Get Pacing right
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- Опубликовано: 11 фев 2024
- Keeping your game flowing, knowing when to slow down and when to speed up is a CRITICAL skill for Game Masters and DMs. Your TTRPG needs you to know how it affects your players. D&D, Star Trek, Pathfinder, Cthulu, whatever you play, needs this management of time. Can you do it? Yes you can!
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Basic answers:
Holds about a dozen minis, dice, pens, cards, and the like.
Is tough design
Is not too heavy, less than 8 D&D books
Looks awesome
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The big thing with the "door" idea is "Never put a roll in a place where failure will bring things to a halt." If picking a lock on the door is the only way in, and it fails, and now your players are stuck, don't lock the door. If the door has to be locked, have a second way to open it. Maybe it changes the events after the door, but always have other ways in.
Cannot endorse this enough. If you place a point where failure halts progress entirely, you can be sure that all of your players WILL fail at that specific task/point. Murphy loves popping his head in like that.
Agreed. Funnily enough, the table had decided this order:
Rogue tries to pick.
On failure, artificier uses alchemy jug acid on hinges. Fighter removes door.
If out of acid or used to make mayo instead (this has happened), fighter breaks door.
One is quiet, another less so, another loud, but there are options.
This can not be over stated. This was one of my own GM flaws when I started running games again. Too many dice rolls and dice rolls that if it is a failure it ends forward progression. Another idea I have employed is Professor Dungeon Master from Dungeon Craft suggest to remove shoe leather. Look it up. It is a great video. I just move my party directly from encounter to encounter unless they need a break for healing and regrouping. Sessions go quicker and they cover more of the adventure per session. It’s much more enjoyable.
Often the challenge is not so much the roll but the players. Sometimes the players simply don't think of a solution. That too can bring things to a dead stop so knowing how to move forward is critical. You are right too - what YOU put in front of the PCs should be there for a reason, and the reason should NEVER be to frustrate them with mechanics.
Sometimes the players are too committed, as well
I've had an optional puzzle completely stumping my party for hours and at any point they could have turned around and taken the "easy" way (encounter instead of puzzle). I thought "well, this is non-blocking since there's always the other way the players could take"
But they were so stubborn that they refused to turn around and give up on the puzzle, so having a gnome pop out and break up the situation would have really been handy there 🙃
I threw a door in the their path and the players ignored it...something about not trusting a door in the middle of the Svalich Woods...
I love that you revisit the topic of pacing so often, I learn something new every time.
And I'm so glad that, after all these years, you've been such a consistent presence in my growth as a GM. Thank you for all of your insight and hard work!!!
Hey Guy. I've been watching you on and off since i started my GM-ing and rpg journey about 4 or 5 years ago now. I just wanted to say thank you. Whenever i am having doubts about myself and making sure i can be the best i can be, i always come back to your videos to learn some new things and reassure me of how far i've come. Thanks for everything you do. You are very much one of my GM safe spaces. Best wishes
One thing I've learned about dead ends... maybe even in a older video here...
"Failing forward" - whenever the players fudge a roll, or go down the 'wrong path' or do a stupid (I know, I know, that never happens) - let them fail - but let them fail in the direction where the adventure goes.
This I used in a Cthulhu-game:
Players arrive at [small English town] searching for their comrade. There's a guy at the train station holding up a sign with one of their names, looking like he's waiting for you."
BUT!!!! Very important: The distressed friend of yours has emphasized in the phone call, that only he himself will contact you, and nobody else is in on the whole thing.
So the players could corner the mysterious strange guy and press him for information on the whereabouts of their friend... they can shadow the guy... or they can simply go in blue eyed and be very thankful for that unknown man to drive them to their comrade.
Well - turns out *le gasp* the strange man was one of the bad guys. tranqulized the party with gas and they wake up in an even more remote village deep in the woods, in a shack next to their comrade, who was kidnapped by them.
Yes, the characters are now in a bit of a predicament, and maybe don't have all of their gear. BUT they have found their friend and can now plan an escape. They failed - but they failed along the trail of the adventure. The only difference is: Are they walking/running/sneaking down this trail, or do they get dragged by their feet bumping their head on every rock.
Used it in a game just this weekend : Made a perception check for players to see that the floor had been changed and corrupted by something
One player did a nat 1
So they simply tripped on it
@@nomiss9246 That's a very straight forward way of implementing this :D
So in the end they had the information they needed - but there were some 'corrupted ground tries to eat a party-member' shennanigans?
Dear Guy, this one was absolutely wonderful! The laundry-goblin and the classic DM-trap of "I have planned this" are so fantastically executed in this video.
A huge thank you!
Sincerely,
Alicia Antoniadis
from Sweden
One thing I took away from Robert Heartly was never put your plot moving forward behind dice rolls.
Your comments on pacing has really been helpful
You made some excellent points in this video. Although, another important aspect is how every person has different perspectives & opinions about things. Including what they consider good pacing. So that's the most important thing is acknowledging those differences and working with each other.
Guy's Outro is still one of the best on RUclips.
I used something like this in a recent Dragonlance: SotDQ campaign. We were in the final chapter. The players had a great fight with a death dragon and managed to incapacitate Lord Soth, leaving multiple PCs at less than 20 HP and a lot of resources spent. The citadel was falling from the sky. As written there's supposed to be a "FINAL final battle" once they get back to the ground. I looked at the players though, they were feeling weary but accomplished, high-fiving each other for surviving, and I knew it was time to wrap it up. So we went right to the postlude. Actually had a very nice wrap-up discussion about what their characters would do next, receiving the accolades from the city leaders, and going their own separate ways with promises to reconvene should their services be required once more. It was a great low-key way to end with a few tears for parting friendships and a satisfying feeling all around. Wasn't the pace as written, but it was the pacing my party needed.
I one hundred percent agree. Pacing is crucial to keep players engaged at the table. Overland travel can bog things down and make players bored. Shopping sessions or sessions where is the group is in a large city with lots of distractions can easily lead to boredom unless the DM uses those distractions as opportunities to introduce NPCs or plot hooks. Great video!
The idea with the door would have been incredibly helpful to me in my last session
I had that mystery about an old, unused forest road (people who went that way would return to the nearby village screaming off the top of their lungs with no recollection of what they saw)
The characters went there and figured out, that it was an old elven spell barrier that erases your memory and fears you if you walk through it. They also figured out that there was some ritual you could do to pay respects to the forest spirits and avoid this effect.
What they didn't figure out was the specific ritual
And what happened is that they brute forced it by fucking around and found the answer after two hours or so of frustration.
But what I would have done after watching this video is probably something like this:
Once the characters started to brute force the ritual I'd have some elves arrive in the thickets to see what that ruckus is all about and curious why these strangers are not leaving after being scared.
They could either be spotted and spoken to or (should the whole party fail their perception checks) announce their presence to the party and engage them in conversation.
They might ask the party to prove their respect for the forest (which would give the ranger a moment to shine) or be won over by persuasion (from the diplomatic paladin) or intimidation (the fire Genasi warlock has entered the chat).
And this could have been a really cool moment instead of being so soulcrushingly bad that I did not schedule a session in almost 4 months because I lost all faith in my prep. I only dared talking to the players about playing again after I decided that the next adventure was not going to be written by me but that instead I'm going to drop the Sunless Citadel next to where they were heading.
But I'm really glad to have this technique in my toolbelt for the future.
One thing that I've discovered that helps with pacing is to create "situations" instead of "conclusions". As in, I spend most of my time creating the scene, setting up the first "situation", and then I let the players decide how they want to approach the problem, without me picking out any sort of conclusion or solution. That way, the pacing is up to the players! Do they want to talk to some NPCs to get more information? Find a spellcaster to help them? Do some research on the area? Stack a bunch of powder kegs in front of the door and let 'er rip? Whatever they decide will be the pace the players want for that moment.
There is also skill in knowing when to let the pace slow down.
I think of in Lord of the rings after trying to climb the mountains and being beaten by sarumans snow storm and gaining a couple of stacks of exhaustion the party needs a rest, but they insist on trying to go through the halls of moria right the heck now! That place the dm Tolkien knows is chock full of goblins and if they go in without a long rest they are just going to get TPKed, so... he places a door in the way with a "guess what I'm thinking" lock puzzle on it deliberately. This forces them to stop and have a big think in a seemingly peaceful area, and gets them their long rest before he gives one if the PCs a hint, and just let's them ask the DMPC for the answer.
There's always more than one way through a locked door.
Pacing: DM: "ok, what do you do?"
The idea of introducing an X-Factor towards a situation that is stumping my PCs is definitely going to come in handy. I'm often at the whims of my creativity whenever I'm generating a scene. That technique allows me to grow the story naturally, since it flows into itself, without that pain point.
I'm a relatively new GM, I run the one-shots when not everyone can make it to the campaign my friend is running. The biggest challenge I have had is pacing, because one-shots are self contained, I always feel like the conclusion is rushed because we're in the early hours of the morning. I feel like a long form campaign would be easier because that conclusion can be pushed to the next session or even further down the line.
Very good advice. Thank you. Love that box!
This is such great advice thank you Guy! I second the suggestion to run games at a con for experience with pacing. Just ran a bunch this weekend and had the experience of one party taking so long on every decision I had to adjust things to wrap up in time and then another group (older war gamers) that were decisive and didn't like to spend time with RP so they were busting through at a break neck pace so I doubled the amount of content in the one shot for them on the fly. Both groups had a great time as far as they told me thankfully but it was a great learning experience!
Great advice, as always!
Great ideas! Thank you.
Don't be afraid to murder your darlings! I had a DM get SO mad at the party one time because he had spent hours coming up with this pirate captain that could negate most of our fave attacks and in 5 minutes I had essentially put him in a magic hamster ball and dropped him overboard.
And we were like "just have him come back later for revenge!" and the DM was like "nope, too late now"
Thank you! Very helpful!
People who play TTRPGs are visually inspired people. My advice to new GMs is this..
Create a "visual flow" diagram on paper of how YOU would like to see your story played out with circles, squares, anything you can put a post-it note into. Then make sure you have space around those notes for possible decisions the players will make. (You can cover everything) but make at least 4 branches from those. And as the players explore your story, write into those branches what they did. What decisions did they make based on what you thought they would do. As the adventure progresses, you will get a feel for anticipating your players and how to deal with their decisions. This imo (along with our glorious host's ideas), will help you develop your own pace.
Great advice
a couple things that I do, for things like investigations in particular but for other things like doors, I try to avoid the extra NPCs, and instead if they fail I go well you don't see any clues to who did the murder which could suggest they knew the assailant which would open a new path of options questioning people they knew missing the blood covered note hidden in the wall. so basically awarding degrees of failure with nuggets often becoming less reliable but pushing the players in a direction that can return to what I have prepared or go even further off the rails which is always exciting.
Pacing should be like the slowfox dance. Slow. Slow. Quick, quick. Slow. Not necessarily in that order. But that is a good starting point.
I’m taking your idea for the “employees only” dungeon run by a hermit. His only employee will be a cavernous ooze that grew out of the ship he had moored in a watery cave. The setting is my own, with the players joining a crew of dwarf and outcast pirates in exile… On an island made of a (dead) baby world turtle, which sits on a plateau of waterfalls above the sea. I was looking for a kooky NPC and cave setting, so thank you!
Lich’d.
Any suggestions on how I can help improve pacing when I'm a player?
I could use help with: keeping the group from getting distracted with Monty python references and other giggly things. I enjoy a well-timed reference, but it's about half our session.
God dam it guy I want that box
Didn’t Arneson and Gygax build in a lever for this exact thing when they ported the idea for random encounters from Outdoor Survival? If the DM is unsure how to proceed with the encounter, there’s even a Monster Reaction table to roll on for initial demeanor. The example you gave is *exactly* how these tools are meant to manifest at the table.
This is literally written into the rules of OD&D.
One thing I have noticed, pacing is quite different from group to group. I've been working on gauging my players, and adjusting my pacing on the fly.
i need that box...
How do you make the slow paced parts of your games more stimulating ?
Another thing my friends and me do when we plan LARPs:
We have a plot - so a main story line. Then we have a few, let's say more important sub-plots going on. And then we have a heap of 'breaks' plot elements we can introduce if the players breeze through the main plot too fast. We also have a bunch of 'accelerators' NPCs who can give out information, handouts - shortcuts basically that help the players.
And yes, there's a plan set like: "If the players didn't do X until time Y - they get Z.", "If the players do X before Y then Z appears"
Basically - you can have a set of spare scenes and you can designate some planned scenes as 'planed dead weight' which you easily can strip away if the game goes too slow.
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What about the impact on game pacing affecting campaign pacing? I’ve written a 0-17 campaign to prevent the apocalypse and broke it into 4 sections. I am finding section 2 feels tedious because while the story and milestones are narratively deep, gameplay feels like fetch-it quests, regardless of threat.
The worst thing for pacing for me? Is the "And Then" syndrome. The concepts of story writing is not just the large scale, but also small scale. Problem, action, result. When the path to a goal drags on and on with no progress? That screws pacing.
"I am sorry, the princess is in another castle". Rinse and repeat. No development or change of pace. An enjoyable module campaign I did for starfinder was spoiled because the end was just a long grind without any sense of progression. Battle after battle....
Traps: Traps are bad when are used as 'gotcha' and one of the main pace disruptors. I hate how most do them. 'Checkfortrap, checkfortrap, checkfortrap'... "I look at the painting"
"Take 2d6 fire damage, you didnt check painting for traps!"
I HATE IT! Slows everything and tedious.
No, make traps an encounter. Assume players are checking. Plan with secret rolls. If they pass, they have a puzzle to solve because see something odd. Fail and now is a different situation to resolve, dont immediately go to damage.
I hate traps when nothing more than a resource sink. Guy, if you read this, perhaps a suggestion for a video. 'Make traps engaging'
If I don't have a scenario that I think seems obvious that there should be a trap, then tough luck for them. However, there are other cases which are peppered with lots of traps because it narratively makes sense. In these cases, what I'll often do is let them scout one or two out or get close to getting caught by one. Or perhaps taking an insignificant amount of damage by triggering one but being fast enough to not get fully hit. That gives the players a heads up that there's traps coming. I don't do these all that much but when I do, I generally use these to make it fair. The only time I sprung one on them wholesale was a spike pit trap where the hidden level of the dungeon was accessible at the bottom of said trap. So they completed the main floor, took their stuff, and went home. The dungeon itself remained a mystery like they were missing information that should have been there. Then they later found a map layout of it that some enemies had that were also interested in it which revealed a second level and the rough location of the entrance. Once it was narrowed down, they figured it out in a few minutes.
Lots of pace, need more Hale
If you have indecisive players killing your pacing, put an IRL time limit on making a decision. Example:
"You hear guards coming down the road. What do you do? 10... 9... 8..."
As someone who runs high-danger games with paranoid players, it helps keep people feeling like they're in the action instead of spending twenty minutes planning a six second round. Using an old-school time chart can also help. If the players are meticulously planning how to open a door, and you say, "A turn goes by and your torch goes out," they'll generally pick the least bad plan and start moving before they get lost in the dark.
I like how the definition for "pedantic" pops ups on screen but the word is used in the definition so it's pointless.
I'm here cuse I need to pace better guy fix me I been gming for 10 years
“When pacing halts… deus ex machina.” ?
That’s pretty weak advice.
First, a single roll should never stand between the players and success. Bottlenecking your plot is a horrible idea. Instead, have one of the players next two ideas (depending on player interest and tolerance) simply work but with consequences! As an example: The roll to pick the lock fails. Then the roll to dismantle the hinges fails. Then, when the players start beating the wall around the door, they automatically succeed with consequences: the wall crumbles and now they need to roll to avoid the cave-in and maybe even dig their allies out of the rubble.
You need to keep the roll. Otherwise your players will expect a gnome savior behind every challenge.
Dont bore players with 30 minute river crossings/breakfast descriptions with no meaningful choices. Its Dungeons and Dragons, not sit around three sessions in town doing nothing and playing Simms.
Ironic that you start a video off on pacing by wasting time on a sidequest.
is it wasting time or getting it out of the way (spoiler alert: its getting it out of the way instead of interrupting the pacing later)