Advice on improving DM speed.

[7RED7]

Hey guys, I've always been a pretty chillaxed DM, and don't mind the odd pauses here and there (usually run games for newbies or friends who like to chat), but I feel like I don't run games as quickly as I should. I've even tried to run some smaller encounters in larger quantities for just combat (an aging company of mercenaries remembering their past battles) to cut out the story side of things and narrow down where the problem is and surgically troubleshoot my playstyle.

I'm not really sure where to start when analyzing this. When I'm running the game things seem fine, but then I notice the clock and I'm like "That encounter took an hour and a half?!"

I'm usually either meeting up with people to run an in-person game (which generally tends to be a multi-week campaign), or doing single events on Roll20 where I can get a party together on a day or two notice. Most of the time it's Pathfinder with a dash of something else for flavor.

I try to budget a half-hour after official start time to check sheets, answer questions, and make sure everyone's on the same page. This always seems to end up being 1hr+ though.

I try to build an encounter that I think would take 30min-1hr, but it usually turns into 2-3hrs per encounter.

I'd like to find some ways to speed up my play so that I can cover more ground, but I want to make sure that it doesn't feel rushed for the players.

What are some methods you've tried to improve your efficiency?

[Pink]

This is something I've recognized I have trouble with myself and I'm trying to improve upon. I hate when I need to take a long pause in the midst of combat to figure out what the enemy should do and what a certain power or ability does or remember/look up this particular rule.

What I'm trying to do is, with index cards, make cheat sheets of the rules for combats. If water's involved, quick notes on fighting within water. If concealment, quick notes about what is and isn't allowed in darkened conditions. Look up certain abilities, decide on a few basic strategies for the enemies to use and stick to them. Try and find a balance between intelligent tactics and a defensive position that will make it a a long boring slogfest.

Another thing is, if you're creating the campaign instead of running an AP, is lower the number of enemies. The more monsters and NPCs you need to control, the longer it's going to be, especially since a player only needs to think about their turn when they're waiting, but you need to analyze each player's actions and each enemy, etc, etc. Make a few strong brute instead of a dozen minions (Unless you have a fireball slinger type that will enjoy that)

Of course, higher levels, combats can just take longer sometimes, especially if you have spellcasters and whatnot amongst the enemies.

Anyway, that's my thoughts, but I'm honestly interested to see what a few others say on this matter too.

Edit: Oh, worth asking, do you feel it is a bit of a player issue as well? Try and gently coax them into being ready for their turns. A good way of doing this is have whoever reads off initiatives (this is a good sidejob for a player to keep track of to keep them focused on the combat and turns as well), have them call out not just the present intiative but a "Who's next" as well to give that person a head's up to start preparing what they want to do.

Also a player/GM thing, if anybody's summoning stuff regularly, they better have index cards written up for the summons or something. None of this, "I'm casting summon monster" "Okay, what are you summoning?" "Hmm, let's see, what can i summon..." business.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Depends on where the problem is. Do your players tend to get distracted easily and take too long? My favorite solution for that is to have things move along without them while they chat. Never, ever do this to screw over the players entirely or solve the problem without their input, just use it to make a normal situation into a mildly annoying one and a bad one into a worse one. They'll pay attention.

Examples:

"Suddenly, another goblin jumps out and sneak attacks you from behind!"

"While you're standing around, an unexpected guard comes around the corner..."

"That formerly-disarmed enemy gets his weapon back while you're distracted."

Note: Craft (Cheese) takes no responsibility for any whining or tantrums from the players if you misuse this power, especially if you don't make it clear that you reserve the right to do this if you feel the game is in a lull. My players expect this but I can see someone not used to it getting upset if you toss this sort of thing at them unfairly or without warning.

Alternatively, it might just be the rules system. d20 combat is ridiculously overfiddly and complicated. Maybe run some playtests with a more rules-lite system?

[White_Drake]

Do your players do mapping and initiative? Also, telling the players the monster's AC on unimportant encounters saves time because they can just roll their stuff before their turn and tell you the results when they come up. This might feel a little metagamey, but by round three most parties will have calculated AC anyway, and for minor encounters it really isn't a big difference.

Also, a barbarian dip can give you and extra 10 ft. / move; combine that with whirling frenzy for an extra attack and you're halfway there.

[DigoDragon]

When I run D&D, I keep a sheet of prerolled d20 attack results for all the NPC combatants. This means all I have to do is look at the next result on the list to see quick results and then get the action back to the players. The rolls also work for saves and skill checks.
This helps on fights against large groups of opponents and BBEG showdowns.

By extension you can also preroll some damage figures for when they do connect with an attack.


As for mapping, handouts help! Sometimes even a crude drawing of an important scene is better than a long-winded description.

[Jay R]

Your problem is that encounters take longer than expected. So don't design 30-minute encounters; plan 15-minute encounters.

Until you have a correct idea of how long encounters will take, you will not succeed at having the game take the amount of time you budget.

So the first step is to learn how long encounters actually take. Pick smaller ones and measure them.

Then you will be able to start trying to speed them up. After each encounter, ask yourself, "What aspect took most of the time? And why?"

But first, learn to know how much time they actually take.

My experience is that an encounter usually takes about as long as I think it should, if and only if the party uses a winning strategy from the start. Each mistake or blind alley adds time - often huge amounts of time. A fast encounter is one in which they know what to do. Usually that means an encounter that requires a straightforward use of their best skills.

So I recommend that you design shorter encounters, and that your starter encounter at the beginning of the session be something in which their straightforward approach works, not a subtle situation that they have to think about.

[valadil]

I'm with Jay R. Your estimation is off. Several campaigns ago I found that the best way to estimate times was to take my gut instinct on a scene and multiply its expected duration by three if it was a combat, or divide by three if it was social.

http://gm.sagotsky.com/?p=225 is a blog post I wrote a while ago. It's about GMing for large groups, but most of my thoughts on large groups are really thoughts on speeding up the game so players don't get bored when it's not your turn. You'll probably find some applicable stuff in there.

[Lord Il Palazzo]

Well if the DM takes a level in Barbarian, he'll get...

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood the question.

Planning for shorter encounters should help. I also like to plan the enemies' tactics round by round like the SRD and Monster Manual do for some strong monsters (like this here pit fiend.). I don't do it unless the monster has lots of options, but it helps cut down on in-combat planning.

For example, I might write this for a sorcerer:
Turn 1: Blur self
Turn 2: Fireball if party is clustered, otherwise Hold Person obvious threat.
Turn 3: Fireball if 2 or more targets in range, otherwise Haste allies.
Turn 4: Scorching Ray
Repeat from Turn 2. Invisibility and flee if HP<33%.

[Edge of Dreams]

A little bit of prep goes a long way.

Read through a monster's entire stat block BEFORE the session in which you expect the players to meet it. Look up any special abilities that might be confusing and make sure you understand them.

Find a way to track initiative more quickly. Some people like a stack of cards - sort them once at the start of the fight, whoever is on top takes their turn, then their card goes to the bottom of the stack.

Have exactly the dice you expect to need handy, instead of one huge pile of dice. Roll damage and attack rolls simultaneously. Potentially even roll multiple attacks all at once, with color-coordinated dice to match the d20 to the damage dice.

If you come across a rule that needs clarification, assign a player who isn't busy at the moment to look up the relevant rules, while you continue dealing with other stuff in the meantime. Multi-tasking like this can help a lot.

Let players help. If they're constantly asking each other who is low on hp, assign a player to track everyone's HP. You can even have a player handle initiative.

[Icewraith]

If you are using a large number of minion-types and math is slowing you down, have them do average damage for hits and the appropriate multiplier of that for crits. This is especially true with anything with more than a couple attacks. Have your party's relevant ACs on a separate sheet (also you should have spot, search, listen and saves on here) so you don't have to ask people what their AC is all the time.

Have your players roll their damage before their turn. If they have to reroll for tactical considerations you should have a pretty good idea of how much damage they can put out, so have the next player start their action while the first player finishes up rolling. Roll to-hit for multiple attacks at the same time using different colored d20s, large-fisted players with voluminous dice bags should be able to roll attack and damage for all their attacks simultaneously.

Is the issue with your spellcasters? If they take too long to decide on a spell then skip their turn or force them to delay. After a couple instances of that, they should have a spell and a backup action or two ready by the time their turn comes around. Explain how you will be enforcing this before play begins-
"Leafing through your spells for every round is taking too long, have an action and a backup action or two figured out by the time it's your turn."

Give some leeway on this unless the player doesn't improve after the first couple of warnings.

Note: In extremely dangerous encounters, or when one or more of the PC's lives are hanging by a thread, or there's an important bit of character development going on, don't enforce this as long as the player is struggling between a few already determined choices. Savor the tension, let the player get some input from the group if they want it. If a risky gamble pays off, it's a triumph for the pcs and a great session, and if it doesn't whoever's character is about to bite it will handle the loss better (hopefully).

Keep a list of generic encounters or encounters you want to spring on the party handy, or somewhat level-appropriate statblocks so you can pull out monsters quickly if you need to improvise. As you go through games your repertoire will fill out so you'll do this less and less as you have more pre-generated material ready. If you have some free time make some encounters that are a little high for the party so you don't suddnely have a massive workload when they level.

Establish ahead of time that if there is a rules dispute that can't be resolved within a few seconds, you're going to wing it. Once you take a break you can figure out if you handled it right, and now everyone should know how to handle the situation if the issue comes up again. Don't relent on this one unless character lives are in danger.

Establish regular bathroom and food breaks.

Don't generate treasure or let players level (unless you're at really low levels) in the middle of the game, if you don't have treasure figured out at the beginning of the session wait until the session is winding down to hand it out. Have players level up on their own time and clear feat choices etc. with you first.

Once your players get used to this combat can be very exciting as people try to make decisions as rapidly as possible and get used to thinking on the fly. It takes a bit of work, and nobody is going to suddenly morph into some kind of hyperspeed gamer overnight, but making the effort to get there will speed up your play.

[Jay R]

It's worth remembering a large party's encounters are much slower than a small party's.

I haven't done enough different sized groups to estimate a curve, but I think it's exponential (about 25-50% longer with each added character)

I'm currently in a game with only three PCs, but we each have two servants - a fighter and a thief. I was astounded at how slow the combats were until I stopped thinking of it as a three-player game and started thinking of it as a nine-character game.

[Vorr]

I'd like to find some ways to speed up my play so that I can cover more ground, but I want to make sure that it doesn't feel rushed for the players.

Rush the game. It's not as bad as it sounds.

A normal game can really, really, really drag. It can very often take like five hours to just have the characters walk down a street.

So first off, rush the players. Give them ten seconds to declare an action. If they don't, then just say ''ok, your character does not action this round.'' You also give them ten seconds to declare game effects. Any longer and they loose the action (again).

Second, rush yourself. Never look up anything during a game. Just make it up. If you need a 5th level fighter guard, just use any 5CR monsters stats. The same goes for spells, you can have ''a blast of sharp glass'' and just use fireball.

Third, keep the story fast paced. Never let the players just sit around.

[DrBurr]

I'd agree with Jay R

I'd also add, keep your player's AC on hand so you don't have to ask (If your forgetful like me) and that if you have 5 goblins and there all going to swing club roll 5 Attacks at once

[Ketiara]

In the game I'm in we have a clock set to 1,5 min pr player, and we have a "tower" made out of duplo-lego with the different players npc's names on it as a initiative watcher. It works great, and helps the players not taking that much time. We are rewarded with bonus xp if we manage to clear an encounter within the time limit.

[ngilop]

I do the same thing Lord Il Palazzo does for 'boss monsters' or important NPCs

i guve a 5 round by round tactical lay out. with each line having an and/if/or attached to it if need be.

Example for 'boss'
Round 1: casts mass bull strength on ogres
round 2: cast mirror image on himself OR summons a feindish wolverine if pcs are not already engaged in battle
Round 3: cast magic missle at the heaviest armored oppoent, or mirror image if not done so in round 2
Round 4: casts unholy rain
Round 5: casts fear if fight seems to be equal, or greater invisibility if fight seems to be going the PCs way.

for mooks well i just kinda wing it or I write down a short descritopn of what their general tactics are

example for mooks
ogres move in defensive postions if a caster or leader is with them and wait untill buffed, PCs are debuffed/damaged, or are given specific orders.
other wise they charge recklessly using power attack untill beaten or dead

[AttilaTheGeek]

Have each player take out the dice they need; no more, no less. For example, I'm a 9th level rogue with two-weapon fighting and two iterative attacks each round. I have out 4d20 (for my four attacks), 4d4 (for dagger damage), and 5d6 for sneak attack (because holding 20d6 for full-round sneak attacks is impractical and (sadly) doesn't happen that often). I keep all my other dice in another bag in my pocket, so that I don't get distracted with them.

[Jay R]

Have each player take out the dice they need; no more, no less. For example, I'm a 9th level rogue with two-weapon fighting and two iterative attacks each round. I have out 4d20 (for my four attacks), 4d4 (for dagger damage), and 5d6 for sneak attack (because holding 20d6 for full-round sneak attacks is impractical and (sadly) doesn't happen that often). I keep all my other dice in another bag in my pocket, so that I don't get distracted with them.

What, play without a d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d14, d16, d20, d24, d30, d34, d50, d100, d120 all in front of me? NEVER!

Besides, I just got a new one-sided die. I promise you I'll have it with me at the next game.

[Incorrect]

How many rounds do your battles usually take?

I plan for 4-5 rounds myself.
Its easy to end up with a slug fest where neither side does significant damage to the other. Perhaps you can tune down the monsters AC and hp, and up the damage? They will be more of a threat but go down faster.

[Ghost49X]

I personally call who's on deck, and force people to delay when they're taking too long to act, I require you having the stats of what you want to summon before you do and I don't allow people to search through books for spell descriptions on their turns (even those with books full of post-tips as bookmarks)

I've also had a GM pair up players with others of similar initiative and had them take their turn at the same time.

[Trebloc]

Is it the players who are screwing around come their turn that is causing the issue? Or when it comes to the NPCs, you (the DM) haven't a clue what they can do or what their plan is?

We use a 15 second time limit per PC turn.

If you're the problem, use more NPCs that are simple to run or that you're familiar with.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Use cheat sheets, or have the players use them. Having a sheet with your most common abilities summed up is very, very helpful. Also, don't run fights to the death if they're not important. (I'd even say not to turn things into a full encounter if they're not important. Minions or lieutenants on the way to the boss? Turn it into 3-4 ability/attack checks and let the players move on. Save the full mechanics for the boss fight.)

I would even take a page out of 13th Age and say "be transparent about monster defenses". If players don't have to ask "did I hit them?", that adds up a lot.

[AttilaTheGeek]

I would even take a page out of 13th Age and say "be transparent about monster defenses". If players don't have to ask "did I hit them?", that adds up a lot.

That's what we do in my campaign. The GM announces the monster's AC (and has ours on an index card), and the five or ten seconds that saves every player every round really add up.

[Lord Il Palazzo]

That's what we do in my campaign. The GM announces the monster's AC (and has ours on an index card), and the five or ten seconds that saves every player every round really add up.

I usually play like this, though not completely intentionally; I don't go out of my way to reveal monster defences, but I don't keep them a big secret either. If a player rolls a 23 against a monster with 24 AC, I might remark "missed it by 1" or "you're close, are you sure you didn't forget any modifiers?" or even just get descriptive with the attack just barely missing its mark. My players catch on pretty fast and it does tend to save some time as "24, that's a hit" is quicker than "does 24 hit?" "yes, roll damage" (especially over the course of long combats.)

[SowZ]

I use a puzzle piece map layout. Meaning I have a bunch of different grid puzzles that I can snap together and make a field in literally about twenty seconds. Yes, a lot of the areas end up looking similar as far as the battlefield goes but if it worked for Bioware in DA2 it can work for me.

I also preselect any terrain pieces or NPC figurines I think they might fight. Anything they fight that I didn't plan on is represented by the closest pre-select. Further, any rules questions are resolved after the session or at break. I make a ruling and then we can go with RAW later. (Every two hours have a ten minute break. Keeps antsyness down.) Finally, in combat no side conversations. Side comments and jokes, absolutely, don't limit those. Fairly short side conversations out of combat where the two players aren't involved are okay. But don't let people say, "Well, it isn't my turn." Chances are, they want people to pay attention when it is there turn to grandstand and they have to take a lot longer to decide something because they need a recap.

Little things: Roll attack and damage together. Then ignore the damage roll on a miss. Have a lot of contingencies pre-calculated.

I usually have about three-four encounters a session and combat is typically half the session in a five hour D&D game so this all works pretty well for me. I used to be a little slower and the biggest battle of the day still takes a good hour and a half. (Typically because of some gimmick or something that adds another tactical level but adds a lot of time. Like a tree house city where you get from platform to platform via teleport runes and you have to figure out how it works.) But I try and keep the other encounters down to about half an hour. But anyway, there you go.

[Longstrider]

My campaign has reached epic levels and includes three spellcasters.

And you know what's fun? Not straightforward encounters using best skills. Fighters wearing away at hitpoints with power attack is boring.

So I reduce even epic monster hit points to around 40 and give them specialized defenses. On your turn, you're making actions to try to figure out the monster's weaknesses. Once you figure it out, there's no slogfest to wear him down. This way you can have encounters with more depth (and even diplomacy) that only take three rounds.