Your Attention Level During Online Games?

[Retreater]

Not sure that follows. We're all mega system nerds in some ways, but that's tended to speed up our games. Its probably got more to do with the tendency to nit-picking which we only have when it looks important.

It's one guy who will start a 5 minute conversation to get a +1 bonus that he doesn't usually need. It's the other player who corrects the GM and forces us to backtrack. It's the necessity to look up feats to allow us to move an extra 5 feet if we get a critical on an Athletics check to swim.
The game is drowning in minutiae. It's worse in Pathfinder 2 than when we take occasional breaks to play one shots in other systems. But it's almost always there.
And in my limited time on earth, I don't think I can do it anymore.

 

[payn]

I don't know what is our average combat length, but I can say that we just reached 10th level. We play almost weekly and were 6th level a year ago. We started this campaign almost exactly two years ago in May 2024. We're at the midpoint of the Adventure Path.
At my preferred pace, we'd have completed it by now.

I ran 5 or so APs in the PF1 era. Usually ended around level 14 after playing bi-weekly for 4-5 hours for 1.5 years. While my sessions times were a little longer, per month it was a little less. Hard to imagine playing for two years and only reaching level 10 playing weekly...

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's one guy who will start a 5 minute conversation to get a +1 bonus that he doesn't usually need.

Yeah, we can't be bothered with that nonsense, even if a +1 has more heft in PF2e than a lot of D20 based games. Someone might get fussy about saves since one step of difference there can make some significant difference.

It's the other player who corrects the GM and forces us to backtrack. It's the necessity to look up feats to allow us to move an extra 5 feet if we get a critical on an Athletics check to swim.

See that's the kind of stuff people look up before they're doing it if they aren't already familiar with the feat. And we have our feats at hand (mostly because we're using HLO, but we'd probably have text copies in a ready-reference. Once in a while we'll have to look up something obscure, but how feats our characters have work? No.

The game is drowning in minutiae. It's worse in Pathfinder 2 than when we take occasional breaks to play one shots in other systems. But it's almost always there.

Well, its no surprise that a group that can't properly prepare and gets worked up over trivia is going to be more impactful in a more detailed system.

And in my limited time on earth, I don't think I can do it anymore.

No reason you should. As I noted a while back, I finally bailed out of a group I'd known for a long time because the irritation level exceeded my tolerance. Given you seemed to have better luck with it, maybe you should try to find a Daggerheart game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I ran 5 or so APs in the PF1 era. Usually ended around level 14 after playing bi-weekly for 4-5 hours for 1.5 years. While my sessions times were a little longer, per month it was a little less. Hard to imagine playing for two years and only reaching level 10 playing weekly...

We play every other week (or more accurately, I run the alternate week) but for longer periods, and yeah, that seems--slow.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

I've only brought it up to one other player, who thinks I'm being a stick in the mud and selfish for not going along with what everyone else wants to do.
The other players are mega system nerds who are part of the reason the combats are as slow and nit-picky as they are.
One other player dropped out early, after only a few weeks of play. We still talk. He wonders why I'm still in it since he knew it was "going to be awful."

The other player asks a good question - why are you even in this game? It doesn't sound like you actually enjoy it, more than it annoys you, so why have you been in it for so long? If the game isn't fun then... just quit and find another game or a different hobby. This is an online game and not in-person so there's a ton of places you can look.

If you're asking for permission to quit from someone on ENworld, I hereby formally grant you permission to quit the game you're not having fun in. Further I formally grant permission and encourage everyone everywhere to quit a game if they're not getting enjoyment out of it and can't fix that with a simple discussion.

 

[Blue]

More than once I've made the comment that sometimes we seem to spend more time messing around with the VTT than actually playing. I think the next time I run something online, I'm getting rid of the VTT entirely. Fire up cameras, roll real dice, run theater of the mind with maybe a basic zones layout... really try to get the at-the-table feel back.

It can work just fine.

Last campaign I ran was D&D 5e, lasted 3 years biweekly, and used Discord video chat, real dice, real character sheets, and a shared google draw page what I could use for handouts, images, or a battlemap. No VTT. Worked just fine.

 

[Blue]

I think folks might find it instructive to actually time how long rounds of combat take in person, too. I bet most folks will be surprised.

I've timed this as a player, but only in games that felt like there were long delays. Now I'm interested in doing it in games where I don't feel there are long delays.

As a GM I've only timed full combats, more for session pacing. I could come up with an aggregate number from that I guess.

 

[Retreater]

It's not just that the turns are long. It's that when it's my action, I don't feel like it has a meaningful impact. We shave away at monster HP. I absorb some damage from my allies. But the fights don't really matter because they're so numerous and the stakes aren't personal. It feels like we're just going through Fight 27 in Adventure Path 4, you know? Just a checklist of encounters that don't matter.
Like, in the last combat we had, we were trying to save an NPC. We had never met her before. It wasn't anyone we could name, that we'd had interactions with, that had any connection to the previous 2 years of the campaign. And this isn't an outlier. Just nothing feels like it matters.

 

[Blue]

One related point to attention level as a whole (not your specific issue). I have ADHD, and will almost always "have a fidget". That doesn't mean I'm paying less attention to the game, functionally it's taking some of the excess and letting me pay more attention to the game.

In-person games, I'll be building a tower of dice, or sorting them by color, or some other thing that keeps my hands busy in a way that frees my mind to pay attention to the game.

But that's when things are going on. So I'm fidgeting and paying attention. But combat there's often mechanics happening that I don't need to pay attention to. I don't care about another player totaling up their dice, or the forty seconds after the caster announced their fireball damage that the DM is assigning it to the right foes and making saves. And there's definitely a limit before biochemically you've lost me.

In online games there's a lot more dangers. Because in real life I have a limited repertoire of other places for my attention. I'm not going to pull out a book and start reading, that's rude. So I will still be more intertwined with the game. But online there are so many more ways I can fill my attention. And again, this has zero to do with willpower, it's all physical in the brain. In that case it's really helpful when the DM tells me I'm "on deck" to go next so I'm pulled back in and ready with my turn when my initiative comes up.

 

[Whisper-Kitten]

Your group sounds fun.