I'm not sure I'm a very good player. When my wife sees me playing, as opposed to GMing, she always says the same thing. "You look really bored. You just sit at the table staring at your papers."

What she means is that during the long pauses in combat, I'm not sure what to do do with myself. When we play D&D 4e, each player can wait up 10-15 minutes for their turn. When it's not their turn, there's nothing to do. You watch the other players, see what happens, wait for people to look their rules up, and so on.

It's just so slow. During an hour long battle there might be 10 minutes of activity for a single player and up to 50 of just...waiting.

Now mix in four combats and you literally have hours - HOURS - of down time.

Are there any systems where there's not so much waiting? What can be done in game to engage as many people as possible?

I'm getting to the point where I'd rather go see a movie with my gaming group than play because it's such a slow form of entertainment.

Certainly there are quicker systems out there. But really it comes down to the GMing. I and a friend both ran GURPS campaigns for a while. His group of 5 had a combat with 12 gargoyles, the 18 combat rounds (18 seconds in GURPS) took 2.5 sessions (4hr sessions once a fortnight) to resolve. My group of 4 had a battle deciding the fate of the entire Roman republic and it took 30 minutes.

Why the difference? The GMing. My friend offered them all the options, looked up the rules for all the possibilities, each and every one of them. I just said, "what do you do?" decided which skill applied, and assigned an arbitrary bonus/malus to it.

I think D&D4e is a dreadful system, but I'm sure there are plenty of GMs who run it smoothly and quickly. Likewise, there are GMs who could make a Risus combat last all night.

If people are going to run a RPG witha lot of tactic details they need a referee who knows it cold to make it run smooth.

What I would do it look at what slows down the turn. If it turns out to be looking up stuff then see if you can get cheat sheets printed out. Or talk to each players that are not currently doing anything about what they are going to do and have the rules indexed and ready to go. In short act as an assistant to keep the game flowing.

It would help to know what system you are playing.

Of course the alternative is to play a more abstract system like an older edition of D&D.

I recommend picking up an earlier edition (pre-3e) of D&D or one of the retro-clones. They run much faster. Entire combats usually only last 10 minutes.

estar - He said he's in a 4e game. While that is faster than 3e, it's still really slow.

If you're trying to stay within the confines of 4e, imposing a time limit so that tactical creep doesn't show up (plotting out 1 hour for 6 seconds' of game time), is one basic item that could work.

There are a number of systems with significantly faster play.  I guess it depends how far your group is willing to go from 4e.  I know you've heard of the retro-clones, but games such as Castles & Crusades mix older versions with d20, which I've found to be a nice meeting ground.

Other people have luck with more cinematic systems; I'm certainly enjoying Mini Six just now, which is nice and free (print is $8). Other recommendations people often put forth for cinematic games are for Savage Worlds, Cortex, etc.  Alternately, companies such as Precis Intermedia and Rogue Games have a range of fast-playing, tweakable games.

I guess it would help to know what you (and your gaming group) are after.

Hey, this is not an uncommon issue. Best of luck to you with it, though!

You all seem to be confirming what I feel and what I know needs to be done. I need to talk to my group and explain the rules-heavy system just won't work for me anymore. We've got to keep it fast, light and pull everyone in.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;418930Certainly there are quicker systems out there. But really it comes down to the GMing.

Absolutely, but not only. It comes down to what you decide to care about as a player as well. If you only care about what your character's doing when he's doing it, then yes, you're going to have some boring downtime. If you actually care about what's going on in the game, what the other players are doing, how the GM describes the action, who rolls what, when and how terrible/awesome that is, if you've got a group synergy, then it's not downtime anymore. It's part of the game.

Quote from: Christian;418937You all seem to be confirming what I feel and what I know needs to be done. I need to talk to my group and explain the rules-heavy system just won't work for me anymore. We've got to keep it fast, light and pull everyone in.

I hear you.  I've found that while I still love heavier games such as Rolemaster, when I only have 4 hours to play every other weekend, I aim for lighter systems and more disciplined time management in combat.

That synergy is key and I think it's something we need to work on. I've been kicking around the idea of a system/setting/genre that focuses on teamwork rather than each player at the table having their own, isolated experience.

Zach: Totally. Time is precious and the game needs to pop.

Quote from: Christian;418942That synergy is key and I think it's something we need to work on. I've been kicking around the idea of a system/setting/genre that focuses on teamwork rather than each player at the table having their own, isolated experience.

That might help, indeed. Bottom line, it's in the players and GM heads that it is going on and where it needs to be solved. If some game rule just allows people to say "hey, I can care about what other players do too!" that's great, but that's really a problem of people and their priorities in the first place. *nod*

So, Christian, do you have any other systems you've been considering for the role? I understand it needs to be a group thing, but it doesn't hurt to have some candidates.

One thing you can do with 4e is rely on skill challenges to "abstract" combats that you don't think need to be played out blow-by-blow. It's not exactly by-the-book, but it leverages people's familiarity with the system and their comfort level with characters so that you don't have to port over to a whole new system.

I'm thinking specifically of a system where you do something like this: the GM says, "Okay, you're fighting your way through these guards to get to the temple; you're tough enough to get there, the thing I'm not sure about is how beat up you get en route."

So you set the EL of the challenge, and the DC for the player's skill rolls (which will really be attack rolls in most cases) is something like 15 + EL. Roll initiative for the PCs. Roll in initiative order. Make the roll and you've contributed to the success of the skill challenge, blow it and you either need to expend a healing surge or allow the GM to impose a condition on you. Expending your daily power gives you a big bonus of some kind, and action points can negate a failure.

The GM keeps track of failures versus successes, and you get experience points equal to the percentage of successes over total rolls times the XP of an encounter of the appropriate level.

It's not a perfect fix, but it may enable you to avoid playing out every single combat so that you can focus on the interesting ones.

Quote from: Zachary The First;418948So, Christian, do you have any other systems you've been considering for the role? I understand it needs to be a group thing, but it doesn't hurt to have some candidates.

Several of us dig the World of Darkness. One thing I like about the Storyteller system is that it's fairly easy to keep things moving. So that's a possibility.

It might even be nice to do a few one-shots. I am terribly curious about Monsters and Other Childish Things AND ICONS. It could be fun to even revisit old faves like Twilight 2000 and Star Frontiers.

Mostly, we need a game that keeps everyone involved and interested. It really bums me out to see people tuned out for long periods of time.