Yes, you can make players pre-plan. You nudge them.

No amount of nudging will make some players do anything. Some players are obstinate and frankly not very good, but honestly the solution to “this player won’t stop looking at their phone and their turns take forever” may be to remove them from the group.

Why does it matter how much time everyone takes?

I don’t want to wait 5 minutes for someone to dither and dither and finally decide “I attack”

This was a weirdly aggressive comment.

The solution is the pre-planning, which does not need a timer, nor is it a guaranteed result of a timer.

You cannot make players pre-plan. The timer encourages pre-planning, or at least rapid decision making on the fly. Both have the desired result of the game moving at a quicker pace.

It also has the benefit of creating an impartial tool for measuring, instead of relying on subjective “You’re taking a long time.” It is harder to argue with a clock. This is an advantage.

There was a problem, and in trying to fix it, the DM created a second problem.

What is the second problem?

I don’t always run a timer, but it is a tool in my box.

Mostly it comes out when I feel like the players are spinning their wheels. Like, they know they need to get into the server room on the 10th floor. There’s a front door with security, a back door with an alarm, etc. The players are just going round and round with ideas but not doing anything.

I’ll say “I’m starting a five minute timer. If it hits zero, something interesting will happen”.

If it hits zero and they’re still stuck, then as foretold something interesting happens. A rival group rolls up and firebombs the entrance before heading inside. A security drone spots them and is calling the cops. Whatever. Something that forces them to act.

In combat rounds I sometimes do the same, but only if it feels like they’re not making progress. Maybe it’s a little rude sometimes, but I value keeping the scene moving forward. I don’t want to keep spending three minutes on “should I move? How far can I move again? Is there a range penalty? What if I use a spell first can I still shoot?” stuff. Especially if it’s rules minutia they should already know.

The amount of times I had to remind an old group’s bard that yes, in DND 5e you can move AND take an action was too high.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.

I don’t think 5e is an especially coherent game.

I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.

I think sometimes people just throw out the accusation of “echo chamber” because their ideas are bad and the community rejects them.

Someone will be like “I don’t think we should have child labor laws but the eChO cHaMbER won’t even consider it”

Sometimes this gets said even when the alleged echo chamber responds with facts and history about why their take is a bad one.

Ultimately, here and in like all other human endeavors, emotions are primary. People feel a thing, and then reach for words to justify it.

Someone’s ideas being rejected by the group? Feels bad. Is it me? Am I wrong? No, that feels worse and the ego won’t accept this. It must be them. But why? Must be an echo chamber. Cool. Now I don’t have to feel bad about myself. I don’t have to change my beliefs. I can just blame them and move on.

So someone saying it’s an echo chamber has only very tenuous relationship to reality.

To your actual point, there’s also the “jaq’ing off” and “for me it’s Tuesday” problems of community management and health. The first being someone asking questions in bad faith. The latter is similar - someone in good faith is asking really basic questions that the community has seen a thousand times before, and people respond with exasperation. From the new person’s perspective the community is unwelcoming. From the community’s view, this is the third guy today that’s stumbled upon the idea that “maybe capitalism is bad” and walking them through that journey is tiresome.

Community is hard.

Cute idea, but I really don’t find this kind of ultra light 1d6 and two stats mechanic fun. I’d rather use Fate

One of the things I learned from being in a group that rotated DMs: Some DMs really expect more or different things from players tactically.

Like, when one guy was running you could pretty much just run into a room and fight, and you’d win. You’d have plenty of time to long rest, so you should just blow all your spells.

The other guy expected like some scouting and planning. Take out the outer patrols first without letting them get a message to the castle, then assault the warlord. Going directly in means you’ll be flanked by those patrols. The total size of what you’ll be dealing with is pretty well known, so you can ration your spells out with pretty good information.

And then there’s the “This dungeon is inhabited intelligent creatures that have spent years fortifying it against intrusion. You don’t know the layout or what forces you’ll face. Your enemies are advancing their goals, and every day you spend means more of your homeland is consumed by The Dirge”

I’m between #2 and #3 there. The wizard struggled a little going from “leveled spell every round” to “I should think about my resources.”

I still tend to run things a little too hard, but the group I ran for full time got into the groove and never wiped.

I’ve tried to run games (in a couple systems) that had complex NPC factions to engage with, and a lot of players just… don’t. I think sometimes they just don’t realize it’s an option.

My last game was kind of picking up speed, where there was a bad megacorp (within it two main factions) and a fractured array of resistance groups. I was hoping the players would do some alliance building. It was kind of working, but then real life sort of scuttled the game.

The other problem that happens to me a lot is I think about the game between sessions, and the players don’t. They don’t remember much detail. So I’ll be like, “And you discover he’s been working with the Seers the whole time!” And they’ll be like “the who? Is that bad?”. It’s hard to get factional stuff going if the players can’t keep straight who’s who.

Would rather they invest in, like, housing, food security, climate crisis, any number of other more useful things. I know you could say that about anything- like all the money being spent on movies seems frivolous next to that stuff- but AI is especially dubious.

Our society’s priorities are all wrong, and I don’t think it’s going to get better without a lot of suffering. Maybe not even then.

You’re going to be pretty sad when your kid dies due to your poorly informed decisions.

This guy is a fool and I hope he is removed from power.

All of these stories I feel the same way: moving to another centralized privately owned platform is stupid.

One time I made a joke to the players, “Yeah watch out, the woods could be full of dangerous things. Like fire bears.”

The players were like “lol right”

And then there were fire bears. Bears made of fire. (Some industrialists had started a forest fire, killing a local druid and wildlife, and now they were haunting the place.)

I’ve tried this a couple times with limited success.

• Hacking something remotely was a default Very Hard challenge. Very difficult to do without spending fate points.
• Hacking something on the same network was hard. Could maybe hit it with a lucky roll, but still would probably require a fate point
• Hacking something with physical access was in the realm of “the PC who specializes in this can likely do it without trouble”

Those were then bumped up or down depending on if it was “budget”, “consumer grade”, or “corporate grade”. Hacking into some nobody chump’s security system from across the street is something the hacker PC get done for free with a little luck. Hacking into the ASI Corporate HQ maglock door subsystem from across town would be a feat of legend, not something someone can likely do just off the cuff.

I do like that Fate encourages players to do some preparation for hard tasks. Have someone use their talky skills to talk up some junior workers, and learn something about the network. That’s an advantage you can invoke. Have someone spend resources to bribe someone, that’s another advantage.

A problem that’s come up each time I’ve tried this kind of game is not having a shared understanding of what “hacking” can do. Fate kind of helps here because the actions are kind of agnostic about what skills are creating them. If you’re trying to remove someone from the scene, that’s likely an Attack whether you’re using “hacking” or “fight” or “intimidate”. The hacker might fake a text from the boss telling the bouncer he’s fired where the bruiser might just deck him, but they go down the same kind of mechanical funnel. The tactical considerations for the players comes from like “what looks like a softer target: his face or his phone? is anyone going to see?”

I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.

The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.

The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.

Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”

When I encounter a GM who has like pages of lore, I’m always like “Would you rather write a book?”

Stuff like this can be very good, but be aware there are some players who hate this. Some people just want to be told a story, and if you ask them to be too creative they’ll have a bad time. Sometimes it’s because they’re new and nervous, but sometimes that’s just how they are.

Also some players just routinely have difficult ideas that don’t mesh with the group. Like everyone else is vibing on a serious dark modern day vampire political game, and they’re like “I want to be a ninja turtle from Mars with a reanimated dead fish for a head”. Like, what. Maybe some people enjoy “zany” off-theme stuff. Not me.

Or the player that always wants to be themselves. Or an amnesiac.

Gosh I’ve had so many players I didn’t enjoy.

Anyway. Player input is also built nicely into Fate, both in campaign creation and scenes. I’m a fan. Spend a fate point and declare a story detail like “every Razer Space Technology office has a helipad with a chopper ready to go. It’s because the CEO is weirdly hands on and loves helicopters.”

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.