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It's been my experience when playing and running games that a little bit of structure can go a long way. Especially in the time-saving department.
I'm starting to trend towards having clearly defined "phases" of gameplay. I can tell the players "this is prep time" and they'll know what's up and can quickly get their bookkeeping out of the way. I know most people probably take a more natural approach, but it really helps me to have these phases in mind. Tell me what you think. Is this too rigid? Am I missing anything?
Narration: Pure story. The GM gives a cinematic description that isn't interruptable by the PCs' actions. However, PCs may make knowledge checks after the narration to have parts of it expanded upon. This is usually used as introductions, conclusions, or recaps to start off and end sessions, or as short descriptive transitions between other phases of play.
Preparation: The PCs are granted a specific amount of time (in hours, days, or weeks) to buy or craft supplies and gear, prepare spells, train up, make plans, gather information, and/or rest. I'll often split days into (morning, afternoon, evening, night) and just go around the table asking people what they're doing with their time.
Travel: Somewhat like preparation, but the PCs are traveling a great distance over a span of time, and make skill checks to survive and to travel in the right direction at a good pace. They decide marching order or ship duties, the setup of their camps, and watch duties, if applicable. Depending on how much down time they have, they might get some Preparation Phase in there.
Conversation: The PCs are interacting with one or more NPCs and may have to ask specific questions, make convincing arguments, or succeed at skill checks to progress and get that item, info, agreement, or NPC patsy they were after.
Investigation: The PCs are presented with an environment that requires the use of their skills. They must traverse a difficult obstacle, avoid a trap, solve a puzzle, or find a hidden room or object.
Encounter: The PCs have a time-sensitive issue to deal with, and play is broken down into rounds with turns taken in initiative order. The players may need to fight monsters, disarm a time bomb, chase a villain, or escape from a collapsing cavern.
The first three phases are more "Wide Scope", and happen over an undefined or longer period of time. The last three are more "Narrow Scope" and usually happen in a matter of minutes. Any of the phases can easily blend into another, often with a bit of colorful narration as a transition.
Also worth noting, I generally treat all player knowledge as shared unless a PC specifically tells me that they are withholding information from the group. I'm also okay with players giving each other playing advice and discussing tactics, even if their characters aren't near each other, as long as they use PC knowledge and not player knowledge. It adds to the "group storytelling" aspect of the game and makes things less frustrating for the players.
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Structure goes quite a long way, yes. It sounds like we've each approached the concept of gameplay phases from somewhat different points. The best way I can think of explaining the paradigm I'm fond of is to reference my character sheets. I actually built these from the ground up to model the concept of what I see as the progression of how roleplaying encounters escalate. I've found that it helps to literally keep everyone on the same 'page'.
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- Center of Sheet:
- Bio: Who they are
- Ability Scores & HP: What comprises them
- Perception & Senses: Can't interact with what they can't sense
- Languages: Speak first, shoot later
- Initiative & Size: Map setup and who goes first
- BAB, Movement, Arcane Casting: What you can do when it's your turn
- Saves, SR, AC, CMD: How you weather your opponent's turns
- Left-hand Column:
- Attacks
- Channeling
- Favored Enemy
- CMB
- Folding this column over the center reveals Inventory, and non-combat abilities
- Right Column:
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Folding this column over the center reveals combat feats/abilities, a reprint of all defensive info, and tracking areas for HP, XP, and wealth.
- Reverse of Sheet:
- Spell List or Book
- Notetaking
BTW, what does it say about my groups that I initially read the last two words of spoiler as "collapsing tavern" rather than "collapsing cavern"? ;)
At any rate, I can't say that I've ever explicitly told players "prep time", "travel time", etc. The players and I just seem to naturally have an understanding of such things, although if they have a few weeks of downtime I'm certain to ask what they are doing so as not to receive blank stares. ;)
Personally, I could see this being useful in a VTT game being conducted live over the internet. In a PbP or live local game I think (ok hope) that most players who aren't totally ADD would be able to tell the difference. If you have some way of testing it though, I'd be interested to hear if it makes a difference. From my own experience, ensuring that everyone's character sheets were in the same format and omitted all the math yielded the biggest improvements in player efficiency.
Making the preparation slots into a template of spells that could be cast from spontaneously greatly reduced the overhead. Now they could simply place a few X's down the left side of their spell sheet to denote what spells were memorized, then mark-off boxes in the header for a given level each time they cast a spell of that level. Once there are no more boxes in the header, you either have to use higher level spell slots or you're done.
Did I mention that this saves a LOT of time?
Because it does.
;)
Ah great, thank you!
Your character sheet sounds really well organized. I especially like the part about folding the the left or right side over. The front side is all the main info, fold over the left, it's all RP, fold over the right, all combat. Very cool!
I'd actually like to take a look at it. I had a similar approach with my character sheet, and I might be able to incorporate some of your ideas!
The middle of the sheet has three columns:
- The leftmost is the "movement" column, with Initiative and Size at the top, followed by move speeds, and then encumbrance/armor at the bottom along with the penalties from that (spell failure, skill penalty, max dex).
- The middle is the "attack" column, with BAB at the top, and 5 boxes for weapons/attacks with total AB, crit, ammo, range, etc...
- The right is the "defense" column, which is two rows. The first row is AC -> DR -> HP. The second row is SR -> Saves -> Energy Resistances/conditions.
- (I figured most turns go move-attack-defend, thus the left to right nature of it. For defense, I figured that against physical attacks, AC is the first line of defense, then DR comes into play, then HP soaks the rest. For magic, SR comes first, then Saves against effects, which often results in a condition when failed.)
The bottom of the sheet has skills/knowledge on the left (under movement and attacks), and combat feats, abilities, and/or spells on the right (under defense).
Still working on the back of the sheet.
BTW, what does it say about my groups that I initially read the last two words of spoiler as "collapsing tavern" rather than "collapsing cavern"? ;)
Sounds like my kind of group!
At any rate, I can't say that I've ever explicitly told players "prep time", "travel time", etc.
Yeah, I don't say it exactly like that, but I like to say something to the effect of "you'll have X amount of hours to do stuff," so we can be sure any crafting is done legally in game terms (none of this, "I made twenty +5 vorpal throwing axes just now, that's cool, right?" stuff), everyone knows how much rest they're getting, etc...
I like to go around the table one person at a time so that everyone knows what they're doing. I find that easiest.
Anyway yeah, I'll try to incorporate this into my current campaign, and I'll let you know how it works!
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Your character sheet sounds really well organized. I especially like the part about folding the the left or right side over. The front side is all the main info, fold over the left, it's all RP, fold over the right, all combat. Very cool!
I'd actually like to take a look at it. I had a similar approach with my character sheet, and I might be able to incorporate some of your ideas
It does sound like we've got some similar or complimentary ideas, that's encouraging. I wouldn't mine seeing a screenshot of yours either, never know when you'll learn a new trick. :)
Since you mentioned wanting to have a look at mine, here are some screenshots:
- Front of blank sheet
- Feat & Ability fold-overs (printed on reverse of front side)
- Inventory & Tracking (printed on cardstock, taped to back of the front sheet at the top and bottom of the central column)
- Blank Spellbook/List (printed on the back of the cardstock)
- Example NPC
There are addition screenshots of what the back-end/entry fields look like visible beneath that last link if it matters to you.
EDIT: It also occurred to me that you might want to see the layouts I used for PbP characters also so here you go:
- Blank PbP template
- Alphabetized, bulleted list of all feats (hyperlinked to the matching pages in the PRD, includes CRB, APG, UM, UC)
- Example NPC (PbP layout of the same NPC as above)
- PbP Tracking Sheet (lists spells, usable items, wishlists, wealth, etc. makes use of collapsible tables)
- Table of Contents (a Paizo list I maintain for Ctrl+F style keyword searches on the game)
- A 'Matrix' of all PCs (manually updated at each level-up)
Note: At the top of each PCs character sheet they have a tracking bar that links to common resources like the ToC, Matrix, Party Inventory, and their own tracking sheets.
Regarding the tracking pages (i.e. PbP tracker and PnP spellbook):
Another organizational paradigm I use is deleting hashmarks (PbP) or checking off boxes (PnP) when abilities, spells, or items are used. This eliminates guesswork and speeds up play. When you are out of hash-marks or boxes, you're done. Then just replace the hashes or erase the check-marks after resting/restocking.
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Also dotting. I really like your character sheet, Laithoron. I may steal that for my group, to cut down on the "Where's my attack bonus/AC/Perception bonus/etc?" nonsense.
Thanks for saying so! I'm still debating whether or not to make the Excel file itself downloadable since I've added a fair bit of non-OGL content to the back-end database. I suppose I could always try and make another that lacks such info or just upload a PDF of a blank sheet though. I'll think on the matter...
Dotting for later