It was about time
While it’s important to focus on the positives, sometimes running the game doesn’t really work out the way you want it to. Last session we had the full squad, six players at the table ready to roll. After a brief recap we set out on our adventure and, as is very common for a larger party, managed to turn a stealth mission into combat.
Initiative is rolled. The scene is described, a precarious combat on a bridge infested by kobolds with an added incentive to defeat them all in one round before they call for back up. Annnnnd one round of everyone's turns took almost an hour. And while I barely feel the time moving while running the game, I can imagine the exhaustion of waiting so long between turns. You start out with a neat idea of how your turn plays out and by the time it gets there you’ve already forgotten what you wanted to do and everything has moved around to different places. You get a moment in the spotlight then it leaves you for almost thirty minutes.
It’s a problem, and I need to solve it.
So I looked around a lot of different resources and here are the main points that stood out to me:
Make some initiative trackers so everyone knows their turn in combat.
Make combats more engaging with goals other than defeating enemies
Increase damage and reduce hp
Next time I will try to implement these concepts into my game and do a follow up blog post to talk about my findings. I’ve been running games for many years now and it’s important to remember that there are always more ways to improve. So let’s hope that taking this learning moment from a rough session will end up with a good result.
