Yes, you can make players pre-plan. You nudge them.
No amount of nudging will make some players do anything. Some players are obstinate and frankly not very good, but honestly the solution to “this player won’t stop looking at their phone and their turns take forever” may be to remove them from the group.
Why does it matter how much time everyone takes?
I don’t want to wait 5 minutes for someone to dither and dither and finally decide “I attack”
This was a weirdly aggressive comment.
The solution is the pre-planning, which does not need a timer, nor is it a guaranteed result of a timer.
You cannot make players pre-plan. The timer encourages pre-planning, or at least rapid decision making on the fly. Both have the desired result of the game moving at a quicker pace.
It also has the benefit of creating an impartial tool for measuring, instead of relying on subjective “You’re taking a long time.” It is harder to argue with a clock. This is an advantage.
There was a problem, and in trying to fix it, the DM created a second problem.
What is the second problem?
I don’t always run a timer, but it is a tool in my box.
Mostly it comes out when I feel like the players are spinning their wheels. Like, they know they need to get into the server room on the 10th floor. There’s a front door with security, a back door with an alarm, etc. The players are just going round and round with ideas but not doing anything.
I’ll say “I’m starting a five minute timer. If it hits zero, something interesting will happen”.
If it hits zero and they’re still stuck, then as foretold something interesting happens. A rival group rolls up and firebombs the entrance before heading inside. A security drone spots them and is calling the cops. Whatever. Something that forces them to act.
In combat rounds I sometimes do the same, but only if it feels like they’re not making progress. Maybe it’s a little rude sometimes, but I value keeping the scene moving forward. I don’t want to keep spending three minutes on “should I move? How far can I move again? Is there a range penalty? What if I use a spell first can I still shoot?” stuff. Especially if it’s rules minutia they should already know.
The amount of times I had to remind an old group’s bard that yes, in DND 5e you can move AND take an action was too high.
I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!
But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.
I don’t think 5e is an especially coherent game.
One of the things I learned from being in a group that rotated DMs: Some DMs really expect more or different things from players tactically.
Like, when one guy was running you could pretty much just run into a room and fight, and you’d win. You’d have plenty of time to long rest, so you should just blow all your spells.
The other guy expected like some scouting and planning. Take out the outer patrols first without letting them get a message to the castle, then assault the warlord. Going directly in means you’ll be flanked by those patrols. The total size of what you’ll be dealing with is pretty well known, so you can ration your spells out with pretty good information.
And then there’s the “This dungeon is inhabited intelligent creatures that have spent years fortifying it against intrusion. You don’t know the layout or what forces you’ll face. Your enemies are advancing their goals, and every day you spend means more of your homeland is consumed by The Dirge”
I’m between #2 and #3 there. The wizard struggled a little going from “leveled spell every round” to “I should think about my resources.”
I still tend to run things a little too hard, but the group I ran for full time got into the groove and never wiped.
People don’t understand externalized costs
One time I made a joke to the players, “Yeah watch out, the woods could be full of dangerous things. Like fire bears.”
The players were like “lol right”
And then there were fire bears. Bears made of fire. (Some industrialists had started a forest fire, killing a local druid and wildlife, and now they were haunting the place.)
I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.
The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.
The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.
My work uses python and it hasn’t been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and “yolo startup” types is less good, but we’ve generally be improving that as we touch it.
Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”
Yeah I don’t think anything will change until disruptive protests happen. Like, republicans resigning from office because they’re afraid.
Unfortunately, the far-right has almost all the money and guns, and a lot of bootlickers. And no one wants to throw their life away by shooting some red hats senators or billionaires.
as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.
Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.
A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.
More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.
I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.
Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.
People are stupid and value in group solidarity more than anything else.
The only way forward is to make them feel like a member of a better group, or violence.
I blame the people who voted for trump, personally. I’d be happy to watch the leopards eat their faces, but unfortunately we’re all stuck with them.
Surely there’s a couple people still working there.
Yes. And no one’s going to do anything about it.
Most people are too lazy and thoughtless to stop using it .
The engineers that work there certainly aren’t going to stage a coup.
And no one’s going to just do violence to Musk.
Interesting. I’ve never felt a need for this, and as the other reply here said it was really unpopular in other languages.
I would have guessed you would have said something about how it’s annoying to type callable arguments, and how Protocol exists but doesn’t seem that widely known.
I think people have radically different ideas about what “minimal background information” is.
Some people think the Silmarillion is a suitable primer for their setting.
Some people have like one paragraph for the big picture, and one paragraph for each major faction.
There are players that would say both is too much.
I think a couple short paragraphs should be enough for a quick start for a custom setting, but I’ve had players that just refuse to read anything at all. As someone else said, it’s makes it really hard to do some sort of stories if all the players are utter neophytes/amnesiacs/from-another-world/etc
I tried to do a game of Vampire once, but the players refused to read anything about the setting. All the political intrigue fell completely flat because they didn’t understand what the different factions were looking for, nor did they understand how vampires worked.
That group might have just been kind of bad players, but I feel like bad players are more common than good. By “bad” I mean “doesn’t think about the game very much, doesn’t retain anything about the story or rules”. They couldn’t really do anything more complex than a simple dungeon crawl.