You start a campaign. The ideas are there, the overall theme, the first few encounters.

What happens then. Players.

The thing I didn’t plan for was the exceptional creativity of the players. Session zero was a blast and lasted about half the first session. I have a few players that came totally prepared, or rather not prepared to interact and create ties with other players. But most everyone else enjoyed creating their characters and creating a shared story to go with. I had some questions prepared to help draw stories out, and honestly that was the best part.

The hard part is taking it all down and then integrating it at a later time.

Taking notes. DnD Beyond has some great tools both to track sessions and keep track of notes for characters. It’s hard to keep going and make the time to write down what happened. It’s totally worth it. I used to depend on the stack of 3×5 cards. Online notes are better.

So why too slow? Because with all of this awesome stuff, play slows down. And COVID means that everyone comes – every week. I have seven players and that means that combat slows down and spot-light time is hard to pass around.

These are all good problems.

But they are problems and they need solutions.

Speeding up combat. Being prepared is the best option I’ve found and for me that means two things. First, letting the players know when their turn is coming, before it happens. I normally call out PC names two or three turns before their initiative. It limits (a little) the terrible question – What just happened? A couple of turns paying attention should catch up even the most distracted player.

Second is the DM being prepared. I have two parts for this. Before a combat encounter starts, know what the monsters will do based on triggers. For example, the front line troops lose half their HP – do they run or stay? Certain monster leaders get killed, do they change tactics, run, ordissolve into a free for all. A great help for this is Keith Ammann’s book The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. It’s an excellent reference for monster tactics. The second part is having all the bits and pieces laid out. For my last set of sessions I used a camera over a dry erase map with cut out tokens. For my next session I’ll be switching to Owlbear Rodeo. A different circumstance, but also means having maps loaded, and icons/tokens ready.

Spotlight time is a different story. With seven players, I’m thinking of focusing a session on two to three PCs. Before COVID, I could rely on two or three players not coming to a session because of their work. That makes it easier to divide time in focus, but possibly random who gets the focus. Now with everyone home and available to play, it’s impossible in our three to four hour session for the spotlight to focus on everyone, and have one or two combats, and include table talk.

This is where Session Zero and player background notes come in handy. I can comb through notes and use background information to both plan a next session and decide how to move spotlight time around. This has the added benefit of incorporating the PCs tightly with the story, and increasing their focus and interaction.

These strategies will help with play slowing down, but can’t fix it completely. Keeping an RPG game going is difficult but satisfying. Working on issues like this is part of the fun of the game.

Let me know if you have any other strategies that you use.