Time for Actions

[DMDarcs]

Hi everybody. This is a thing that has been bugging me for awhile, and it drove me batty last session to the point of my very curt ending after the encounter.

We are high level characters. We are purportedly in the sixth book of six in the campaign. There are a wealth of abilities all around for everyone. Combats are more likely to involve combatants with high hp and AC, damage reduction, spell resistance, and a variety of other things that will extend combat rounds.

Please have an idea of what you are going to do in combat when your turn comes up. I understand that when an encounter begins, the first person to go might need a little extra time, especially if it is a surprise situation as we had last session. The amount of time that it takes me to get everyone in the initiative should act as that little barrier. Remember, each combat round is theoretically supposed to be a six-second amount of time -- for the ENTIRE ROUND. You should not need more than 5 minutes to figure out your action. Use other players' turns to figure things out. If you are looking something up because you're not sure if it does what you think, please just say you're looking it up or ask the question. (More on this below.)

GM WARNING: If you take more than 5 minutes to decide your course of action, your turn will be skipped. Game play needs to continue. If you are known to be away from the keyboard for any reason (spouse aggro, dog shenanigans, needed a drink, you're putting my son to bed because he's wandering around upstairs in his sleep again), I will skip you immediately upon your turn coming up, but will put you back in the initiative order when you come back (basically, treat as a delay).

Please know your math. Some people have fully programmed macros off of their character sheets, some use less programmed macros, some type in their dice rolls each time. I have no preference for method, and think you should use which ever method you feel most comfortable. But please know your numbers. I think the most commonly asked question in our campaign is "song bonus?" followed by "current song bonus?"

GM WARNING: If you forget to add a bonus, then you forget to add a bonus. Oops.

Please know what your abilities do. If it's a case of an unsure rules interaction or corner case scenario where you don't know if something works the way you think it will, ask. I will try to give you an accurate answer, or at least a momentary ruling. I will look things up as we play in case of a weird question, but please keep in mind that I am often answering multiple questions at the same time, after 7 tabs and 3 windows open looking things up for people, my computer suffers serious lag.

GM WARNING: I don't really have a warning on this one, but I hated to break format. It does bug me, though, when the question asked is answered in the first sentence of the ability description.

[Tahlvin]

Thanks for sharing. I know I'll try to do whatever I can to make your job as GM easier.

And all the searching I was doing last week for anything that could deal fire damage to the zombie tree, I completely missed the obvious fact that I have a flaming longsword that can shoot a ray of fire once a day and do 4d6 damage. I was planning to use that on my very next turn, but the combat ended before I had the chance. Ugh. I need to do a better job of sorting through my gear, but all the myriad different types of arrows I have are cluttering things up.

[bralbovsky]

mea culpa, taking steps