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Here's the article described below.
Combat can sometimes drag, especially when we wind up dealing more with dice and arithmetic than with Demons and Orcs. My brother and I have written some tips on making combat run more smoothly and efficiently. Feel free to share it with your lodges if you think it would be helpful to people there.
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Call out things like:
"I hit AC 23, including +4 for him being prone"
"I hit AC 23, including -4 for his cover".
I know they're AC modifiers, not attack roll modifiers, but this way really is smoother and quicker.
There are some very good suggestions in this article. I particularly recommend requiring players to have their to hit and damage pre-calculated for the most common situations; players who spend time during their turn calculating their bonuses from scratch are deliberately delaying the game for everyone else.
One of the biggest problems I find is the use of single-page character sheets. Great for 1st level characters but their limitations start to become apparent once you gain a few levels, especially for spellcasters and characters with multiple class abilities, because increasingly players who refuse to keep notes are forced to rely upon their memories and end up forgetting important stuff.
A few things that our group uses:
Players are not allowed to look in the rulebooks when it is their turn to act UNLESS it is to check something that they have said that they are doing. This stops players from looking in the rulebooks during their turn before deciding what to do. If you’re looking through the books, do so when others are acting (or preferably have enough information written on your customised character sheet so that you do not have to look through the books).
No mulligans / takebacks. If you have forgotten that you had a particular bonus that’s tough, you can’t add it back afterwards. For example, if something your character has would have prevented your character from being killed, but you forgot about it, that’s your problem not the DM’s or the party’s.
If you dither when it’s your turn to act then the DM will drop your initiative to below the next creature to act. If you are the last person to act in the round then you are assumed to have done nothing for that round.
If you are vague in describing what you do then this will be interpreted by the DM in a manner which may penalise you. For example, if you say “I cast a spell” instead of saying “I cast [NAME OF SPELL AND WHAT YOU ARE TARGETING]” then you are assumed to be casting one of your spells at random and/or casting it at a random (but legitimate) target. Generally this only has to be done once; when a player wastes their best spell (e.g. they meant to cast Prayer but because they didn’t specify they instead cast Heal) they pay more attention in future.
Keep notes about the current combat on a notepad, not on your character sheet. Some players waste a lot of time in calculating their hit points (generally slowly) after being hit and changing the figure on their character sheet; start the fight with your hit points noted on a piece of paper and then just put –X (where X was the damage) and then calculate your new hit point total later.
If you have problems with mental arithmetic, use a calculator.