A discussion about whether or not PCs need to eat, a goblin ambush, an argument over dividing a very small pile of loot, breaching the dungeons entrance, falling into the worlds most harmless trap, squishing rats, and the second session winds to a close.
So, Rooster was saying the games are going too slowly and I have to agree with him. Yes, tabletop games can be slow, they're slower online, and our party is primarily newbies. Slow is expected. But this is very slow. I'll give some thought towards speeding it up, and hopefully once everyone gets used to the flow of battle and such it'll move quicker, but off the top of my head;
If you have questions about anything, ask them here, before the session starts.
I will do my best to speed things up as a DM as much as I can. Preparing enemy pogs ahead of time (which I haven't been doing), getting the most relevant DM information printed out and right in front of me so I'm not scanning pages and clicking tabs while you're all piling things in the chat window, and anything else I can think of. Maptool also strikes me as more efficient, hopefully I'll be able to spend enough time with that in the coming week that we can adopt it.
Have your own character sheet open, and (if you are a newbie) learn where all the relevant information is. It is tedious to load up peoples character sheets whenever they want to know what this or that roll is, having them all open at once slows down my computer, and I already have a load of tabs open in the first place. (Actually, I suppose I should just print out everyones sheets too)
To that effect, make dice macro's for all your attacks, saves, and initiative, at least.
In many encounters it should be pretty easy to decide what you're going to do while waiting for your turn. This helps.
When we're doing doing initiative specifically, and anything else that requires a multitude of rolls like that, please don't fill the chat up with side discussions, so I don't have to scroll through a mess of text or arrange a battle order.
In fact, I might just adopt an entirely separate OOC chat, since it's confusing as hell when two characters are discussing one thing, two another, and someone else is trying to perform an action.
I'm not trying to be critical here, just trying my best to speed things up. The way things are now I'm considering letting the party size drop (through natural causes, of course), because it's harder to handle 6 people smoothly than I thought. This is a less than ideal scenario. I'd rather just make things efficient enough that a 6-person party can get things done at a decent speed. I'll take a hard look at the availabilities and figure out when our next couple sessions could work, possibly skipping people for one session. More sessions = more progress, and it's very hard to get even 1 session a week with peoples availabilities as they are.
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Topic: D&D on the Interwebs (Read 48641 times)