Please Stop Interrupting Other Players’ Exploration Rolls
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
- Lots of players do this thing, and I don’t think they’re WRONG… but I do think they should stop.
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CW: Spoilers for episodes 19 and 44 of the “Vox Machina” campaign.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:56 - Why Players Do This
04:15 - Why Interrupting Other Rolls is Bad for Everyone
09:44 - Some Possible Solutions
12:20 - A Word From Our Sponsor
13:15 - Outro
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How do you handle exploration scenes where everybody wants to do different things?
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I basically split exploration into 10 min or 1 hour (in-game) turns. I go around the table to ask what they are doing and then go down the line asking for rolls.
Then, I resolve success and failure. If it leads into a skill check rabbit hole, I start up a new turn, where the person making the second check is doing that as their thing and ask everyone else for their action, etc, etc.
I even use this for party splits! If I'm running a combat for one group while the others are doing out of combat, the combat group's turn is, well, their turn, and the out of combat people do an exploration turn. I usually kinda play the out of combat people on "action movie time"; where the scenes interact with each other when its narratively convenient and satisfying rather than realistic if they are trying to regroup or otherwise interact with the combat group; but, otherwise, I don't really worry about the time gap.
It works really well, and it's incredibly uncommon for any given player to be waiting more than a few minutes. It's also equally fast when the group is together or split!
I run two long term games with 7+ players. They always split up while exploring, because it makes little sense for five or six people to be standing around while one guy tries to open a door, or look at some runes or whatever. And in cities? Forget about it, they'll be districts and time increments apart.
When I'm really on the ball, before anyone gets to do anything I ask what everyone wants to do, then I group them up based on proximity and task, and we resolve it group by group as if it were happening at the same time. This works quite well. Everyone knows that they are going to get to do their thing, if they both want to do the same thing, they get grouped together and they are doing it together (so you get less of the "Oh I wanna go over there now!" thing). Everything is happening roughly at the same time, so people can't really change their minds about their tasks until everything is resolved. It works well enough that I've also used this system for combat, but in that case it requires a massive amount of mental energy on my part to keep it moving, but players liked it because there was basically no down time.
Failing that I kind of go around the table, but usually by location. Just today I had 9 PC's with 4 follower NPC's spread across 3 levels of a huge magical tower, trying to solve three different puzzles at once. I was not on the ball, but I went from top to bottom, resolving actions as we went. It wasn't perfect, and I got a couple "Why did I only get to do one thing?" complaints, as there were a couple of rabbit holes with some of those puzzles. In the end everyone got to do what they wanted, and we made a ton of progress considering it was only a 3 hour game (they solved two puzzles, one of which was using the "alien technology" rules that lead to prophetic visions related to the big plot, and another was this big planar puzzle thing where touching different planar glyphs caused weird effects, and they found a way to free ten prisoners from magitek tanks they were locked in, and then they accessed an inaccessible section of the tower).
But the first option always works better. it groups people up, and they all do things together, usually breaking down how they want to do it. Failing that, when I do get an interruption (which at a table of 7-9 with at least 3 ADD players, I do) I tell them to hold that thought until I come around again (which can lead to people forgetting), or I get distracted and fall down a rabbit hole lol. I try to take a note of what someone wants to do though or use that as an opportunity to restructure into phases or turns. it's imperfect, and much easier with fewer players.
Our group has used an 'Intention Round' for about 40 years. The GM goes round and asks what each players intention is and then resolves them in the most logical fashion that they feel is correct. Sometimes initiative can be used.
I think a lot of players have experienced having things they wanted to do, waited patiently, then the joke character or extroverted button pusher does a thing that triggers combat or bad things and now has an almost anxiety to be heard before their intentions are forgotten and it’s too late. 😅
yeah, this happens a lot. There's almost always a 'pusher' player that forces the scene forward, even when everyone hasn't had their turns yet. It certainly creates a cycle of bad behaviour, because you'll naturally be more urgent to "get your thing out of the way", even though it's JUST as relevant as what every other character is doing! And that other player rarely gets punished; They want the conflict, they want the action, so them pushing into new scenes doesn't hurt them unless they're the only ones endangered. (Seldom happens, the DM doesn't want a tpk because of one player's stupid decision!)
Really, the only way this can pan out well is just to put the game on pause, take a moment to go over each individual players' choice while looting, then slowly go over what each player does in order of initiative.
Yup, that’s exactly why I’ve sometimes done that. Social anxiety makes me want to get my actions done before something else happens that pulls everyone’s attention away 😅
As a DM if multiple people ask to do things and one of them does something I know is likely to cause some kind of point of no return like a fight starting I will usually resolve what they're asking last.
Kinda hard to do when you have a party of multiple button pushers.
This 100%. I have a Minotaur Barbarian in my party that absolutely fills the role of "button pusher". I play a rougish Soul Knife Mystic, And we were in a dungeon with a tapestry that had some yellow moss on it. As I was trying to investigate it he just decided to Take the torch that he was holding and burn it, causing it to explode into a poisonous gas that almost killed my character.
Later in a spin-off of that campaign, we were playing as a separate party retrieving herbs to heal our main characters. We ended up stumbling upon a Black dragon's horde (we were level four), and both me and the Rouge, collectively agreed not to touch it, and to pursue the main quest for the time being, potentially swinging back around to slay the dragon when we were stronger. The same player as the barbarian, this time playing a halfling bard, tried to argue that we should just take it despite their literally only being one exit to this cave through a watery trench with none of us having a swimming speed and the dragon being literally less than 500 ft outside, and capable of sensing if any of its treasure is touched, an abhorrent idea obviously. with the argument going nowhere both me and the Rouge just agreed to start walking back towards the entrance, to which the halfling decided to declare that he was going to start shoveling up gold, ignoring the rest of the party. I attempted to restrain him with a strength check, and actually succeeded despite my -1 and strength, But unfortunately he rolled a nat 1, and got to reroll it with halfling luck, beating me.
We ended up having to fight a freaking dragon at level 4. At the very least it was pre wounded, and had little maneuverability in the cave, So we barely managed to survive and cause it to flee. But needless to say tension was a little high that session.
It's not like every instance of this proactivity is bad. There have been moments where it's resulted in some pretty cool scenarios, but it's almost always irrelative to the other players at the table.
I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but at least in terms of traps, the cast of critical role got a LOT better about letting their rogues check for traps before they did anything after this episode
Almost too well sometimes where they don’t let but straight out tell them, hey don’t forget to check for traps….
@@SummerOtaku It's fairly in character since someone literally died from just touching armor.
@@damienjohnson3450 yeah this would be rather traumatic for the characters. I don't think they would ever enter a room without knowing it was safe first
The animated series makes this very explicit. I really like how that was included. It added more weight to the scene because it was clear vax felt partially responsible.
@@damienjohnson3450I’m actually talking about future campaigns as well not just these characters. If you picked up annoyance in my tone it is just I hate being told how to play my character. If I’m a cleric don’t demand I heal someone, I’ll make that decision, you know? The CR cast can go from helpful suggestions/reminders to practically demanding certain things on rare occasions.
My favorite I played was GM asking. Someone would say "I wanna loot the bad guy," then he'd ask what everyone wants to do, note it, then he had people role. He rolled in what would take the least time to the most, so he knew if it would interrupt others. It also let people preemptively do a Help Action or keep watch. Sure it took an extra minute, but stopped over talking when we played online and if we never got to do our task it felt like a result of dice or the activity, not that we were ignored or didn't speak up.
The Help action is something one of my characters often did. She was not great at exploration and her main thing was being helpful and supportive, so I usually said "If I see anyone trying something challenging that I could help with, I'll lend a hand and give them advantage. And if it's something I can't help with, I'll cast Guidance."
After combat, I stay in the initiative order for looting. Everyone gets one question/roll/action before I move on to the next person. Then I ease out of it by shifting focus to some event that ends the initiative.
I once almost got into a shouting match with a player who was in the habit of immediately saying "I look for whatever interesting magical items I can find" after every boss fight. So because the DM kind of handled each character in turn on a first-come-first-served basis, they would instantly hoover up every magical item in the vicinity and everyone else would just have to get the mundane stuff. Even if the DM discussed how their search would take some time, the other characters would effectively lose the opportunity to find all the things they had been told they would find.
It was especially annoying because their character was kind of ambiguous (i.e., no one was quite sure in game whether they were actually on our side). So they were not freely sharing inventory and we were never sure whether we would have to fight all that accumulated power someday. After this happened a couple of times, I was getting so frustrated that I genuinely got angry at that player (really nice person IRL). Stuff like this can really poison the atmosphere and you should talk this out early before it does.
Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a race to get to search for loot
That would be a non-problem if their character had the party's best interests in mind, letting the party decide as a group which member having this item could make the party strongest. (Like an MMO raiding group using loot council to decide who gets which upgrade.)
Having people keep every magic item they find for themselves sounds like a terrible way to distribute loot. And if a party plays that way, a DM must not just allow the first person to speak up to take everything. That's insane, especially in cases where searching would take time like you describe. Sounds like a gaming group that needed to have an out-of-character talk about how loot works.
What you describe sounds like a total disaster even if the hoarder wasn't someone you were worried about turning on the party. A "really nice person IRL" would hopefully be interested in discussing things once you pointed out that it's not fair and not fun, as well as not realistic, for their PC to take all the magic items.
This is also something that in-character would get noticed by the other PCs: they could certainly ask the eager-searcher PC for a share of the loot, especially for items that look interesting to their character. If not right away, then once they see them using it. Like "hey, we all helped kill this thing, I'd like to take a look at that sword you found."
Having one character take all the loot repeatedly isn't something most adventuring parties would let happen, in-character.
Something to consider in certain cases, however, is that certain activities take different lengths of time. Checking a sarcophagus for traps takes way longer than grabbing a corpse. So it comes down not only to how a DM will set the other, but to what the characters will do. Taliesin had zero common sense at that time, and that reflected poorly on another player, which created a great setting for drama and consequence. But Travis should have had his answer way before the band of rippers, since checking pockets will take much less time than carefully and correctly removing body parts from a tough corpse.
One way to settle this , I would suggest, is to say: ok, your activity will take X-minutes, yours will take Y-minutes. So the longer one can wait for the shorter ones to be resolved.
I am a firm believer of getting every player's intent/plans for the next 10(ish) minutes of game time.
Not only does it help make sure everyone gets their opportunity to act, it prevents skill check "pile-ons". It's also useful to set it as a precedent and routine; this way, if there will be reinforcements (or other hostiles) showing up post-battle, the players aren't put on their guard if you suddenly ask for it one time.
It also lets you tie their actions and choices to the initiative, which can be pretty relevant for both player conflict over loot as well as for encounters with reinforcements, leftover hostiles or what have you.
Also, a lot of the 10-minute durations of spells make WAY more sense in this paradigm. A Spirit Guardians can cover against random encounters, trap-deployed monsters, and probably an imminent encounter in the next room.
Doing 10-minute segments, declared first among all players, also lets you go, "Ah, Julie, your thing only takes maybe 2 or three minutes. Anything else you wanna squeeze in?", or "Mark, that'll probably take 20 minutes to decode the book. Everyone cool with spending another segment in this room?" It lets people balance the social dynamics of exploration WAY better.
@@EndyHawk Okay, yeah, this sounds pretty great.
@@Shalakor The secret sauce for exploration (overland or location) is to tie random encounters into these 10-minute segments; a 1 on a d6 triggers, either rolled every ten or twenty minutes. Then look up "reaction rolls" for older editions, and suddenly you have a very dynamic and uncertain ecosystem for the players to navigate; are these woodland monsters hostile, or potentially willing to take us back to their village as friends? Do we spend another 10 minutes trying to decipher the ancient mural, knowing it might risk a random encounter, because We have to be EFFICIENT. Maybe this random result isn't a monster, but a distant scream for help, or the party's torches running out early. It just opens up so much surprise and discovery, and engages the whole table, including the DM! I love not knowing quite what's going to happen, and discovering new realities of the fictional world alongside the table.
Something I've tried to do is ask all my players what they would like to do/what they would like to loot or search, and if they do something important or get a really great roll, I start with the easiest stuff first and then go to the more important time consuming things. It helps because everyone has an order of operations, we get the rolls out of the way at the start, and it doesn't turn into a clusterfuck.
I played an adventurers league game at GenCon where the DM chose to pay with “always-on initiative” and it was PAINFUL how slowly everything crawled.
He *did* keep us in 6 second increments though
I really like the two loop solution, where everyone describes their general intentions and the second loop resolves everything. Matt does this a lot in Campaign 2. That said it might not always fit the situation or vibe. So I can see cases where you have to take the risk and avoid that prompt to maintain tension for example.
We play by voice chat, so accidents happen, but I try to keep out of everyone's way when they're doing their things. With one exception where I will deliberately interupt. "My character would help with that." (And then resolve it as an aid role, or whatever the system has for helping each other out; though it's more often my character wanting to do something he's not great at so asking the strongest party member to help him move something and then him doing the aid role)
But absolutely agree that, even if you're not doing the formal dungeon turn stuff from some of the OSR games I've heard about/read, proactively making space for everyone to do their thing, either finding out what they're all doing before hand or going around the table and having them take turns, can really help.
this is why i'll always try to chime in "i have something i'd like to do too" when i can. be that when someone is rolling or otherwise.
i am often talked over and interrupted. so any chance to get the DM to say "Okay Tam, what was it you wanted to do?" to get the other players to focus on me for a moment is great.
Feel like in an ideal world, the DM would go around the table saying "X, what do you want to do? Okay. Y, what would you like to do," etc. taking note along the way, and then collabing any who are doing the same thing, and going through those tasks one at a time.
I get stepped on even when I say that, and with my ADHD I won't remember what my action was by the time the DM would get to me out of the 15(or so) characters in the party. (One person has 6 or 7 of them, everyone else has one to three.)
@@CadokaFenoira yikes, that's rough buddy. the sheer abundance of PC's might be partly why though.
Isn't this exactly the sort of problem that initiative resolves? Just keep initiative order and go "are you doing anything?" In order.
No, initiative is used to determine which one of two or more conflicting actions happens first. It actually isn't the same as turn order, although as a D&D 5e player it is hard to spot the difference.
I intend on implementing this once I start my first campaign, but I’ve been toying with the idea of making a layout of the table with each player labeled, and laminating it so I can use dry erase to make notes on things I should remember about that character in the moment, such as conditions, concentration, spell effects, etc., and now I’m thinking of making a space specifically to write down DCs for rolls they’re making just so I don’t get confused who’s rolling to do what.
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My first campaigns were plagued by this problem, and the poor GM didn't want to turn players away, so we had a first-time GM trying to handle 7 players popcorn-ing questions and rolls. They tried to "I can only focus on one thing at a time, I'll get to you in a minute" but it definitely led to some "Well I was GOING to do x, but Player B did y before I could say anything..."
I think the always-on initiative is a great idea and simple enough to implement without any fuss. Everyone gets to participate, and there's some order to the process. As someone who tends to be a bit quiet at the table, I often get overshadowed or (in some cases) outright bullied out of participating by other players. And yeah, it tends to be quite frustrating, especially when it happens constantly.
The jokesters and loudmouthed extroverts tend to suck up all the oxygen in the room, and I'm usually left not being able to do the cool stuff that I want to do. Either that, or when I finally get a chance to speak up, the rest of the players (after we've already been exploring or looting for several minutes) assume that we're moving on to the next thing. Then I seem like the asshole who's wasting everyone's time.
Yes, it's fine to be energetic, excited, or even loud (to a point). But I don't think it's acceptable player behavior to push other people out of the way. Everyone at the table is there to play and have fun. If they don't get to participate, they're unlikely to have much fun.
One of the long running Campaigns I'm a part of I kind of drifted away from participating because I'm an introvert. I love the setting the DM has, but when there's one player with 6 characters keeping most of our DM's attention, who steps on most the rest of the party (save for the "leader" only because he has the 'authority' to stop most conversation in the session) the people like me who are unable to really have our characters shine because the one with 6 is trying to have all of her characters in the foreground. While I just want to try to get my character to do some relevant, but mundane task. The one thing I am grateful for from our DM though is that there's a text channel for actions that we want our characters to do, wasn't always the case however.
Thank you so much! I need this for my dnd game! Four supremely enthusiastic players but everyone speaks over each other.
Typing this at the start of the video when you just mentioned where it is something both the players and DM need to be aware of, and I 100% agree.
I only kind of just realized how messed up it really is to throw a roll request in the middle of someone else's roll, as I always thought it would help save time all the while FOMO kicks in hard if my character would do something at the same time and me not wanting to miss out on something by patiently waiting.
What I feel can be done is for players to be honest to their DM why they might struggle with such things, or share intend as why they did it in the past, all the while the DM could maybe be more clear about taking turns and not forcing progression at those moments or get a system in place where those moments players that are interested to do something flip a card or something to show they want something done in that moment.
Of course, these might not work for all groups, but I feel it builds on the core concept of D&D; communication.
Very interesting topic.
The way I've handled this in my game is as follows:
1) I have one player tell me what their PC does or attempts and note it on paper. I then do the same for the rest of the players, one at a time.
2) I then take note how long each action takes in real-world terms to determine when they get resolved.
3) I have each player make their dice rolls as necessary to determine outcomes in the order it takes to complete their stated actions.
4) As each action attempt is completed, the narrative emerges accordingly. If it makes sense for the outcome of a quicker action to interrupt the completion of another PC's slower action, then that's what happens.
To maximize the smoothness of this process, the players need a period of time to huddle and discuss what they're doing in the scene so that they step on each others' toes as little as possible.
I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I've been playing around with a few ideas for essentially "bookmarks" for players, making some custom card-like thing I can hand out to people to let them (and me) know that they have something waiting to be resolved (I've mostly been thinking physical ones, but I know at least some VTTs have support for player card hands that can be easily used for similar effect). I really like the freeform initiative-based-on-actual-player-decisions of players just calling out what they want to do when they first think of it (although obviously it depends on the players themselves a lot), and this helps keep it organized without turning it purely into a mechanical initiative thing (I still sometimes use initiative roles for something like if a player starts trying to loot and another player wants to interrupt them so they can check for traps first, as that's more of an action-type scenario with fail conditions as opposed to just deciding what you want to do next, which is a non-committal character role-play choice). It can also be modified or expanded with different 'bookmarks' for different lengths of time or types of actions and used in shopping/NPC-interaction/roleplay situations as well.
I think in my next session where it's relevant, I might try writing down all of my players' plans and then run through them one roll at the time, adding any extra rolls needed to the end of the list
My takeaway from this, as a DM, is to try and be more aware of things that are going to transition out of the after-combat looting phase and postpone resolving them till everyone else has done their thing, or at least is aware they have One More Thing to do before stuff starts happening. I've already talked with my player who enjoys pushing the story forward and let them know that they're being asked what they want to do last because of that - it's not a bad thing, it's more like a little "Story Advancer" merit badge they can wear.
As for meta-gaming pile ons due to low rolls. I rule that each successive attempt at searching for something increases the DC - if you just saw someone check somewhere, you're not going to check the same spot as you'd assume and trust your party to be thorough, so the chances of you finding something they missed are subsequently higher. I tired a variant where if your character didn't see the failed attempt, your DC didn't increase... but I have never found a more effective way to encourage a party to split up out of sight of each other. Never again.
One of the things that really frustrates me as a player is when one character decides to do some action just for most of the other characters to decide they must have a hand in that action as well. A fairly recent example is while the other five party members were Busy talking to npcs, my dwarf walks over to a small cabin and opened the door. Soon as the door was opened the rest of the party stampede my dwarf to get into the hut. My dwarf got off the ground, brushed himself off and slammed the door
This is very much how I feel about Vex's greed for loot. It's so hard to watch and not get annoyed and frustrated with her. She was in an entirely different room/location in the dungeon, head halfway down a pit yelling at her brother to look for loot, but she can hear the sarcophagus being opened? Bah. In fact, a lot of early campaign one suffers from this, and it was one of the things that annoyed me about Orion, the constant jumping in on *everyone* else's actions. "You're not there" was such a common refrain in the the first half of this campaign, not just to Orion, but to the whole group. I'm now at ep 72 (first watch through) and they are much better at checking themselves rather than having someone else remind them.
I'm fortunate I haven't run into this problem yet, but our DM basically wraps up fights with saying "there's loot, roll for if you want (A)... okay, loot (B), roll if you want it.... " etc. We have more discussion around what we want to do and what comes next, and have a consensus as a group.
i’ve been using a more procedural way to run exploration and it’s given me a lot of confidence as a dm. very useful for older editions of dnd where time was always an important resource to keep track of
As a generally quiet-voiced and diffident person, I find I get spoken over a lot even when I'm sitting closest to the GM, so there have been times I've needed to raise my hand or voice or both dramatically for even fairly minor things, and sometimes I even ask for an initiative roll-off against another player whose action cut across my intentions that I stated first or didn't get a chance to state (I *always* lose those roll-offs so it never helps...) There are also plenty of times I end up not getting to do anything, even if I had the most suitable character for the task, or the best solution for the puzzle. I fully support the "go around the table, ask for intentions, then go around again to get rolls and resolve results" approach, it seems the best one to me, for those times when several people want to act at once but not in concert. Also, I advocate (and when GMing try to remember) whenever a character is doing something others could help, give everyone a chance to say if and how they help, not just the first/loudest player.
In one of the games I was in the DM had us stay in INT so that everyone had a shot until everyone said that they had nothing to do.
I'm currently in a game that has everyone roll initiative at the start of the session, and take turns in initiative order for EVERYTHING in the session, not just combat. It's mostly to make running a Zoom game with multiple people manageable, and it's not perfect but it prevents situations like this. (It's also kind of fun to be on the high end of initiative in one session and on the low end in another and seeing how that changes the way you play)
Another route might be for the GM, instead of asking for explorer init, ask players to each say broadly what they're going to do in the downtime. The GM can then make a note of the actions and attempt to address them in an order that makes narrative sense, since they know where traps and plot hooks are; you can also frontload the quick, dead-end stuff to let the player get an answer before moving on. You could do this round-based, so that every player makes one skill check before they're allowed to take any more actions, which keeps the story moving.
Something I would love some insight on: I don't have a good name for it but it is a part of "main character syndrome" and related to the behaviour of looting a room (and needing to resolve one roll at a time). I've been in plenty of games where one person dominates all opportunities for loot and wants to be in all places at once.
For example, the party enters a large room with multiple chambers. Player A declares they're looting the chest in chamber 1, player B investigates the statue in chamber 2, and I explore the bookshelves in chamber 3. DM resolves each chamber in order, so player A unlocks the chest and gets loot. Player B then roll for investigation and the statue is pointing to a hidden chamber with some other object, maybe a trap. Player A announces they enter and deactivate the trap. Then I roll investigation for the bookshelf and find a trap door, which reveals a new area. Player A then announces they're entering the new area first and (does something in that room). Everyone else did one thing in parallel, as if the party had spread out into multiple rooms. But player A seems to either think they're in multiple places at once, or that the whole party moves from chamber to chamber and only one person touches anything. Either way. They suck a lot of the oxygen (and loot) from the other players.
It's a really sucky experience that the DM perpetuates. But I don't blame the DM because as you point out, they're just overwhelmed by player actions and attempt to resolve them one at a time. What really sucks is player A not waiting their turn or intentionally hogging the spotlight.
Do you have a better name or descriptor for the behaviour or how to address it at the table without being a prick?
You covered my solution. The second someone asks to do something while I'm resolving a different thing - or after a big moment/fight - I'll put the game on a quick pause. I'll then go around the table and have everyone state what they would like to do. If someone doesn't know what they want, I'll ask if they want to help someone else. Once we've gone around the table, I'll ask if someone wants to change what they want to do (i.e. "as you go to open the door, you see the Rogue take out their toolkit to check for traps. Do you just open the door anyhow or do you want to wait?" or "As you go to loot treasure, you realize no one is harvesting the parts from the time-sensitive corpse. Would you like to switch to that?") Then we roll and I resolve actions in the order I feel they'd resolve in.
It works well and everyone gets a chance to do something, even if it is just giving a bonus to someone else.
I've never heard of the "always on" form of initiative, but I've been unknowingly running something similar for ages. Following combat encounters, I just retain the initiative rolls the participants had before combat ended. If someone is downed, they lose their spot and once they're back up they go after the lowest initiative. I just tell everyone to think about what they plan on doing and run down the line. Fastest player has the least amount of time to think, usually, but I give a grace period.
Obviously if something turns into a complex check, I'll let them know I'm going to circle back around to them, which also gives them time to ask for help from others, but it also helps maintain that everyone is still kind of doing all of this all at the same time, spread out and distracted. It allows for traps to trigger, secret actions by sneaky players, and for anyone in initiative who escaped combat to act, too.
The last part is one of my favorite aspects of this, because not every combat results in the enemies being wiped. Sometimes enemies run, teleport, or never even make it close enough to join combat. Those enemies might try to alert others, escape for another day, surprise attack, etc. and it gives those enemies a fair chance to make their move.
First off all, it's not rude to tell a player to hold their horses. They all know you're human, and giving them a "Hang on a second" is better than just... ignoring them and resolving the thing you're currently working on.
Beyond that, easy solution.
"Roll for initiative."
Initiative isn't just there for fights, it's there for whenever who acts first and the exact order that things resolve in _matters._ Of course, you do need to be clear with your players that this is what you're doing, and why, before they all go "Why did the fight music start?" and start acting sketchy because they're in initiative.
I've been playing online for the last three years or so. I started asking what everyone was doing, collect all of their intentions and needed rolls, then I would resolve them in the order of importance; any story or events that could occur are at the top of the list, so that happens last. Looting? You're going first. It helps cause the potential of players talking over everyone is very real.
11 seconds ago!? Nice! Loving these extra uploads
You know I've got 4 players currently and I don't think I've ever had this problem. I'm probably just lucky with my party. But I will ask everyone what they want to do, tell them what to roll individually and then just start on one side and work my way down the table. Unless of course I feel like there is something that needs pointing out first, then I'll start with that.
I in some groups will go round and ask them to sum up in one sentence what they want. After that I figure a order and then go around one by one and give them rolls.
6:49 how big do you think a rabbit hole is? Rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit hole, that’s a pretty sweet beat.
Rabbit, hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit hole UH! Rabbit hole, rabbit, hole, rabbit hole WHAT?!
Yeah, when in "popcorn" mode I usually go around the table according to some form of order (usually clockwise from my left, but it's very contextual)
This type of thing we resolve post combat actions, in initiative for however many turns it takes - so as to be fair and ordered.
I get actions first and then rolls. Player 1 searches for secret door. I will go around the table and ask what everyone is doing while P1 searches. Then I will go around and ask for rolls. Amd you just mentioned it, lol.
There's no need to use out of combat initiative or anything like that. In my experience, the reason most players end up interrupting is because the DM fails to give the non-acting players a chance to do anything. Instead of instantly resolving the roll of the first player to voice an action, a DM should instead ask what everyone else is going to do, then resolve the actions in order. If rabbit holes develop, it's okay to pursue it for a bit, but it is imperative that the DM be aware of everything else that's going on and doesn't let a rabbit hole go too deep before pausing and returning to the other players, shifting back and forth so that the relative time of all the players' actions is more or less concurrent.
It is the DM's responsibility to rein everyone in and keep things moving. Sometimes that means prodding players who are perennially slow to act, and other times, it means keep a hold on the players who are super decisive.
Remember that dice rolls are there to decide outcomes that are not a sure thing. There's usually no need to make a check when the result is obvious/the outcome is unimportant. It is very common for GMs, even experienced ones, to ask for more skill checks that are really necessary, which often leads to one of two things: 1) skill dogpiling and/or 2)unlikely outcomes (this is true in both extremes: a)the party having an unlikely success that derails an adventure or breaks immersion, like the bard successfully seducing the dragon or some crap and b) the party having an unlikely failure that grinds the adventure to a halt, like everyone failing an investigation check to find the hatch that leads downstairs and the GM has to amend it by giving the players the information in some other way after some minutes of confusion and frustration, which also break immersion.
So, how to decide which actions require a skill check and which ones don't? This is, for me, mostly derived from circumstance, and is not prescriptive. Tha answer is based on two major things you can take into account that can work separately or in tandem: 1) verisimilitude and 2) game flow:
1) A) how likely is a success in any given circumstance? B) Is it a binary answer where there is only one successful outcome and one failed one or is there degrees of success to what the character is attempting?
2) A) how important is success in this action to the advancement of the game? B) how many alternate routes to progress (defined as the game moving forward) are there?
Let's take one example from the video: Mike describes Travis waiting 7 minutes for the outcome of Grog's looting of a giant corpse. The outcome finally was that the giant had X amount of coin. In this case: how likely was it for Grog to find this gold? Did the giant likely keep it well hidden or was it more likely that they had a pouch on their belt or something like that? Are there degrees of success for this action? Is the action performed on a time crunch or did the character have time to search? How important is finding the loot of this giant to the advancement of the game/story?
In this case it's very clear (at least to me) that the random amount of gold was out there by the GM as a way to not leave the player empty handed, it wasn't game changing, there wasn't a discernible difficulty in finding a large pouch of hundreds of coins on a corpse given enough time and there was not any degree of success or failure, you either found the pouch and all of its coins or somehow miss it and found none. This is a clear case of a skill check NOT needed and it being asked just because it is the expected rhythm of the game (gm describes scene, players describe character actions, gm asks for dice rolls, players roll, gm describes outcome, rinse and repeat).
It is very easy to fall into that sort of rhythm at the table once the group gets the handle of the game mechanics. I think it is very important to never stop making it very clear to the players that they shouldn't ask to roll x or y check, they should always describe their character's action and let the GM decide if a roll is needed. I've run into many players that, for example, upon entering a room will ask "to make a perception check". And though it is not a heinous sin against the game and even can be considered positive to see the players engaging with the environment and being proactive I would encourage GMs to discourage this language while encouraging the behavior. Give your players the clear signal: "not every action requires a roll, please describe what your character is doing and a roll will be made if necessary". This will help you as a GM to think about it a bit more instead of rolling with the punches. Moreover it will encourage players to think more of their character's actions in the universe's terms, instead of in the game's terms, which should also increase immersion in most groups. Another benefit is that if you ask for less rolls you can spend more time thinking about the outcomes.
Think about it: when your players ask to make a perception check and you tell them to roll, even when you weren't thinking that particular scene warranted said check, are you really deciding the outcome of the check in that split second? Do you know what would the possible outcomes entail and what the DC's are for that check? Or are you just humoring your players need to fondle their shiny math rocks and the outcome of the action is fixed in the first place? If that's the case, what do you do when they roll the outlier result? (Like less than 5 total in a perception check on a lit room with nothing hidden or a 28 deception check to convince a guard that they are the king of the land in disguise)
6-7 players is a pretty full table. I love all the cast members and many of the guest characters, but loot-cluttering does get a little less bogged down with fewer players.
Keep the combat initiative order up and use as a reminder to make sure everyone gets a turn.
I like these thoughts. Recently our rogue ran ahead to a dragon hoard (dragon already dead) and encountered a whole bunch of low level bad guys who simultaneously slit their throats rather than have us kill them (or more likely take some of them prisoner). I think if we'd all been able to circle around and act quicker we could've taken at least one of them prisoner. Hard to say although it mightve still ended up the same way :-)
So many uploads!!
Hey SGM. Enjoyed this video, since it’s a topic near and dear to my style of running the game. Useful analysis, relevant examples, and some workable solutions. You mention the “always on” initiative concept that Shadowdark uses. That’s one way. I think the old 10 min “dungeon turn” procedure from B/X (or in a contemporary version, from Old School Essentials) is probably a more comprehensive and simple solution that we’ve had in older editions of the game but that isn’t in 5E formally.
Recommend folks check that out!
i don't run dnd but i almost always run exploration in loose turns. each turn i ask everyone what they want to do, and resolve things in the order the players announce their action, then get to the next turn if the situation requires it. i'm also very quick to remind players to wait if they want to do stuff while i'm resolving something, as cross-talk online with 6 other people becomes chaotic fast.
I think you missed talking about one reason why this sometimes happens: The necessary respect for player agency which the GM can't overrule. If a player declares they do something and the GM lets them, they do the thing. It's established. Often they'll want to do something else afterwards in reaction to the new information they get. Sometimes what happens is that something the player does will make whatever another player wanted to do obsolete - and the GM can't just turn back the clock as with their npcs at that point, since that would remove the player who acted's agency. Players don't want to have their characters just standing around OR have their characters just do something they know is useless or redundant, so they interrupt before that out whenever they fear it might happen, which is more often than it actually does.
The GM needs to learn to interrupt the one player's flow in order to ask other players want they want to do frequently enough that the fear of this happens disappears.
I was thinking for most of this video "Oh man, the always on initiative from ShadowDark would really solve this issue" then you actually mentioned it.
I've been thinking about incororating a similar system into my 5e games since in the past, I've had players at my table that spotlight hog a bit during exploration without realising it. When I was newer to GMing, I wasn't sure how to handle this problem at all, since I didn't want to step on player choice.
I was running a campaign for 6 players, and noticed this problem was at it's worst post combat. Often the player who finished the combat would immediately want to start doing stuff (looting usually), meaning the player would have been next in initiative hadn't had a chance to do anything for a fair while, it would get even worse if they were trying to be polite like Travis since then other players would just talk over them leading to that player just sitting there not engaging with the game for an extended period of time.
Regardless if you choose to use initiative for exploration or not, I think having a firm hand with your players is a really important skill. You need to be able to tell a player who's been splotlight hogging to hold on, then shift focus to a player that's been quiet for a bit.
Another solution that didn't really get touched on in this video is to just roll less. I don't think any single player should be getting into skill check rabbit holes, in fact, if there's going to be a big string of skill checks it needs to be something the whole party can be involved in.
Instead of calling for skill checks, if a task is relatively mundane or within the character's training, and there isn't an immediately threat, time pressure, or consequence from failure, then don't have them roll, or if you do have them roll, do it under the presumption that you're seeing how well/poorly they succeed. A good example of this is a rogue opening a locked door in a secluded location, if he fails, he could just try again until he succeeds, so you might as well just say that "you work on the lock and a few moments later you hear a satisfying click as you manage to unlock the door".
By not rolling for every little thing, you can resolve player actions much quicker, which means you can get back around to the players who haven't done anything for a while sooner. Also resolving player actions in a reasonably succinct way can help the game move at a quick pace which also helps with this problem.
Even the other week they showed their impatience to talk over each other when they're not in the scene. The group behaved quite well whilst Laura, Marisha and Fearne did there Whitestone sluthing. But then when it was the others go Laura didn't show the same respect.
I run an after school dungeons and dragons club for my middle school students and basically whenever we are on a map, we are in initiative. Middle schoolers don’t have the best impulse control and I have about twenty kids in the club so I’ve found it’s the best way to make sure they all get a turn in each session. Yes it does mean we spend months in the same dungeon because we only have an hour and a half per week and twenty kids, and yes there have been times where a character with more movement ends up away from the rest of the party and in trouble, but overall it’s been worth it. And when a character has gone too far ahead, we use it as a lesson. Recently one of the kids characters died because he used his fast movement plus a bunch of ki points to move way ahead of the rest of the party towards the dragon by himself and was killed before anyone else got there. But it was a good lesson in staying with the group even if you’re fast and not assuming you can take on all the monsters one on one. And he rolled a new character and was back with the group a week later so it all worked out. I don’t think this approach would work well with adults in a typical game and I don’t run my other games like this, but it works for the kids.
you have 20 players on 1 map?
@@poe_slaw yeah it’s a bit crazy. But since it’s a student club I can’t really limit the players and my principal wouldn’t let me do multiple days a week and split them up
Maybe its just cus I used to be a teacher and I've worked with (and run RPGs for) kids allot, but I tend to just handle situations like this by going, "Okay, everyone wants to do things so top of the order: P1 what are you doing? Okay we are going to resolve that or if its a big or long thing you get to do half of it, then we'll come back to you. Next P2. P3. P4. And P1 we are back to you to finish your scene." If someone wants to spend there time helping someone else or doing the same thing they can say they are joining, but then they give up their turn and are now just doing that instead, at least till the next loop if one's needed. Its a bit restrictive and can be a little, 'treating grown adults like rambunctious children' but it prevents quiet or shy players getting steam rolled by louder, more excited players and avoids everyone jumping in on one another.
Sometimes clamping down a little can help keep things on track and allow everyone to be engaged and if you do so in a firm, but polite way most folks tend not to get all that upset about it. "Hey, its P2's turn, give her a moment and I'll get to you next P3."
I would love a video about crafting with monster parts. I haven’t found a good system
Any criticism of CR will assuredly draw the ire of fans, but this is definitely a legitimate one everyone including Mercer could benefit from
This happened today in my Curse of Strahd session, and I just said let me get back to you while he is doing what he is doing. Just hold on to the thought or write it down and then tell me later.
I also think that this problem becomes more evident or requires addressing when you have a lot of players at the table. When I'm Dming for 3-4 players, it's exponentially easier for my players and myself to wait on each other for their turns of what they'd like to do, than compared to when you've got 7-8 people at your table. And I find a lot of the mechanics and gameplay of DnD does not favour having many people at your table, not that you shouldn't, but the way it was made perhaps assumed smaller parties. At least that's the impression I got.
I handle this completely differently as in I let the players workout the details among themselves and then get back to me with what they intend to do first and /or what each PC is doing. Then I organize their actions based on how long their actions take. I know there are new issues w/ this but, the players learn to work together better and it creates less headache for me as DM. Each player still gets to do what they want and it becomes organized before I chime in. So, questions from the group first then, actions for each PC already decided, at least for that moment, then the execution of game play as a general practice. It's not perfect, but everyone gets their action every round.
To be honest, my players needed this structure so the more dominant players don't rule the party and leave the others becoming NPCs to the leader. That's not exactly very fun.
In my experience, the biggest problem with doing everything one character at a time is the opposite of your metagaming issue, and is actually exemplified in that example about Percy searching carelessly while Vex is checking for traps. Within the fiction of the game, everyone should be able to take independent action at the same time, but GMs will often move forward with the consequences of one character's action before pausing to see what everyone else was doing. For example, the GM asks player 1 what they're doing, they're messing around with something in the environment, there turns out to be a trap, and the player sets the trap off. Now the GM asks player 2 what they're doing, and they say "Well, I would've grabbed them by the arm and said, don't do anything until I check for traps, but now I guess there's no point." Even while taking turns, you get the same bad result that happened in CR, but no one even had a chance to proceed in an intuitive fictional without interrupting both in and out of character. To avoid this, you have to roll back time when another player should've been able to intervene (which no one likes, I think), or the GM has to be conscious of what simultaneous actions by other players might affect the action they're resolving at the moment, or the GM has to check what everyone is doing before resolving any actions... or you just gotta let people interrupt when they need to.
I don't understand why I get surprised still byt all these segways to the sponsor. I'm impressed, really! But I'm also using this for my table.
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
More bonus content!
Our dm I think tends to retain the turn order into post fight.
You're healer in Star Wars is probably not like my group's healer. I was knocked out by the boss of the first act and instead of doing a medicine check on my character he's off doing other things. My brother (the healer) turns to me and says "what's your character doing." I said, "He'd be shouting 'MEDIC' if he was awake."
Oooo~ this looks like an interesting subject
I would 100% play in your games, Mike. And never do justice to it, either. 😁
While I totally agree with the concepts laid out in the video and do abhor when players interrupt other players no matter what phase of the game we are in, I look at the examples given and wish they worked out that way. If tat was all the time my group took to resolve a loot session, interruptions or not, I would be ecstatic. LOL. Hell, double that time would be amazing if the party actually accomplished something during the time.
Eh, I think it depends on the group. I feel like if you know the characters well enough, it's usually always clear what they might do. And naturally the party can help one another resolve what they wanna do quicker.
Shout out to team rouge! Doing the very specialized deadly work that can usually still be done with a barbarian at full health and a crowbar or a wizard with mage hand and a knock spell… ya know shout out to rogues for being cool. 🙌
Ive been playing 5e for like 8 years and I read this title like 5 times wondering "what is an exploration roll?"
As DM I sometimes want to scream at the players like Cheech and Chong Nun......
As to always on initiative. Back in 1E most of the groups had a standard operating procedure. Thieves checked for traps, then fighter kicked the door. ETC. This did decrease some of the table blurping things out. But not always.
The worse game session for me was the time I spent entire night dead
Oh I definitely do this…like while that person is doing a thing - fyi let me share what my character is doing so I’m not forgotten in the game’s narrative happening in my mind… 😅
This is why exploration in older editions of the game had turns. Combat and exploration were there own separate mini-games. EDIT: You mention this about 11 minutes in, so I'll emphasize that this is the answer.
Another vid?!? Feeling so spoiled!!
Roll set initiative
I have an art degree and have never heard that pronunciation of bas relief. Is that a European pronunciation? It’s usually pronounced as “bah” as far as I know
As soon as a player announces her/his action, you make sure to know what the others want to do. No rolling at that point. Then go through the actions as you see fit. This also keeps away these problems like 'I wasn't near the trap' or jumping into another one's action. Matt handled both situations poorly.
Initiative is the wrong tool for that.
I keep initiative for a round or two after the final hostile action.
If the players have a bad habit of making uncalled-for rolls, I remind them that such rolls are read as negative numbers. Dice that go off the table are a 1 regardless of the numeral facing up, and 'cocked' dice are read as the lower face, unless they were rolled in dice tray.
(I run games on Discord now, so that stuff hasn't applied for years.)
Not everybody is going to be on the same page, yet so many people aren’t content with this realization, as evidence by the comments 😂
I’ve played D&D since the early 90s- I’ve seen it all. That “clever” political commentary you inject into your campaign that you find so interesting- is probably not interesting at all, and I’ve seen it done before 15 years ago. That big plot twist you have cooked up for the players at the campaign finale? I’ve probably seen something like it before (about 12 years ago) and that DM did it better than you could ever do.
But I’m old. My time is scarcer now than it ever was. I don’t want to commit to a long-running campaign, I much prefer to roll up a character and do a one-shot over the weekend. I’ve lived long enough to see how “gray hat” the world can be that I’d rather play a game that is clearly “white hat” vs “black hat” for nostalgia’s sake.
But that’s me. It’s not necessarily you. Just don’t take it personal when a player finds all that world-building content you worked on for the past month and a half is boring. They’re not your demographic- they don’t want a lecture, they don’t want a history lesson, they just want to show up and be a hero for an afternoon.
And D&D has always been like this- the epic world builders/role players vs the beer and pretzels weekend warriors. It’s nothing new.
And this comment is open btw, not directed to Mike in particular. It’s for anyone who may be reading so they can have some insight into the other side of the aisle of D&D players.