- After everyone has taken action (like in a round), has the state of the board changed drastically enough that we cannot simply repeat what we did last time?
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in reply to @Scampir's post:
Reading this question feels like a goddamned bat to the side of my head, it's so good.
There's a youtuber named Seth Skorkowsky who gets mad if you take more than six seconds to play out your game turn in a combat. And I often think about how most TTRPGs assume that everyone is playing out their turns that quickly, even in 2023. That it's expected that you'd go five or more rounds without anything significant happening.
I am not the kind of guy who wants to get on peoples case for time taken during turns. Sometimes people are new to the game, are having trouble making sense of a really complex situation, or are at a table to tag along. That said, I am with you on this idea that there isn't enough scrutiny about the moment-to-moment timeframe it takes to execute what you want to do in play.
I would agree with the sentiment that after each turn, something significant should have happened in the narrative.
Many TTRPG designers are in love with rules, and it's not hard to do the math. If the typical character dishes out 10.5 HP of damage on their turn, and you have four characters, and your single monster has 120 HP, then on average this hullabaloo is going to take about 3 rounds to play out ... If each player takes 5 minutes to play out their turn, this "simple combat" is going to take an hour. And that's the average — half the time it will take over twice that long!
And it only gets more complex from there! Add the overheads of initiative, rules questioning, theater-of-the-mind descriptions, cracking-wise, etc. — you know, the fun — and it's going to take longer. So you're right to ask, how can we cram the greatest meaning into the smallest amount of time.
It's not just a skill issue. Many players want to do something fun. It's their turn, after all, they've been waiting patiently for it. Everything about TTRPGs encourages you to "be descriptive", "role-play not roll-play", to ham it up and to have fun with it.
We need games that have the maximum amount of emergence in the minimum amount of execution time.