeem's condition cards are awesome, etc.)

I try to pair experience players with newer ones to show them the ropes. My wife is teaching a very new player, Jessica, right now and she is now consistently rolling attack and damage dice together.

Now we need to help her understand all the ways she can get Combat Advantage so she can maximize her lethality as the party rogue.

For me personally, it depends on the intensity of the game. In DDE, I might wait until there are one or two PCs ahead of me in the initiative order before I make a decision.

DDE is really a training ground for a lot of new players.

Personally, if I am playing something like Ultimate Dungeon Delve (which is the pre-cursor to the new Lair Assault program) where I am operating under a time limit I will plan my next actions when I end my turn. I will even pre-roll my attack and damage before my turn happens to speed things up.

Convention games vs. home games also will change my speed dial.

My two coppers,

 

[Doctor Proctor]

[MENTION=65726]Mengu[/MENTION] - Great explanation of how a Paragon turn can wind up taking a lot longer.

I played a Paragon level campaign using a Dragonborn Sorcerer with the Dragonfear option. I also went with a lot of blasty powers, since most of the rest of the party was single target or used Burst 1 attacks (Bard, Monk, Warlock, Barbarian and Fighter).

So, a typical turn for me took a long time, but not due to be being unprepared. In fact, I was probably the most tactical player in the group, and would usually be developing plans literally as soon as my turn was over. But when you minor Dragonfear, which basically hit the entire encounter, and then use your regular action to do a Close Blast 3 or 5 on 3+ enemies, and then Action Point to do it again, things take awhile. Even rolling against multiple targets at once (I had 4 dice sets, which is all I could really easily manage) along with with the damage dice only helps so much. If your Dragonfear hits 8 guys, who all have different defenses, it takes awhile to calculate.

And then once you do figure out who that hit, you have to take into account on the subsequent attacks that now some of the guys are granting Combat Advantage from Dragonfear (as well as somehow marking the ones you hit so that everyone knows they're granting CA, have a -2 to hit and are marked). So even though I use CB and power cards, I still have some extra math to do (or the DM, depending) to take into account the additional mods from status effects. And then do that twice, because I used an Action Point.

Contrast that with our Bard, who typically just used Jinx Shot every round: "*Rolls for Jinx Shot* Ah, I missed. Anyone need heals? No? Okay, that's it for me." He never really planned his turn out ahead, but because he basically just spammed his At-Wills and rarely used Encounter or Daily powers (don't ask me why...), his turn still went pretty fast. But you can't always just make universal judgements about how fast something should be as players get more and more powers, because there can be vast differences between even how optimized characters will play out, just because of the nature of what they are capable of doing in a turn.