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 don’t think 5e is an especially coherent game.
Yeah, but none of them are “Wait for leadership of these tech companies to Visit Manhattan”, which is probably a necessary component.
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.
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.
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”
best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.
You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)
Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”
One of my friends wanted kids. She has a full time job in software and does side gigs like bartending. Can’t afford kids, so she didn’t have any. It’s sad.
Meanwhile the ultra wealthy have more money than they can spend.
Nationalize health care. Basic income. Public housing. Enforce existing tax laws. Tax or prohibit bullshit like “I’ll get a loan against my assets but that’s not technically income so I don’t pay anything”. Break up monopolies.
No one made the “pee v pee” joke yet?
My hypothesis is that a lot of people are emotionally invested in DND, and if you say bad things about it then it feels like you’re saying bad things about them. Saying it didn’t happen or it was the players fault let’s them still feel good about DND.
We’re all susceptible to this.
For some reason DND fans seem less likely to just go “yeah it’s kind of garbage but I like it”
Ah, yeah. During combat there’s the related “if you can’t decide what you’re doing in a minute, you dodge and we go to the next person” rule you can bring out.
There’s a wide range between tpk and something interesting happening.
Like, the players are dicking around and can’t decide how to ask the bartender if they can have access to the secret occult library in the basement. Just really spinning their wheels and being total PCs. Fine. Timer runs out. Their rival shows up, doesn’t acknowledge them, says something quietly to the bartender and is being lead to the basement.
I often do “I am starting a timer. When it goes off, something interesting will happen”
If the players are still fucking around, then the fire bears show up (or whatever).
You don’t seem to understand how things or people work, so I don’t think engaging with you further will be fruitful.
It’s not you. Google has been getting worse.
https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
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.